The Six Five team discusses AWS Summit New York 2024.
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Transcript:
Daniel Newman: AWS Summit. So look, a lot of content happened, and there was a little bit of a prelaunch because the Graviton for CPU was announced. It came out the day before I came down with a little illness. I was in my room watching Matt Garmin on CNBC talking about it. Great to start to see him get out there by the way, look forward to having him on the show. And look, AWS did the most AWS thing that AWS does. They launched a new chip. It’s got some great improvements on generation to generation and they really only focused on that. They didn’t talk a whole lot about how Graviton compares to other merchant silicon that they sell. They talked a lot about, and really efficiency was the big focal point of this announcement. They talked about, I believe it was 60%, Pat, more efficient than its previous generation and they also talked a lot about the ability for this next generation to reduce carbon footprint. Now they did make a reference to non Graviton instances. That was about as competitive as I’ve ever seen, but like I said, the topic was all in on efficiency. They did the exact same thing by the way, as they ran through second generation Inferentia and Tranium chips, talking about two times more efficient out of their new Tranium chip and 50% more energy efficient on deep learning. Now again-
Patrick Moorhead: Hey Dan. Hey Dan. They announced this chip a long time ago. This announcement was about GA.
Daniel Newman: Oh, yeah.
Patrick Moorhead: No, no, I’m just doing the check.
Daniel Newman: You’re talking on Inferentia or Tranium or Graviton?
Patrick Moorhead: Graviton 4.
Daniel Newman: They announced. Yeah, I’m sorry. I should have said that clearly.
Patrick Moorhead: No, no. For the audience.
Daniel Newman: It came out . The tour, they were on announcing it’s out, so I should have used that word more clearly. They announced that it’s out and it’s available now. My point though is really that they were doing a victory lap on efficiency. They seemed to double down, lean in hard into the power envelope of these AWS homemade. I appreciate you stopping that. It probably came across like I was saying, they were announcing these chips for the first time. GA, everybody, GA, Pat. Thank you. All right, let me talk a little bit more about the bigger AI summit or AWS Summit focuses and that was the Matt Wood keynote. Matt Wood, a VP of AI services, he came out and I did a long thread, lots of different things that he was talking about. I’m going to kind of try to focus on a couple of things-
Patrick Moorhead: The way Matt Wood did a Six Five summit keynote on end-to-end enterprise AI.
Daniel Newman: He did, and you almost worried me there that I’d given the wrong name that I’d also botched that. So thank you.
Patrick Moorhead: I’m not punching, I’m, just clarifying for the audience who doesn’t follow it. I know you knew it was GA. It was-
Daniel Newman: Yeah. Fact checking department. Well, but you know how I am though, Pat. I acquire a company and I announce it and then when I actually close it, I announce it again. I mean is this any different?
Patrick Moorhead: No, that’s exactly what AWS does. It’s smart.
Daniel Newman: Yeah, it’s smart. And they were smart. They did a whole nother media round and got a whole nother tour to talk about their launches. So anyways, point though was a couple of interesting things with Matt that he came out. One is he really started off big on wanting to establish the footprint that AWS is in the AI business. Let’s talk about where that happened. They ran the stat 96% of AI ML unicorns run on AWS. Where have we seen that stat before, Pat? Maybe it wasn’t 96, but it was some version of ninety-something that has come from every-
Patrick Moorhead: It was 97% or something,
Daniel Newman: Every other provider. So it’s a really interesting thing. But what I’ve come to the definitive conclusion is that multi-cloud is a big part of every AI strategy. They also mentioned 90% of the AI. One thing I did really like though is that they talked about the development and build out of their services, Pat. They talked about having 326 new services that were launched, two times as many as they’re saying as their nearest competition. Now AWS got a little goofy with this. Not goofy. They got more, you know how they’ve always been so PC with this. They actually did a slide Pat where it showed the AWS list of services and then right below it’s a company one and it was a color, red, green, blue, yellow, and they were talking about it was more than two times as many in the last 18 months. I mean, is this a little different feel from Matt, under Matt’s leadership?
Patrick Moorhead: They’re getting aggressive for sure and there’s a perception that they’re behind and –
Daniel Newman: Yeah, and I like that you said that. I’m going to go quick so you can get to your stuff because there’s a lot here. I’ll be really a bit succinct with the rest of the stuff. I like that they pointed out training foundational models on AWS. There’s only so many places this is happening, but some of the big ones, Anthropic, Mistral, Hugging Face, AWS, AWS, AWS. They also did some very exclusive fine-tuning with CloudThree. CloudThree is getting a lot of very important attention for its accuracy, its fidelity, its capabilities. So there’s a deep partnership with Cloud and obviously Amazon being a big investor in Anthropic. Last thing they did a how many LLMs data point. I really like this. For everyone out there, enterprises are not going to standardize on a single LLM. Let’s be very clear. Most are using two, three, four or more. They’re going to use multiple clouds. They’re going to use multiple LLMs and Pat, don’t be surprised if they use multiple silicon architectures to get this done.
