AWS re:Invent 2023 showcased future of AI

The event, which was held from November 27 to December 1 in Las Vegas, saw AWS launch a slew of new Generative AI (GenAI) products to turbocharge its AI market position, including a new cybersecurity offer for its flagship GenAI platform, Amazon Bedrock, as well as a new processor chip, Graviton4, to enable AI-powered workloads and applications.

Adam Selipsky, CEO, AWS

Opening the event, Adam Selipsky, CEO of AWS, shared his perspective on how the cloud transformation journey is helping AWS customers achieve their goals faster and exploit untapped potential, saying, “Generative AI is the next step in artificial intelligence, and it’s going to reinvent every application that we interact with at work and at home.”

Selipsky’s entire keynote was centred around generative AI and the GenAI stack, and he illustrated AWS's ongoing commitment to enhancing cloud capabilities and driving the evolution of AI in various industries.

“We were the first to develop and offer our own server processors. We’re now in our fourth generation in just five years,” said Selipsky, “Other cloud providers have not even delivered on their first server processors yet.”

In his keynote address, Dr. Werner Vogels, Amazon.com vice president and chief technology officer, shared his insights and predictions and launched a number of tools, including Amazon SageMaker and new Amazon Inspector capabilities.

Dr. Vogels’s keynote also introduced myApplications and Amazon CloudWatch Application Signals, offering enhanced monitoring and management capabilities and revisited the concept of the 'frugal architect', emphasising cost-consciousness in architectural decisions.

“As builders, we really need to start thinking about this not only because we want to be frugal in the way that we use our resources, but also be as sustainable as possible," said Vogels.

Dr. Werner Vogels, vice president and chief technology officer, Amazon.com

Vogels also further elaborated on the alignment of business and technology decisions within AWS's architectural framework. He emphasised that these decisions should not be made in isolation, but rather in a manner that complements and enhances the structure of AWS.

The coming years are certain to be filled with innovation in areas designed to democratise access to technology and help us keep up with the increasing pace of every-day life, and Vogels was good enough to share his tech predictions for 2024 and beyond.

"Firstly, generative AI will become culturally aware. Large language models trained on culturally diverse data will gain a more nuanced understanding of human experience and complex societal challenges," said Vogels, "Secondly, FemTech will finally take off. Investment in women’s healthcare solutions will surge as an abundance of data unlocks improved diagnoses and patient outcomes. The rise of FemTech will not only benefit women, but lift the entire healthcare system."

Vogels went on to say, "AI assistants will redefine developer productivity. After evolving from basic code generators into teachers and tireless collaborators that provide support throughout the software development lifecycle, they will be able to explain complex systems in simple language, suggest targeted improvements, and take on repetitive tasks, allowing developers to focus on the parts of their work that have the most impact."

For his final predictions, Vogels said,"Education will evolve to match the speed of tech innovation. Higher education alone cannot keep up with the rate of technological change. Industry-led training programmes will emerge that more closely resemble the journeys of skilled tradespeople. This shift to continuous learning will benefit individuals and businesses alike."

AWS made several new announcements at the event, among them, Amazon Q, a new type of generative AI-powered work-focussed assistant that can be tailored to any business. Customers can get fast, relevant answers to pressing questions, generate content, and make data-driven decisions, all informed by a customer’s information repositories, code, and enterprise systems.

Three new serverless innovations were also announced that make it faster and easier for customers to scale their data infrastructure to support their most demanding use cases. They are Amazon Aurora Limitless Database, a new capability that automatically scales beyond the limits of a single Amazon Aurora database; Amazon ElastiCache Serverless, and a new Amazon Redshift Serverless capability that uses AI to predict workloads and automatically scale and optimise resources to help customers meet their price-performance targets.

In regard to partner/customer announcements, the Bank of Ayudhya (Krungsri), one of Thailand's top five banks, is working with AWS to improve customer experiences, promote financial inclusion, and enhance operational efficiencies.

AWS and Nvidia have also announced an expansion of their strategic collaboration to deliver the most advanced infrastructure, software, and services to power customers’ generative AI innovations.

In ASEAN, Malaysia-based startup and drone solutions provider Aerodyne is running its DRONOS SaaS platform on AWS to help drone operators worldwide grow their businesses.

In South Korea, LG AI Research, the AI research hub of South Korean conglomerate LG Group, has launched its AI image-to-text captioning solution on AWS. The new captioning solution uses LG AI’s EXAONE, a 300-billion-parameter, multimodal foundation model that creates more accurate and relevant content for worldwide customers across industries like advertising, fashion, and retail.

AWS increases approach to early-stage startups with new programme Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud, on August 25 launched a new AWS Build programme to increase its approach to early-stage startups.

Elevating security capabilities with AWS As the digital transformation is accelerated, businesses in Vietnam are looking to improve their security capabilities, with AWS services being among the most optimal choices.

AWS is helping Asia-Pacific get 'AI-ready' We hear from Andrew Sklar, director of Training and Certification at Amazon Web Services for Asia Pacific and Japan, about the tech giant's new training initiatives that are helping businesses and individuals in the region prepare for the next big evolutionary step in technology.