Amazon intensifies its AI fight with Microsoft and Google with new cloud tools

AWS will provide a service called Bedrock that enables companies to use their own data to develop custom foundation models

On Thursday, Amazon's cloud computing division unveiled a set of tools to assist other businesses in creating chatbots and AI-powered image-generation services of their own. The largest cloud computing company in the world, Amazon Web Services (AWS), entered that contest on Thursday with a number of its own proprietary AI capabilities, but it is going in a different direction.

AWS will provide a service called Bedrock that enables companies to use their own data to develop custom foundation models from the fundamental AI technologies that do things like react to questions with language that sounds human-like or produce visuals in response to a suggestion. For instance, OpenAI, the company that developed ChatGPT, provides a similar service that enables users to customize the ChatGPT models to produce a unique chatbot.

Customers of the Bedrock service will be able to work with Amazon Titan, a set of the company's own proprietary foundation models, but it will also provide a menu of models provided by other businesses. Along with Amazon's own models, the initial third-party solutions will come from businesses including AI21 Labs, Anthropic, and Stability AI. AWS users can test drive those technologies using the Bedrock service without having to deal with the supporting data center infrastructure.