All posts tagged: aws

Anthropic takes B from Amazon and pledges 0B in cloud spending in return

Anthropic takes $5B from Amazon and pledges $100B in cloud spending in return

Published by skeptic

Anthropic announced on Monday that Amazon has agreed to invest a fresh $5 billion, bringing Amazon’s total investment in the company to $13 billion. Anthropic, for its part, has agreed to spend over $100 billion on AWS over the next 10 years, obtaining up to 5 GW of new computing capacity to train and run Claude. The deal echoes an agreement Amazon struck with OpenAI just two months ago, when it joined a $110 billion funding round — contributing $50 billion — that valued the ChatGPT maker at a $730 billion pre-money valuation. That deal, too, was structured partly as cloud infrastructure services rather than straight cash. At the heart of this deal is Amazon’s custom chips: Graviton (a low-power CPU) and Trainium (an Nvidia competitor and AI accelerator chip). The Anthropic deal specifically covers Trainium2 through Trainium4 chips, even though Trainium4 chips are not currently available. The latest chip, Trainium3, was released in December. On top of that, Anthropic has secured the option to buy capacity on future Amazon chips as they become available. …

Amazon CEO takes aim at Nvidia, Intel, Starlink, more in annual shareholder letter

Amazon CEO takes aim at Nvidia, Intel, Starlink, more in annual shareholder letter

Published by skeptic

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy’s annual shareholder letter reads something like a Kendrick Lamar diss track, if the rapper was a corporate-speak talking CEO and not a poetic Pulitzer-prize winning musician. Meaning, you have to know the history to understand all of the competitors Jassy takes aim at, alongside cute personal stories about his unrealized dream of being a sportscaster and watching hockey games with his dad. Of course, Jassy doesn’t throw the gauntlet down directly. He takes a more nuanced approach. For instance, in his challenge to Nvidia, he writes, “We have a strong partnership with NVIDIA, will always have customers who choose to run NVIDIA” and will always support these chips in its cloud. But he also says: “Virtually all AI thus far has been done on NVIDIA chips, but a new shift has started.” AWS customers, he says, “want better price-performance” meaning Amazon’s own home-grown Trainium AI chips. Jassy says demand is so high for this chip that capacity for the newest one, Trainium3, is nearly sold out. Remarkably, he says that capacity …

AWS boss explains why investing billions in both Anthropic and OpenAI is an OK conflict

AWS boss explains why investing billions in both Anthropic and OpenAI is an OK conflict

Published by skeptic

AWS CEO Matt Garman said Amazon’s recent $50 billion investment in OpenAI, after its long partnership including $8 billion of investment in Anthropic, is the type of conflict of interest the cloud giant is used to handling. Garman has worked at Amazon since he was a business school intern in 2005, before the launch of AWS in 2006, he told the audience of the HumanX conference taking place this week in San Francisco. When asked about the inherent conflict of working closely with two AI model companies that are fierce (and, arguably, sometimes petty) competitors, he said it’s not a problem. Because AWS itself often competes with its partners, it has a lot of direct experience with such competition, he explained. In AWS’s earliest years, it knew it couldn’t build every cloud offering itself, so the unit partnered with others. “We also knew that we would have to compete with our partners, because technology is interconnected,” Garman recounted. “So, for a very long time, we’ve built this muscle up of how we go to market …

Anthropic Teams Up With Its Rivals to Keep AI From Hacking Everything

Anthropic Teams Up With Its Rivals to Keep AI From Hacking Everything

Published by skeptic

Following leaked revelations at the end of March that Anthropic had developed a powerful new Claude model, the company formally announced Mythos Preview on Tuesday along with news of an industry consortium it has convened, known as Project Glasswing, to grapple with the cybersecurity implications of the new model and advancing capabilities more generally across the AI field. The group includes Microsoft, Apple, and Google as well as Amazon Web Services, the Linux Foundation, Cisco, Nvidia, Broadcom, and more than 40 other tech, cybersecurity, critical infrastructure, and financial organizations that will have private access to the model, which is not yet being generally released. The idea, in part, is simply to give the developers of the world’s foundational tech platforms time to turn Mythos Preview on their own systems so they can mitigate vulnerabilities and exploit chains that the model develops in simulated attacks. More broadly, Anthropic emphasizes that the purpose of convening the effort is to kickstart urgent exploration of how AI capabilities across the industry are on the precipice, the company says, of …

An exclusive tour of Amazon’s Trainium lab, the chip that’s won over Anthropic, OpenAI, even Apple 

An exclusive tour of Amazon’s Trainium lab, the chip that’s won over Anthropic, OpenAI, even Apple 

Published by skeptic

Shortly after Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announced AWS’s groundbreaking $50 billion investment deal with OpenAI, Amazon invited me on a private tour of the chip development lab at the heart of the deal, at (mostly*) its own expense.  Industry experts are watching Amazon’s Trainium chip, created at that facility, for its implications for lower-cost AI inference and, potentially, a dent in Nvidia’s near monopoly.   Curious, I agreed to go.   My tour guides for the day were the lab’s director, Kristopher King (pictured below right) and director of engineering Mark Carroll (below left), as well as the team’s PR person who arranged the visit, Doron Aronson (pictured with yours truly later in the story).  AWS Chip lab leaders Mark Carroll and Kristopher King.Image Credits:TechCrunch/Julie Bort AWS has been Anthropic’s major cloud platform since the AI lab’s early days — a relationship significant enough to survive Anthropic later adding Microsoft as a cloud partner as well, and Amazon’s growing partnership with OpenAI. The OpenAI deal makes AWS the exclusive provider of the model maker’s new AI agent builder, …