Patrick Moorhead: That’s it. You done?
Daniel Newman: I had a lot more, but we’re like 30 minutes in because you were fixing your computer for the first 22 minutes of the show.
Patrick Moorhead: I know. I’m sorry everybody. There was a lot more goodness I know Dan had on that. And yeah, by the way, I participated in a, I don’t know, was a 10-minute video that Yahoo Finance did on Graviton four and gosh, my tweets were in there. I sent in photos, I did some video for them as well. So it was fun I got in on the action as well. So let me boil this down into two things. What AWS brought out here was either better results for enterprises or increased efficiencies by developers. On the better results, you had more data sources, RAG connectors to Salesforce, Confluence and SharePoint, not just the data that’s sitting in S3 buckets. They added guardrails for hallucinations and that’s about again, getting better results. For agents, which is a new way to do an application, which is essentially an agent talking to an agent, talking to an agent and sometimes even creating a code on the fly.
And what they did is they added memory to the agent. In a very similar way, if you use open AI or perplexity, it has a certain memory and it just gives you better results. And on the increased efficiency, they added Q developer to SageMaker. So SageMaker is the end-to-end data and AI platform all the way to data ingest to training to deploying the models. And then of course Bedrock sits on top of it and connects it to create enterprise applications. So you can actually go in and do what you would expect, which is create code inside of SageMaker. You can have it write code to create a script to do data cleanup as an example. So exactly what you would expect Q. The competition has co-pilot, Google has agents, what you’d expect it to do. Also, basic how-to manuals, how do I do this?
And it goes in and it tells you exactly how to do something. And the second thing they added is adding to developer to your own code base with the ability to customize that as opposed to the code that you wrote that is essentially housed and new on AWS. And the third one was what’s called App Studio that went into preview and that’s building applications with natural language. And we’ve seen examples of this out there out from many different vendors to be able to do that and AWS is bringing it to their capability and one thing I do want to point out is that AWS, while the company has a consumer play with .com and the media and all the different devices, this stuff has to be bulletproof and cannot be put out there. The expectation is that whatever they put out there is absolutely bulletproof and overall I did sense an increased aggression.
I do believe that they are feeling some of the heat. There’s a couple of things going on here. Microsoft and Azure, two things. First of all, there was a lot of people talking about OpenAI and the capabilities that were put out there and writing on top of Microsoft. Microsoft came out big time on the consumer side with Bing and Bing with Copilot and then Consumer Copilot that is on every modern PC out there that’s updated. Microsoft also did the cheat code and I don’t mean that in a bad way is they partner with OpenAI and then you’ve got Google with doing all their training on the TPU. Bard one and Bard two, didn’t come out very well.
Even when Gemini came out, had some mistakes and some issues, but when it was running and it is much improved almost every Google search you can see some of the generative AI capabilities. AWS doesn’t have that capability yet to get all those people talking on the consumer side. So yeah, it’s going to be very interesting. AWS, its posture is being first. They’re the first one who stood up cloud computing and this is a very different area for them and it’s interesting to say the least.
Daniel Newman: Yeah, there’s a lot there, Pat, and I mean, we could talk more and more about Bedrock and how they’re building a very open sort of platform with lots of experimentation capabilities. I mentioned services. What the real question I will ask as we head into this next era of cloud is how much does that established market leadership and infrastructure translate to the AI era? How much do new disruptors like CoreWeave, Lambda and others impact it and how much does the app layer being more present in some of the others with Google and Microsoft really impact the AWS business if it doesn’t all exist because AWS has never quite, but Q is really interesting. Anyways, we got to move on. Lots of good insights there buddy.
Author Information
Daniel is the CEO of The Futurum Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise.
From the leading edge of AI to global technology policy, Daniel makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology investments. Daniel is a top 5 globally ranked industry analyst and his ideas are regularly cited or shared in television appearances by CNBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal and hundreds of other sites around the world.
A 7x Best-Selling Author including his most recent book “Human/Machine.” Daniel is also a Forbes and MarketWatch (Dow Jones) contributor.
An MBA and Former Graduate Adjunct Faculty, Daniel is an Austin Texas transplant after 40 years in Chicago. His speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.
