Hugging Face just made 83 popular open models available directly within Amazon Bedrock Marketplace. The models are managed via SageMaker JumpStart under the hood, allowing developers to plug open weights into Bedrock features like Agents, Knowledge Bases, and Guardrails with standard Bedrock API calls.
Apple just confirmed it uses Amazon's Inferentia and Graviton chips for services like search, delivering a 40% efficiency boost. The company is now evaluating AWS's new Trainium2 chips to pretrain models like Apple Intelligence, eyeing up to a 50% efficiency gain and signaling alternatives to Nvidia's pricey dominance.
Amazon is teaming up with Anthropic to build Project Rainer, a massive AI supercomputer powered by hundreds of thousands of its custom Trainium 2 chips. AWS says the system is 30% to 40% cheaper than Nvidia setups and five times larger than Anthropic’s current training cluster. Why it matters: Amazon is proving Nvidia isn't the only viable game in town, giving frontier AI builders a much cheaper route to compute.
Amazon just unveiled Amazon Nova, its new lineup of foundation models spanning text, multimodal reasoning, and image/video generation. Available in Amazon Bedrock, the Micro, Lite, and Pro models claim to be the fastest in their classes while slashing costs by at least 75%.
AWS just rolled out new generative AI features for Amazon Connect, its cloud contact center service. The update brings dynamic self-service to Amazon Q in Connect without requiring code, alongside customizable guardrails and automated agent evaluations. Fujitsu and Priceline are already among the early adopters.
Cohere just launched Rerank 3.5, a cross-encoder model designed to boost enterprise search and cut hallucinations in RAG pipelines. It tackles complex reasoning across over 100 languages and sets new high marks in finance and ecommerce benchmarks. AWS customers can already deploy it via a single Amazon Bedrock API call.
Amazon just developed a new multimodal AI model code-named Olympus that can process images and videos alongside text, according to The Information. The model aims to let users search video scenes with simple text prompts and lessen AWS's heavy reliance on Anthropic's Claude, despite Amazon recently pumping an additional $4 billion into the startup. An official reveal could drop as early as next week at AWS re:Invent.
Amazon just poured another $4 billion into Anthropic, bringing its total investment to $8 billion. Under the expanded partnership, Anthropic will use AWS's custom Trainium and Inferentia chips to train and deploy its largest models, while AWS customers get early access to fine-tune Claude on their own data. Amazon remains a minority investor without a board seat.
Amazon is reportedly partnering with brands like Uber, DoorDash, and Ticketmaster to make its upgraded Alexa actually handle tasks from start to finish. Instead of relying purely on LLMs to navigate web pages, Amazon wants direct API hooks with around 200 partners by Q3 next year. It's a far more practical bet on assistants actually getting things done.
Amazon-owned Zoox is preparing to roll out its purpose-built, steering-wheel-free robotaxi commercially in the coming months, starting in Las Vegas. The symmetrical, bidirectional EV ditches the driver's seat entirely in favor of an inward-facing carriage cabin. Early employee tests are already underway in San Francisco and Las Vegas.
Stable Diffusion 3.5 Large is now available on Amazon SageMaker JumpStart, bringing the 8-billion-parameter text-to-image model directly to enterprise cloud setups. It generates 1-megapixel images across multiple styles and deploys securely inside your VPC to protect proprietary data.
Amazon is in talks to pour billions more into Anthropic, but there's a catch. The tech giant reportedly wants the startup to train its AI on Amazon-developed silicon rather than its preferred Nvidia chips. With Anthropic projected to burn through over $2.7 billion this year, walking away won't be easy.
Amazon just launched X-Ray Recaps on Prime Video, a generative AI tool that creates text summaries of full seasons, episodes, or even specific scenes. It analyzes video and dialogue to highlight key events while enforcing guardrails to prevent spoilers. The beta is live on Fire TV for its original series.
Anthropic just launched Claude 3.5 Haiku, but it comes with a surprise 4x price hike and no image analysis at launch. While the new model matches or beats its previous flagship Claude 3 Opus on key benchmarks, input tokens now cost four times more than before. Anthropic will keep Claude 3 Haiku around for cost-conscious users.
Amazon just delayed its generative AI-powered Alexa revamp into 2025, quietly shuttering its beta program in the process. Testers reported the new assistant was slow, hallucinated, and struggled with basic smart home commands like setting kitchen timers or turning off lights. Why it matters: Building a conversational bot is one thing, but reliably connecting an LLM to legacy smart home hardware is proving to be a massive headache.
GitHub Copilot just added Anthropic's upgraded Claude 3.5 Sonnet as a model option directly within VS Code and GitHub.com. Powered via Amazon Bedrock, the top-tier coding model is rolling out in public preview to all Copilot Chat users and organizations over the coming weeks.
Amazon just announced a refreshed Fire HD 8 tablet featuring new generative AI tools like keyboard writing assistance, Silk browser webpage summaries, and prompt-based wallpaper generation. You don't have to buy the new hardware to try them either, as Amazon is rolling out these features to multiple older Fire HD and Max tablets later this month.
Figma just relaunched its generative AI app builder as First Draft after pulling it in June for cloning Apple's weather app. The tool now lets designers pick from four component libraries—ranging from low-fi wireframes to high-fidelity patterns—powered by off-the-shelf models like GPT-4 and Amazon Titan. It is currently rolling out in limited beta.
NVIDIA just teamed up with the U.S. government and companies like OpenAI and Google on the Partnership for Global Inclusivity on AI. The effort aims to expand access to AI tools in developing nations, with NVIDIA pledging roughly $10 million in free training alongside GPU credits. Why it matters: Frontier AI has been heavily concentrated in wealthy regions, and this effort could help developers in emerging markets build local solutions.
Amazon just rolled out an AI-powered Video Generator that turns a single product image into 6-to-9-second video ads in about five minutes. It creates four 720p variations at no extra charge, complete with customizable text and branding. Why it matters: It lowers the barrier for e-commerce video ads, though access is currently limited to select U.S. advertisers.
