AI in practice

AWS announces general availability of Amazon Bedrock featuring Claude 2 and Llama 2

Matthias Bastian

Midjourney prompted by THE DECODER

AWS today announced the general availability of Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed generative AI service that provides foundation models (FMs) from leading AI companies for a wide range of applications while ensuring privacy and security, according to AWS.

Amazon Bedrock now includes the generally available Amazon Titan Embeddings model and Meta's Llama 2 model, which will be available in "the next few weeks."

"No single model is optimized for every use case, and to unlock the value of generative AI, customers need access to a variety of models to discover what works best for their needs," AWS writes.

The company is also introducing a new feature for Amazon CodeWhisperer to customize code suggestions and generative BI dashboard authoring in Amazon QuickSight for faster data exploration and visualization.

Claude 2 could be AWS's GPT competitor

OpenAI competitor Anthropic is also making its Claude chatbot generally available on Amazon Bedrock. By integrating with Amazon Bedrock, customers will benefit from an expanded roadmap that includes Agents for Amazon Bedrock, which can duplicate popular AWS Lambda capabilities and extend Claude's role as an agent, Anthropic said.

According to the startup, Claude has been enhanced to play a more central role as an agent, adept at understanding user queries, dissecting complex tasks, engaging in detailed dialogues, gathering information, and executing actions to meet requirements.

In practical terms, an e-commerce platform equipped with a Claude-powered chat assistant can check product availability, but it could also actively help customers modify their orders, facilitate product exchanges, and retrieve relevant manuals.

In addition, Claude models can be securely customized and fine-tuned to produce more relevant results and limit harmful output, Anthropic writes.

Bridgewater Associates aims to increase analyst productivity with Claude through Amazon Bedrock, providing an investment analyst assistant that helps junior staff visualize data, test hypotheses, and synthesize research with features such as in-place code editing and accelerated iterations.

Video: Anthropic

The news comes after Amazon announced plans to invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic and gain priority access to its generative AI models, including the Claude chatbot. In return, Anthropic will move its software to the Amazon Web Services cloud and use Amazon's Trainium and Inferentia chips to train its AI models. Amazon's investment could be a move to compete with Microsoft's partnership with OpenAI.

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