For this year’s AWS re:Invent, both Managing Directors (Ahmed & Charlie) journeyed over to Las vegas to, not only be first on the scene for the latest tech announcements, but to also meet and celebrate with the many partners and co-workers from AWS that had worked closely with us across 2023. We were also declared the AWS UK & Ireland Rising Star of the Year for 2023! A fantastic achievement that you can read all about in our recent press release.

As predicted, Generative AI took the limelight in a series of new and exciting announcements which are sure to see AWS remain a top contender in the field.

Most notably, Anthropic selected AWS as its primary cloud provider and will train and deploy its future foundation models on AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips, taking advantage of AWS’s high-performance, low-cost machine learning accelerators. This deeper commitment to AWS, will make its future foundation models accessible to millions of developers, providing AWS customers early access to unique features for model customisation, using their proprietary data, and fine-tuning capabilities, all through Amazon Bedrock.

AWS will also be the first cloud provider to deploy Nvidia’s GH200 chips, originally announced for release in 2024. Nvidia said GH200 has triple the memory of the popular H100 chips. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, a surprise guest during AWS CEO Adam Selipsky’s keynote at the AWS re:Invent conference, also announced Nvidia’s AI “factory” DGX Cloud is coming to AWS. We’re looking forward to seeing what that has to offer in 2024.

Amazon Q was also announced, providing a new type of generative AI–powered assistant. It is specifically for work, and can be tailored to any business to have conversations, solve problems, generate content, and take actions using the data and expertise found in a companies information repositories, code bases, and enterprise systems. Amazon Q provides quick, relevant, and actionable information and advice to help streamline tasks, speed decision-making and problem-solving, and help spark creativity and innovation at work.

Amazon Redshift also introduced Amazon Q generative SQL in Amazon Redshift Query Editor, an out-of-the-box web-based SQL editor for Redshift, that simplifies query authoring and increases productivity by allowing you to express queries in natural language and receive SQL code recommendations. Furthermore, it allows you to get insights faster without extensive knowledge of your organisation’s complex database metadata.

We also caught the news that Amazon Transcribe, a popular and highly used transcription platform, has now seen some big boosts to it’s capabilities thanks to generative AI. AWS added new languages to the product, offering speech foundation model-based transcription for 100 languages and a slew of new AI capabilities for customers.

Swami Sivasubramanian, VP of Data and AI at AWS, explored the powerful relationship between humans, data, and AI. As well as demonstrating how Generative AI is augmenting our productivity and creativity in new ways, while also being fueled by massive amounts of enterprise data and human intelligence. Be sure to watch or listen in the background as he covers some of our favourite service/platform announcements such as:

• Launch of Amazon Titan (Text Lite, Text Express & Image Generator)
• Meta Llama 2 70B now available in Amazon Bedrock
• Launch of Amazon SageMaker HyperPod
• Launch of Amazon Q data integration in AWS Glue

Here’s a few of our highlight images from the event this week. For even more notable announcements, we recommend visiting the AWS glossary page for all the key highlights, including the latest AWS Podcast episodes and official news on the week in Las Vegas.

If you’ve been inspired by some of the recent announcements at this year’s AWS re:Invent, and you’re looking to explore Generative AI, to improve creativity and personalisation, to foster scalability and efficiency, or to manage huge data sets of insights, reach out today.