Amazon’s cloud unit partners with startup that faces targeted AI developers

Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud computing arm of Amazon.com, announced on Tuesday that it is collaborating with startup Hugging Face, a software development hub, to make it easier to do artificial intelligence (AI) work. ) in the Amazon cloud.

While new generative AI services like Microsoft’s chat-based search engines and Alphabet’s Google have captured the public imagination, tech companies like AWS are also competing behind the scenes to provide the tools. and the services that software developers will need to integrate similar technology into their own products.

AWS, the largest cloud computing provider, already offers tools to help developers build AI-based software, including proprietary computer chips for raining down AI algorithms on massive amounts of data at lower cost than rivals to services that reduce the time it takes to create a chatbot or other AI products.

On Tuesday, AWS announced it would be working with Hugging Face, a New York-based company that has become a central place online where AI developers share open source code and models. Clem Delangue, Managing Director of Hugging Face, said while the deal isn’t exclusive, the startup is working closely with AWS to make it easy for developers to take code from the site and run it on the AWS cloud. .

“For this product collaboration, we are devoting significant engineering resources to building our shared products,” Delangue told Reuters in an interview.

Delangue also said the next generation of Bloom, an open-source AI model that rivals in size and scope the model that Microsoft-backed OpenAI used to create ChatGPT, will run on Trainium, an intelligence chip proprietary artificial intelligence created by AWS.

Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of database, analyst and machine learning at AWS, said he believes technologies like Trainium can help developers save money as AI takes more power from computing and AWS wants developers to take less time to adopt them.

“We want to make sure they have access to our silicon and networking innovations,” Sivasubramanian told Reuters.

© Thomson Reuters 2023