Amazon’s big cloud event, AWS, has begun, with a clear focus on using artificial intelligence to maintain its lead
Amazon Web Services To Las Vegas for the AWS re:Invent event, which kicked off on November 27 and runs through December 1. Amazon made a quick series of announcements and reveals the latest things it’s been working on, in direct response to the growing competition for cloud providers to meet the rise of artificial intelligence with compelling customer offerings. AWS CEO Adam Selipski’s keynote set the tone for the event, demonstrating that AWS is positioned to defend its long-standing leadership, and that it is deploying AI tools and services to continue being the largest large cloud provider in the market.
We know you may not have time to attendSo we’ll be dealing with that over the next few days and providing quick takes on the biggest stories as they’re announced, all in an easy-to-understand, easy-to-navigate list that includes on-the-ground reporting from editors and cloud experts Frederic Lardinois and Ron Miller, as well as contributions from the broader TechCrunch team. here we are!
Friday 1 December
A final piece of AWS analysis
AWS re:Invent is coming to an end, but the effects of the AI announcements and Amazon’s approach at this year’s conference remain with us. Ron put a pin on this year’s event with an exclusive TC+ article explaining that Amazon had its sights set on one big company in particular with its event this year: Microsoft. Read more.
Thursday 30 November
Q&A with Amazon’s CTO, Werner Vogels
Ahead of Amazon CTO Werner Vogels’ keynote, Frederick sat down with Vogels to discuss the trends he’s seeing — generative AI, of course — and the outlook for the year ahead. Read more.
Wednesday 29 November
Neptune Analytics
Another new tool is Amazon Neptune Analytics, which combines the best of both worlds: graph and vector databases. Ron reports that the new service helps customers analyze existing Neptune graph data or data lakes on top of an S3 volume, leveraging vector search to find key insights. Read more.
Clean rooms ml
Amazon is launching a privacy-preserving service that allows AWS customers to deploy “lookalike” AI models trained for one-time business-to-business collaborations called AWS Clean Rooms ML, which Kyle wrote is an offshoot of AWS’s existing Clean Rooms product and removes the need for AWS customers to share proprietary data. With their external partners to build, train and deploy AI models. Read more.
Sagemaker Hyperpod
From Amazon’s cloud arm AWS comes Amazon SageMaker HyperPod, a new service designed specifically for training and fine-tuning large language models. Frederick spoke with Ankur Mehrotra, AWS general manager for SageMaker, ahead of today’s announcement, who said: “SageMaker HyperPod gives you the ability to create a distributed cluster with accelerated instances that are optimized for contentious training. It gives you the tools to efficiently distribute models and data across your cluster — and that It speeds up your training process.” Read more.
AWS Titan Image Generator
You read that right, Amazon is joining the ranks of other big tech companies in finally launching its own image generator. Kyle reports that the Titan Image Generator is now available in preview for AWS customers and can generate new images when provided with a text description or customize existing images. Read more.
Tuesday 28 November
Amazon Q: an AI-powered chatbot
The big announcement of the day was Amazon Q, an AI-powered chatbot for AWS customers. During his keynote, AWS CEO Adam Selipski described the service as being able to “easily chat, create content, and take action. It’s all based on understanding your systems, data warehouses, and processes.” Kyle reported that Q has been trained in the equivalent of 17 years of Knowledge of AWS He’ll go beyond just answering questions — he’ll also do things like understand the nuances of application workloads and suggest AWS solutions and products for applications that run for just a few seconds. Read More.
Railings for Amazon Bedrock
The new Guardrails for Amazon Bedrock tool allows businesses to define and limit the types of language a form can use. For example, identify topics that fall outside the boundaries of the model, so that it doesn’t simply answer irrelevant questions, Ron writes. Read more.
New AWS Trainium segments for AI models
Amazon has unveiled its latest generation of chips for model training and inference (i.e. running trained models). Kyle wrote that Amazon has already discussed AWS Trainium2, which is designed to deliver up to 4x better performance and 2x better energy efficiency than first-generation Trainium. The second chip announced this morning, called Graviton4, is dedicated to inference. The fourth generation in Amazon’s Graviton chipset family (shown by the “4” appended to “Graviton”), it differs from Amazon’s other inference chip, the Inferentia. Read more.
Amazon S3 Express One Region
Amazon has a major update to its S3 object storage service called Amazon S3 Express One Zone, a new high-performance, low-latency layer for S3. Frederick reported that One Zone will provide a significant performance improvement for data-intensive applications, including AI/ML training, financial modeling and high-performance computing. Read more.
Three new serverless offerings
Amazon has announced three new serverless offerings to make it easier to manage serverless services Aurora, ElastiCache, and Redshift. “Since each of these options is serverless, it means Amazon manages all the machines in the background, provisioning just the right amount of resources they need, and scaling them out when needed without IT having to handle all the hardware,” Ron wrote. Background: “Termination of administrative work.” Read more.
Amazon One’s palm scanning extends from stores to security
AWS has lifted the lid on a new palm-scanning identity service that allows businesses to verify people’s identity when entering physical buildings. Amazon One Enterprise builds on the company’s existing Amazon One offering, which was first rolled out in 2020 to enable biometric payments at Amazon’s non-ATM and monitored stores, Paul reported. Visitors to Amazon Go stores can link their payment card to a palm print, allowing them to enter the store and complete their transactions by passing their hand over the scanner. Read more.
New thin client virtual desktop environment hardware
Amazon has launched new $195 devices that allow enterprise users to access virtual desktop environments, such as Amazon WorkSpaces, over the Internet. The hardware is in the Fire TV Cube, Sarah wrote, a decision Amazon made to leverage existing expertise from the arm of the retail giant that makes streaming media players. The company explained that its decision to build new devices came as a result of customer comments about their desire to reduce spending on information technology by replacing desktop and laptop computers with less expensive devices. Read more.