Bedrock. Amazon's size does matter
It was November 2006. I was at the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco and sitting about ten rows back from the stage when Jeff Bezos walked on and pitched computing in the cloud.
I'd gotten off the morning flight from Australia only three hours earlier and the jet lag had begun to creep in. Bezos exclaimed something like 'rent your web services, don't buy them!' That shook me from my brain fog, reminding me I'd just spent $20K on a HP server. We started using Amazon Web Services soon after, just like everyone else.
Amazon announced Bedrock this week and it has OpenAI directly in its firing line. Bedrock is a suite of generative AI tools for AWS customers to build chatbots, summarize text and generate images from text prompts - which sounds a lot like every other AI tool we've been playing with for the past 6 months. But what AWS has is reach and scale, and perhaps in time Bedrock will make the others look like the Flintstones.
AWS is big business. As Scott Galloway once remarked, 'if AWS was a standalone company, it would be in the S&P top 10.' It's the size of Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, combined. Microsoft revenue in 2022 was $204B. AWS revenue was $80B, and incase you wanted to know, Amazon revenue was $514B in 2022. Amazon has capital, clout and influence to dominate AI. Google's revenue in 2022? $280B.
Users of Bedrock can carry out particular tasks by choosing from a variety of machine learning models which Amazon refers to as "foundation models." These include Jurassic-2 from AI21, Claude from Anthropic, Stable Diffusion from Stability AI, and Amazon Titan.
The simplicity with which a model can be customised is one of Bedrock's most significant features. Customers can fine-tune the model for a specific task by pointing Bedrock at a small number of labelled examples stored in Amazon S3. Time will tell if this delivers something worthwhile.
https://aws.amazon.com/bedrock/
While OpenAI runs on Microsoft metal, Bedrock has the run of the place on AWS which dominates its next two rivals. Bedrock may be a pseudonym for 'we're betting the foundation of Amazon on AI', and a first strike response from how Jassy and Co. view how fast Amazon need to move on staying a leader in what may be this decades most important innovation.