Lesson three: Anything Microsoft does, Amazon believes it can do better.

It’s not over until the ChatGPT sings, it seems. Excuse the laboured play on words – it’s the last day of an extremely busy week after all – but it sums up to some degree Amazon’s thinking when it comes to generative AI. While some have seen Microsoft’s backing of Open AI as one of the shrewdest moves in tech history, re:Invent has been Amazon’s play at showing the cloud community that it had not been outdone on GenAI.

Dr. Swami Sivasubramanian was the latest executive to use his keynote to highlight how AWS was not only still in the GenAI race – but at the forefront. He hardly had time to breathe during the near two-hour talk on Wednesday as he rattled through all its new offerings, from updated foundation models on Amazon Bedrock, including Anthropic’s Claude 2.1 and Meta’s Llama 2 70B, to a new feature that lets customers easily compare and contrast which AI system to use.

And it certainly seemed a case of ‘anything Microsoft can do, we can do better!’. One of the most eye-catching tools was the new AI image generator tool, which will allow businesses to create ‘realistic, studio-quality images’ with just a simple prompt. And with Amazon’s emphasis on AI safety, Dr Swami was keen to highlight its built-in guardrails against toxicity and bias. It was, perhaps, a not-so-subtle reference to the criticism its rival, Open AI’s Dall-E, has faced over perpetuating stereotype. [Washington Post investigation]

But how does this rivalry between two tech behemoths impact VeUP customers? Amazon believes that enterprises will want flexibility and choice over different models, rather than a single vendor, and then be able to train and fine tune them with their own proprietary data. And that’s what it will provide. As Dr Swami said as he signed off his keynote: ‘AWS has everything you need to unlock this transformative technology’.

Come visit VeUP, an official partner of AWS, in booth #264 today to find out more about how we can help your business. It’s your last chance!