AWS Joins the Generative AI Race: AWS launches Bedrock, a generative AI platform.

Amazon joined big-tech peers Google, Meta, and Microsoft in rolling out services that provide generated text and images.

What’s new: The online retailer launched early access to Bedrock, a cloud platform that offers generative models built by Amazon and its partners.

How it works: Bedrock is aimed at business customers, who can select among image- and text-generation models and fine-tune them for proprietary uses. It’s available to selected customers of Amazon Web Services as a “limited preview.” The price has yet to be announced.

• The platform hosts Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion for image generation. This arrangement extends a partnership announced in November, when Stability AI named Amazon Web Services its preferred provider of cloud processing and storage.
• It offers two third-party language models: AI21’s Jurassic-2 for composing stand-alone text and Anthropic’s Claude for conversational applications such as answering questions.
• Bedrock also includes two language models developed by Amazon based on Titan. Titan Text generates and summarizes text, while Titan Embeddings generates text embeddings.

Behind the news: Amazon’s peers offer similar capabilities via their respective cloud services.

• Earlier this month, Meta announced plans to launch a tool, powered by an in-house language model, to help advertisers generate ad copy.
• In March, Google announced an API for the PaLM language model as well as tools for building generative text apps on Google Cloud.
• Microsoft Azure offers access to OpenAI models including GPT-4 for generating text and DALL·E 2 for generating images.

Why it matters: Between Amazon and other cloud computing providers, generative AI rapidly is becoming available to developers of all kinds.

We’re thinking: DALL·E 2 and ChatGPT debuted less than a year ago. Generative AI is gathering momentum at warp speed!