Analyst(s): Nick Patience
Publication Date: December 12, 2024
AWS makes significant moves in AI at re:Invent 2024 in Las Vegas, introducing new foundation models, enhancing its chip capabilities with Trainium2, and transforming key services such as SageMaker and Bedrock to strengthen its position against cloud rivals Microsoft and Google.
Key Points:
- Amazon launches Nova foundation models, marking its first truly competitive entry into the model space, with benchmarks showing promising performance against rivals such as Google’s Gemini and Meta’s Llama.
- AWS’s Trainium2 chip is now generally available, delivering 30-40% better price performance than GPU-based EC2 instances, with major customers such as Apple and Adobe reporting significant efficiency gains.
- SageMaker undergoes major transformation with Unified Studio and Lakehouse features, while Bedrock receives significant enhancements including model distillation and multi-agent collaboration capabilities.
Overview:
AWS used its annual re:Invent conference in Las Vegas to assert its AI credentials with several major announcements. The headliner was Amazon Nova, a new family of foundation models replacing the existing Titan lineup. These models include Nova Micro for text, Nova Lite and Pro for multimodal processing, and the upcoming Nova Premier expected in early 2025. The models show strong performance in benchmarks for language understanding and mathematics compared to competitors.
AWS also highlighted the general availability of its Trainium2 chips, which are being used by notable customers including Apple and Adobe. The chips deliver 30-40% better price performance compared to GPU-based instances, with some customers reporting up to 30% lower TCO. AWS and Anthropic are collaborating on Project Rainer, a massive compute cluster powered by hundreds of thousands of Trainium2 chips, while Trainium3 was announced for late 2025.
The company transformed its AI/ML development platforms, with SageMaker evolving into a comprehensive data science platform through SageMaker Unified Studio. Bedrock received significant updates including model distillation, multi-agent collaboration, and enhanced RAG capabilities through Knowledge Bases.
AWS and Anthropic are collaborating extensively on infrastructure, including Project Rainer, a massive compute cluster powered by hundreds of thousands of Trainium2 chips. The chips deliver 30-40% better price performance compared to GPU-based instances, with some customers reporting up to 30% lower TCO. Anthropic will also help develop Trainium3, announced for late 2025.
According to Menlo Ventures’ State of Generative AI In the Enterprise report, Anthropic has seen significant growth, doubling its enterprise market share from 12% to 24% as enterprises switched from OpenAI’s models to Claude 3.5 Sonnet. This partnership, backed by AWS’s $8bn investment, appears to be paying dividends as joint customers such as The Hartford and Novo Nordisk report substantial time savings using Bedrock with Claude models.
See the complete overview of announcements from re:Invent 2024 on the AWS blog covering the top announcements from re:Invent 2024. The full report is available via subscription to the Artificial Intelligence IQ service from Futurum Intelligence – click here for inquiry and access.
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Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
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