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Amazon says that it willcommitup to $ 230 million to startups building generative AI - power applications .
The investment , roughly $ 80 million of which will fund Amazon ’s second AWS Generative AI Accelerator program , aims to position AWS as an attractive cloud infrastructure choice for startups developing generative AI models to power their product , apps and services . Much of the young tranche — including the entire portion set apart for the accelerator program — comes in the form of compute credit for AWS infrastructure , meaning that it ca n’t be transferred to other cloud service providers like Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure .
To edulcorate the pot , Amazon is pledging that startups in this year ’s Generative AI Accelerator cohort will advance access to experts and tech from Nvidia , the curriculum ’s presenting partner . They will also be invited to bring together the Nvidia Inception program , which provides company opportunities to tie with potential investor and additional consulting resources .
The Generative AI Accelerator program has also spring up substantially . Last year ’s age group , which had 21 startups , received only up to $ 300,000 in AWS compute credits , amounting to around a combined $ 6.3 million investiture .
“ With this new effort , we will help startups launch and surmount world - class businesses , bring home the bacon the construction blocks they call for to unleash new AI app that will bear upon all facet of how the world read , connects , and does business , ” Matt Wood , VP of AI products at AWS , said in a command .
Amazon ’s grow outgo on generative AI technical school , which includes efforts like its $ 100 millionAWS Generative AI Innovation Center , costless credits for startups using major AI modelsand itsProject Olympusmodel , comes as the company looks to catch up to tech giant challenger in the bloom — and progressively militant — generative AI space . While Amazon take that its various procreative AI line havereached“multiple billions ” in run charge per unit , the company is wide perceive as having overleap the boat on generative AI .
AWS originallyplanned to uncover its own generative AI modelakin to OpenAI ’s ChatGPT code - named Bedrock — which finally became Amazon’sBedrockmodel host service — at its annual league in November 2022 , according to The Information . But major bugs force the organization to postpone the launching . ( Amazon PR disputes this . )
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Amazon’sAlexa division has been beset with challengesas well , thanks to proficient black eye and political infighting , as account by Fortune ’s Sharon Goldman this week . Nine month after a splashy press demonstration of a “ next - gen ” Alexa , the new Alexa is reportedly far from ready for premier time — the final result of deficient training data , short access to training hardware and other barrier .
Amazon also lapse on former chance to back two conduct AI startups , Cohere and Anthropic . The fellowship by and by endeavor to invest in Cohere , but was disapprove — and had to get back for a co - investment ( albeit alarge one , total $ 4 billion ) in Anthropic with principal rival Google .
Besides the recent exit of Howard Wright , AWS ’ top dog of startup , who managed startup relationships at the org , a hurdle in Amazon ’s way is growing examination from regulator over Big Tech ’s investments in AI inauguration .
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission recently opened aninquiryon Microsoft ’s backing of OpenAI , as well as Google and Amazon ’s investment in Anthropic . European policymakers havesignaledthey’re sceptical of such deals as well .
