AWS re:Invent, AWS Jabs Microsoft, & Together AI Raises $102 Million

We have a quick summary of Amazon's AI announcements at AWS re:Invent, and Together AI raised $102.5 million.

AWS Announces Amazon Q & Enhanced Bedrock Features at re:Invent

AWS made several some big AI announcements during the 2nd day of their cloud conference re:Invent.

The highlight was the introduction of Amazon Q, a generative AI that streamlines automation across AWS cloud services, enhancing development, analytics, and operations. Amazon Q promises to transform tasks like workload architecture and troubleshooting, offering capabilities like code transformation for efficient migration across technologies.

Additionally, AWS introduced enhancements to Amazon Bedrock, such as customizable AI models through retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and continued pre-training. These improvements allow more tailored applications and improved safety with new "Guardrails" for responsible AI usage.

AWS Jabs Microsoft & OpenAI at re:Invent

In addition to their AI announcements, AWS CEO Adam Selipsky took a shot at Microsoft & OpenAI after last week’s OpenAI drama.

Things are moving so fast, and in that type of environment the ability to adapt is the most valuable capability that you can have. There’s not going to be one model to rule them all. And there’s certainly not going to be one company providing the models that everybody uses, so you don’t want a cloud provider who is beholden primarily to one model provider. You need to be trying out different models. You need to be able to switch between them rapidly, even combining them with the same use cases. And you need a real choice of model providers as you decide who has the best technology, but also who has the dependability that you need in a business partner. I think the events of the past 10 days have made that very clear.

It's a fair argument, and we'll see over the next year if enterprises agree that the OpenAI drama was too concerning to partner with them.

Together AI Rasied $102.5 Million Led by Kleiner Perkins

Together AI, which specializes in open source generative AI and AI model development infrastructure, raised a $102.5 million Series A, led by Kleiner Perkins.

Together aims to democratize AI through open source models and accessible cloud services, and this investment will boost the expansion of their cloud platform, which facilitates the development of both open and custom AI models.

Tools & Resources

llamafile lets you distribute and run LLMs with a single file, and the feedback on Hacker News has been fantastic.

This unified framework allows AI developers to create single-file applications that are universally compatible across various platforms. Key features include runtime dispatching in llama.cpp for support across multiple CPU microarchitectures, including modern Intel and older systems. Additionally, the framework supports multiple CPU architectures (AMD64 and ARM64) and is compatible with WIN32 and UNIX shells, with easy conversion to native formats. The framework extends compatibility across six operating systems (macOS, Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD), requiring only a single build process.