Amazon Q, AI Chip and More: 5 Biggest Takeaways from AWS re:Invent 2023 Day 2!

The annual flagship event of Amazon Web Service (AWS), known as re:Invent, is currently taking place. On November 28, the first day of the event featured keynote sessions by AWS CEO Adam Selipsky, where he made several new announcements and updates. The second day’s keynote session has also concluded, revealing a few more announcements. The event, which is being held in Las Vegas, has a strong focus on artificial intelligence (AI). It will continue until December 1, and we anticipate more announcements to be made. However, let’s now examine the five most significant announcements from the AWS event thus far.

The 5 biggest announcements from AWS re:Invent 2023

1. Amazon Q: Amazon Q is a chatbot for businesses where customers can ask questions about their businesses. It works as an artificial intelligence assistant that helps users gain actionable insights into their own data. It serves as a tool for tasks such as retrieving company guidelines or understanding code, streamlining the process by presenting information without extensive document searches. The tool is available through multiple platforms, including the AWS management console, company documentation pages, developer environments such as Slack, and third-party applications.

2. Trainium 2 AI chip: During AWS re:Invent 2023, the company’s CEO announced significant advances in its Trainium chip technology. The company highlighted this when it announced a new AI chip that can train basic models twice as fast. The second generation Trainium 2 model has four times the training speed compared to its predecessor, the company claims. Selipsky also said that Trainium 2 has three times the memory capacity of its predecessor, allowing it to handle more complex and larger datasets.

3. AWS and Nvidia expand their AI partnership: AWS will adopt Nvidia’s upcoming GH200 chips, making them the first cloud provider to do so. Introduced by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang at AWS re:Invent, these chips offer three times more memory than the widely used H100 chips. Additionally, AWS users can anticipate the arrival of Nvidia’s DGX Cloud, an AI “factory,” adding a significant dimension to the collaboration between the two tech giants in advancing AI capabilities.

4. An AI chip that can solve key quantum computing problems? During a Re:Invent keynote, Peter Desantis, general manager of AWS EC2, revealed a new chip designed to fix errors, such as the one-to-zero translation of binary codes, that can occur in quantum computing queries. AWS is currently experimenting with it and it is not a finished product. Desantis emphasized that mitigating these errors could potentially improve the usability of quantum computing.

He said: “We are still in the very early stages, but this chip is an important step in quantum computing error correction.”

5. AWS Transcription Platform Gets AI: The event also made an Amazon Transcribe-specific announcement highlighting an updated multi-billion-parameter speech base model that extends automatic speech recognition to more than 100 languages. This managed automatic speech recognition (ASR) service simplifies the integration of speech-to-text capabilities into applications, the company said. The base model, trained with self-supervised algorithms, learns universal speech patterns in different languages and accents.