E-commerce giant Amazon.com Inc. joined the artificial intelligence (AI) fray Thursday with the launch of its own generative AI service, Bedrock, which Amazon CEO Andy Jass said in an interview would take billions of dollars and years to train for a truly great big language model.
Andy Jass
With Bedrock, Amazon’s cloud service AWS will allow developers to access its autonomous language model Titan, as well as language models from startup AI21 and Google-backed AI company Anthropic. One of the Titan models can generate text for blog posts, emails or other documents, while the other can help with search and personalization.
Most companies want to use these large language models, but really good language models cost billions of dollars to train and years of time to invest, and most companies don’t want to go through that,” Jassy said in an interview Thursday. So what they want to do is work on a base model that’s already large and good and then have the ability to customize it for their own purposes. That’s what Bedrock is.”
Amazon did not reveal the cost of the Bedrock service because it has just begun a limited preview. An Amazon spokesperson said users can join a waiting list. Previously, Microsoft and OpenAI have announced prices for using GPT-4, which start at a few cents per 1,000 “tokens. One token equals about four English characters. Google has not yet announced pricing for its PaLM language model.
