Anthropic has released Claude 3, claiming new industry benchmarks that see the family of three new large language models approaching “near-human” cognitive capability in some instances. Accessible via Anthropic’s website, the three new models — Claude 3 Haiku, Claude 3 Sonnet and Claude 3 Opus — represent successively increased complexity and parameter count. Sonnet is powering the current Claude.ai chatbot and is free, for now, requiring only an email sign-in. Opus comes with the the $20 monthly subscription for Claude Pro. Both are generally available from the Anthropic website and via API in 159 countries, with Haiku coming soon. Continue reading Anthropic’s Claude 3 AI Is Said to Have ‘Near-Human’ Abilities

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is launching a pilot program to create the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (NAIRR), a shared U.S. AI research infrastructure. The move fulfills part of President Biden’s October executive order on the responsible development of artificial intelligence. Ten other federal agencies have joined the NSF in launching the program, while tech giants Microsoft, Nvidia and Google have already pledged their support, along with more than 20 other private organizations across the industry, academic and non-profit sectors. The idea is to create shared access to information and things like cloud computing resources. Continue reading Big Tech Onboard to Advance President Biden’s NSF AI Pilot

Amazon is debuting its Titan Image Generator in preview for AWS Bedrock customers. The new Titan generative AI model can create new images from a text prompt or existing image, and automatically adds watermarking to protect intellectual property. The move into generative imaging puts Amazon in competition with a growing field that includes large firms like Adobe and Google. Unlike those companies and others, the e-retail giant is at present focusing exclusively on enterprise customers. Amazon Bedrock is a managed service giving developers access to a range of foundation models from companies including Meta Platforms, Anthropic, and Amazon itself. Continue reading Amazon Previews Titan Image Generator for Bedrock Clients

Amazon Web Services is introducing Amazon Q, an AI chatbot geared toward enterprise clients who can customize it to increase productivity for their specific business needs. AWS also announced that it has updated its homegrown Graviton4 chips for a 30 percent performance boost. AWS confirmed it will be the first Big Tech firm to deploy the latest version of Nvidia’s Grace Hopper Superchip AI accelerator, and additionally will become a data center host for Nvidia’s DGX Cloud service. The announcements were disclosed at the AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas. Continue reading Amazon Unveils Productivity Chatbot, Gets Nvidia Superchip

In a move to put “generative AI at the fingertips of every business, from startups to enterprises,” Amazon Web Services is commercially rolling out the Bedrock service it announced in April. Bedrock offers a wide range of foundation models from Amazon’s own Titan to products from Anthropic, Stability AI and soon Meta Platforms. The fully managed Bedrock service makes its generative FMs operable through a single, simple API. This means customers can experiment with various leading FMs and customize simple apps in-house, without the need for a third-party diving into their proprietary data. Continue reading AWS Rolls Out Bedrock Generative AI Service, Adds Llama 2

Amazon has entered into a strategic investment in San Francisco-based Anthropic, founded by former members of OpenAI. The AI startup will train and deploy future models using AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to train and deploy future foundation models with AWS as its primary cloud provider. In turn, Amazon says it will invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic, as it strives to compete with other technology firms in the race to develop generative AI, seeding growth for what is shaping up to be an entirely new economic and social landscape. Continue reading Amazon Plans to Invest Up to $4 Billion in AI Startup Anthropic

AI21 Labs, a pioneer in large language model artificial intelligence, has closed a $155 million Series-C funding that brings the Tel Aviv-based firm’s total raise to $283 million for a valuation of $1.4 billion. Investors include Google, Nvidia, Samsung Next, Walden Catalyst, Pitango, SCB 10X, b2venture, and AI21 co-founder Amnon Shashua. The company is best known for its flagship AI21 Studio product, a developer platform that lets customers pay as they go to build custom text-based business apps using AI21’s proprietary models, notably Jurassic-2. The firm’s portfolio also includes the multilingual reading and writing assistant Wordtune. Continue reading Major Tech Firms Help Boost Valuation of AI21 to $1.4 Billion

Amazon’s AWS cloud-computing unit generated $22.1 billion in Q2, a 12 percent year-over-year gain that was a highlight in a strong quarter for the e-commerce giant. The company generated a total of $134.4 billion in revenue for the period ending in June, an 11 percent increase over the prior year. Advertising was also strong, jumping 22 percent to $10.68 billion. Cost-cutting and rebounding e-commerce helped propel the Seattle-based company to a quarterly profit of $6.75 billion (its strongest performance since Q4 2021), which contrasted sharply with a loss in the same period last year. Continue reading AWS, Advertising Drive Amazon to 11 Percent Revenue Gain

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is investing $100 million to fund a global AI accelerator, aiming to link its machine learning initiatives with experts, customers and partners worldwide. Twilio, Highspot, Lonely Planet and Ryanair are among the first companies to get onboard with the AWS Generative AI Innovation Center to develop new applications. “Through free workshops, engagements and training, AWS will help customers imagine and scope the use cases that will create the greatest value for their businesses, based on best practices and industry expertise,” the company explains. Continue reading AWS Invests $100 Million in Generative AI Innovation Center

Amazon is offering a new service called Bedrock that offers foundation models from AI21 Labs, Anthropic, Stability AI and Amazon, which is introducing two of its own models under its new brand, Titan. The models, which are accessible via API, will allow customers to build and scale generative AI-based applications using pre-trained, off-the-shelf systems that can be customized. Amazon’s Titan line includes a generative LLM that outputs text, the other is an embeddings LLM that translates text to numeric representations that carry the semantic meaning of the text. Embeddings are typically helpful when bridging concepts, like words and images. Continue reading Amazon Intros GenAI Service Bedrock and Its Own Titan LLM