OpenAI expands government footprint with AWS deal, report says

OpenAI expands government footprint with AWS deal, report says

Published by skeptic

OpenAI signed a deal to work with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to sell its AI products to the U.S. government for classified and unclassified work, according to The Information. The partnership comes after OpenAI signed a deal with the Pentagon to allow the military to use its AI models in its classified network — a win that came in the midst of conflict between Anthropic and the Defense Department. Anthropic has since been named a supply chain risk by the DOD after it refused to back down on allowing its tech to be used for mass surveillance of Americans and to power fully autonomous weapons. Anthropic has sued the Pentagon in response. OpenAI’s AWS deal sees the AI giant stepping onto Anthropic’s home turf. Amazon has invested at least $4 billion in Anthropic, and as such, Anthropic uses AWS as its main cloud provider. Claude models are integrated into Amazon Bedrock, AWS’s AI platform for enterprise and government customers, and Claude is one of the most deeply integrated frontier models in AWS GovCloud for public …

AWS launches a new AI agent platform specifically for health care

AWS launches a new AI agent platform specifically for health care

Published by skeptic

Amazon Web Services announced Thursday the launch of Amazon Connect Health. This AI agent-powered platform is meant to help health care organizations automate repetitive administrative tasks including appointment scheduling, documentation, and patient verification, among other things. Amazon Connect Health is HIPAA eligible and connects with electronic health record (EHR) software. The platform is currently partnered with EHR software providers, data integrators, and patient engagement companies, the company said. This move is not the cloud giant’s first in the health care space, and it comes at a time when AWS is increasingly looking to grow its footprint in the $5 trillion U.S. health care industry. The company launched Amazon Comprehend Medical, a HIPAA-eligible natural language processor for unstructured medical data in 2018, and it launched Amazon HealthLake in 2021 which is HIPAA-eligible Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) infrastructure used to organize health data. The company also launched HealthOmics, a bioinformatics workflow, in 2022. Still, it is its first major product offering AI agents — software that completes complex tasks on behalf of a human — within a …

Amazon Warns Of “Degraded” AWS Service In UAE After “Power Issues” Amid Middle East Conflict

Amazon Warns Of “Degraded” AWS Service In UAE After “Power Issues” Amid Middle East Conflict

Published by Jenni Sidey

Iran’s retaliatory attack ramped up on Sunday after the U.S.-Israeli Operation Epic Fury killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Saturday morning. Follow-on strikes were reported in Israel, across multiple Gulf states, and maritime incidents affected commercial shipping lanes in and around the Strait of Hormuz. One notable and unexpected point of disruption has emerged in the Middle East critical infrastructure on Sunday morning, with Amazon reporting that its Middle East (UAE) data center region has experienced a power issue that degraded internet connectivity and impaired cloud service availability. AWS reported that its ME-CENTRAL-1 Region (mec1-az2), which refers to a specific cluster of AWS data-center infrastructure in the United Arab Emirates, is experiencing operational issues due to a “localized power issue.” AWS stated that the severity of the incident is “degraded.” “Other AWS Services are also experiencing error rates and latencies for some workflows. We have weighed away traffic for most services at this time. We recommend customers utilize one of the other Availability Zones in the ME-CENTRAL-1 Region at this time, as existing instances in other …

OpenAI’s big investment from AWS comes with something else: new ‘stateful’ architecture for enterprise agents

OpenAI’s big investment from AWS comes with something else: new ‘stateful’ architecture for enterprise agents

Published by skeptic

The landscape of enterprise artificial intelligence shifted fundamentally today as OpenAI announced $110 billion in new funding from three of tech’s largest firms: $30 billion from SoftBank, $30 billion from Nvidia, and $50 billion from Amazon. But while the former two players are providing money, OpenAI is going further with Amazon in a new direction, establishing an upcoming fully “Stateful Runtime Environment” on Amazon Web Services (AWS), the world’s most used cloud environment. This signals OpenAI’s and Amazon’s vision of the next phase of the AI economy — moving from chatbots to autonomous “AI coworkers” known as agents — and that this evolution requires a different architectural foundation than the one that built GPT-4. For enterprise decision-makers, this announcement isn’t just a headline about massive capital; it is a technical roadmap for where the next generation of agentic intelligence will live and breathe. And especially for those enterprises currently using AWS, it’s great news, giving them more options with a new runtime environment from OpenAI coming soon (the companies have yet to announce a precise …

Amazon’s Blundering AI Caused Multiple AWS Outages

Amazon’s Blundering AI Caused Multiple AWS Outages

Published by José Betancourt

Arda Kucukkaya / Anadolu via Getty Images Are AI tools reliable enough to be used at in commercial settings? If so, should they be given “autonomy” to make decisions? These are the questions being raised after at least two internet outages at Amazon’s cloud division were allegedly caused by blundering AI agents, according to new reporting from the Financial Times. In one incident in December, engineers at Amazon Web Services allowed its in-house Kiro “agentic” coding tool to make changes that sparked a 13-hour disruption, according to four sources familiar with the matter. The AI, ill-fatedly, had decided to “delete and recreate the environment,” the sources said. Amazon employees claimed that this was not the first service disruption involving an AI tool.  “We’ve already seen at least two production outages [in the past few months],” one senior AWS employee told the FT. “The engineers let the AI [agent] resolve an issue without intervention. The outages were small but entirely foreseeable.” AWS launched its in-house coding assistant, Kiro, in July. The company describes the tool as …