The cloud computing division of Amazon.com Inc. on Thursday unveiled a set of tools to assist other businesses in creating their own chatbots and AI-powered image-generation services.

As they integrate AI chatbots into consumer goods like their search engines, Microsoft Corp. and Alphabet Inc. are also keeping an eye on a sizable untapped market: selling the underlying technology to other businesses via their cloud operations.

The largest cloud computing company in the world, Amazon Web Services (AWS), entered that contest on Thursday with a number of its own proprietary AI capabilities, but it is going in a different direction.

AWS will provide a service called Bedrock that enables companies to use their own data to develop custom foundation models from the fundamental AI technologies that do things like react to questions with language that sounds human-like or produce pictures in response to a prompt. For instance, OpenAI, the company that developed ChatGPT, provides a similar service that enables clients to customize the ChatGPT models to produce a unique chatbot.

Customers of the Bedrock service will be able to work with Amazon Titan, a set of the company’s own proprietary foundation models, but it will also provide a menu of models provided by other businesses. Along with Amazon’s own models, the first third-party solutions will come from firms AI21 Labs, Anthropic, and Stability AI.

AWS users can test drive those technologies using the Bedrock service without having to deal with the supporting data center servers.

“It’s unneeded complexity from the perspective of the user,” Vasi Philomin, vice president of generative AI at AWS, told Reuters. “Behind the scenes, we can abstract that away.”

The underlying servers will utilize a combination of Nvidia Corp. chips, the largest supplier of chips for AI work but whose chips have been in short supply this year, as well as chips from Amazon’s own bespoke AI chips.

“We’re able to land tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of these chips, as we need them,” Dave Brown, vice president of Elastic Compute Cloud at AWS, said of the company’s custom chips. “It is a release valve for some of the supply-chain concerns that I think folks are worried about.”

(Adapted from CGTN.com)

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