LAS VEGAS (Nov 30): Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is still at its nascent stages with no knowing of where it will ultimately head towards.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) vice-president and managing director of Asean Conor McNamara believes that there will not be only one large language model (LLM) that will solve all customer use cases. Instead, there will be a move from AWS for customers to have access to as many LLMs as possible.
AWS has its very own Amazon Titan, which is a family of foundation models pre-trained by AWS on large datasets. Customers can privately customise it with their own data, or use it as is. Before moving to generative AI, organisations will be first figuring out how to harness their data, he said.
AWS has also announced the general availability of Amazon Bedrock, which is a service that makes it easy to build and scale generative models with foundation models in September this year.
“Customers can get access to various LLMs, both privately and open source and can tune those LLMs securely with their own data via an application programming interface (API) call. Of course, the base layer is the provision of infrastructure to give customers access to cost-effective and high performing infrastructure in the cloud to run generative AI use cases and workloads,” he said during the Asean media briefing at the AWS:ReInvent 2023, which is being held in Nevada.
McNamara noted that there will be an acceleration in enterprises as they move mission critical workloads to the cloud.
In Malaysia, Axiata Group Bhd has selected AWS as its primary cloud and will migrate its mission critical applications by the end of 2024. Axiata will also use AWS technologies, which include data analytics, generative AI and machine learning, to inform data-driven business decisions. Furthermore, Aerodyne will use AWS to host its DRONOS software as a service (SaaS) platform.
McNamara pointed out that with the emergence of all these technologies achieving digital skills will be a hurdle, such as in achieving cloud fluency.
Achieving this will not only entail the education of developers, system administrators and database administrators. It will also include the education of boards, risk committees and procurements on what a cloud transformation is.
If an organisation is to derive value from the cloud, that means the entire organisation needs to know what it stands for, he added.
On top of that, business leaders need to be thinking about innovation and how to transform their businesses by leveraging technology. The audit risk committee and security professionals because it is a paradigm shift.
“If you’re pivoting from fixed costs to variable costs, you need to transform your information technology (IT) organisation. You need to think about what it means to be a developer on the cloud versus developing applications in a traditional sense,” said McNamara.
In this stead, AWS has trained over a million people with cloud skills in Asean through its training and certification efforts, since 2017. In the same time frame, Malaysia has seen over 50,000 individuals being trained.