Amazon announces 'Bedrock' AI platform to take on OpenAI

• Amazon announced on Thursday its generative AI toolkit called "Bedrock."
• Amazon Web Services customers can use Bedrock to build chatbots, generate text, and create images.
• The announcement comes after Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said the company will "invest heavily" in AI.

Amazon announced on Thursday it's releasing an AI platform for businesses called Amazon Bedrock, which will compete with enterprise offerings from OpenAI and others in the generative AI space.

Bedrock is a suite of generative AI tools that can help Amazon Web Service customers — businesses who run their operations on Amazon's data servers — build chatbots, generate and summarize text, and make and classify images based on prompts.

Bedrock users can perform specific tasks by selecting from a range of machine learning models it calls "foundation models," such as AI21's Jurassic-2, Anthropic's Claude, Stability AI's Stable Diffusion, and Amazon Titan. 

A content marketing manager, for example, can use Bedrock to create a targeted ad campaign for a new line of handbags by feeding it data so it can generate product social media posts, display ads, and web copy for each product, according to an AWS blog post.

The announcement comes after Amazon CEO Andy Jassy wrote in his annual shareholder letter that his company is betting big on generative AI. The e-commerce giant will be "investing heavily" in generative AI and large language models — LLMs for short, Jassy said. He called them "transformative."

"Let's just say that LLMs and Generative AI are going to be a big deal for customers, our shareholders, and Amazon," Jassy said in his letter.

As generative AI tools have become more widely available to the public, people have flocked to consumer-facing tools like ChatGPT to start their own businesses. Some firms are even implementing ChatGPT into their operations to boost productivity. 

Amazon is the latest big tech giant to release generative AI tools alongside companies like Microsoft and Google, which launched their own versions of generative AI chatbots earlier this year.

A preview of Amazon's generative AI toolkit is currently limited to select AWS customers. So far, Coda, an AI-document generation firm used by companies like Uber and the New York Times, is using Bedrock to scale its business operations, according to Amazon.