AWS bets big on GenAI, unveils next-gen chips & serverless innovations

LAS VEGAS: Amazon Web Services (AWS) CEO Adam Selipsky on Tuesday unveiled a slew of new offerings, including a purpose-built chip for generative AI and ML training to boost GenAI adoption among enterprises of all sizes.

The AWS CEO said that 80 per cent of unicorns (companies with a valuation of $1 billion and above) run on their cloud globally and with GenAI, the innovation will only grow across companies of all sizes. The Cloud giant has been working with AI and ML offerings for more than 25 years.

Delivering the keynote at the company’s annual flagship ‘re: Invent’ conference here, Selipsky said that innovators across the world are relying on AWS to drive their businesses, including leading enterprises from leading financial service providers to automotive giants.

“We are constantly reinventing with GenAI. Companies of all sizes are in the early experimental stages with GenAI and are innovating for early-use cases with large language models (LLMs). We are offering a generative AI stack for enterprises,” he told a packed house here.

Selipsky unveiled the next generation of two AWS-designed chips — AWS Graviton4 and AWS Trainium2 — for a broad range of customer workloads, including machine learning (ML) training and generative artificial intelligence (AI) applications.

Graviton4 provides up to 30 per cent better compute performance, 50 per cent more cores, and 75 per cent more memory bandwidth than current generation Graviton3 processors, delivering the best price performance and energy efficiency for a broad range of workloads running on Amazon EC2.

AWS currently offers more than 150 different Graviton-powered Amazon EC2 instance types globally at scale, has built more than 2 million Graviton processors, and has more than 50,000 customers—including the top 100 EC2 customers—using Graviton-based instances to achieve the best price performance for their applications.

At the event, the company announced three new serverless innovations across its database and analytics portfolio that make it faster and easier for customers to scale their data infrastructure to support their most demanding use cases.

Dr Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of Data and Artificial Intelligence at AWS, said that the new serverless innovations “build on the foundation to make it easier for customers to scale to millions of transactions per second, quickly add capacity at a moment’s notice, and dynamically adapt workload patterns to optimize for performance and cost.”

The company also announced a new palm-scanning identity service that will allow companies to authenticate people when entering physical premises.

Called ‘Amazon One Enterprise,’ the service eliminates operational overhead associated with the management of traditional enterprise authentication methods, like badges and PINs, the company said during its ‘AWS re:Invent 2023’ event here.

The palm-recognition technology uses advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning to create a palm signature that is associated with identification credentials like a badge, employee ID, or PIN.

“Amazon One Enterprise’s palm recognition technology is designed to deliver a highly accurate identification service that increases an organisation’s overall security, while offering seamless authentication management with lower operational overhead,” said Dilip Kumar, vice president of AWS Applications.

Amazon launched a new $195 devices that allow enterprise users to access virtual desktop environments, like Amazon WorkSpaces, over the internet. The devices are housed in Fire TV Cube hardware.