Amazon Web Services (AWS) hosted its re:Invent event in Las Vegas, and we saw some exciting announcements, so lets break them all down.
First, the company unveiled its next generation of AI-Chips that they claim, are 4-times faster and more capable for AI training. Christened ‘Trainium2’, the next generation chips are clearly meant for training purposes has been designed to be 2x more power efficient in addition to 4x better performance. Amazon believes that these chips will allow users to train their AI models faster and cheaper as the power consumption is exponentially reduced, leading to a smaller bill. Anthropic, a competitor to OpenAI, who has been backed by Amazon, has already announced its intention to start training its AI models using Trainium2.
Next up, we saw the Graviton4, a chip that Amazon says, is for general use. These next-gen processors are based on the ARM architecture, but consume less energy compared to both Intel and AMD chips, which in itself, is an impressive feat. Now, if you were to use a pre-loaded AI Model on the Graviton4, you can expect to see a 30% increase in general performance. According to Amazon, the Graviton4 will allow AWS customers to “process larger amounts of data, scale their workloads, improve time-to-results and lower their total cost of ownership.”
The Graviton4 is available as a preview today, with the general release due in a few months time. But what does this mean for the Amazon Nvidia partnership?
Well, anyone would say that a shift to indigenous chips means goodbye Nvidia, but it looks like that is not the case. AWS has announced that enterprise customers will be able to access to NVIDIA’s latest H200 AI GPUs. It’ll also operate more than 16,000 Nvidia GH200 Grace Hopper Superchips expressly for NVIDIA’s research and development team. This is greta news as customers can now enjoy the power of Nvidia, while also trying out Amazon’s next-gen AI chips.
Alongside these chipsets, Amazon also revealed an all-new generative AI chatbot named Q. When asked about what is different about this chatbot, the company revealed that Q is a “new type of generative AI-powered personal assistant”, and has been designed to streamline work projects and customer service tasks.
Q will be found on apps like Slack, as well as in text editing applications that are commonly used by developers. Amazon has also revealed that Q can edit source code and connect with up to 40 popular enterprise systems, including the likes of Microsoft 365, Dropbox, Salesforce and Zendesk. Q is currently available in preview, with a full release scheduled in a few months. As far as the pricing is concerned, Q will cost anywhere between $20 to $30, which sounds reasonable.
