Corey QuinnGood morning; it's time for Adam Selipsky's #awsreinvent keynote. I'm here at Sugarcane thanks to the fine folks at MongoDB, and I'm about to see whether or not this keynote is going to get me into "15 shots of whiskey, please" territory before 9AM.
Adam Selipsky walks on to "Sweet Child of Mine." I just lost $5; I was sure it'd be "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald." On balance, this is why he's the CEO and I'm the gadfly...
The annual "AWS Customer Eye Chart, Automotive Edition" slide.
Honestly at this point it'd be visually cleaner and easier on the team to just put up the dozen or so companies on the planet who aren't using AWS.
"Why is all of this happening on AWS?" Because a lot of your competition was asleep at the wheel and still oh so very clearly DOES NOT GET THEIR CUSTOMERS, if I'm being honest. I wish it was otherwise; I don't want there to be only one reasonable choice to build upon; competition benefits everyone.
Talking about the AZ separation model. What a fantastic waste of money; why not just slap a pair of racks into a burned out warehouse and call it a day like Azure does?
(The entire AWS global infrastructure is an oft-overlooked but incredible differentiator.)
S3 Intelligent Tiering has saved customers over $2 billion.
Honestly, based upon what I've seen I'm surprised it's not more. That service has gotten awesomely cost efficient since launch; it should probably be your default storage class unless you're doing something "special."
First announcement of the day: new storage class for S3: S3 Express One Zone.
For those wondering, this is the last of four announcements I was told about in advance. Everything from here on out is as new to me as it is to you.
This is not a general purpose storage tier; super fast access, located in a single AZ, built for massive request volume. Think "ML project."
Pinterest has seen 10x faster write speed with a 40% cost reduction.
Now talking about Graviton. He's right; it's time to use it. A watershed moment was Arm support by other cloud vendors; having a theoretical exodus path is important.
And now announcing Graviton 4!
Didn't see that one coming; I thought it was still a year away based upon industy scuttlebutt.
But R8g instances are available today in preview. I'll be requesting one as my annual ec2 dev box upgrade!
Now talking about generative AI. To his credit he's not claiming to be the industry leader in it, and there is significant value in the space.
Talking about the three layers of the stack. He's not wrong--but customers increasingly care about the top part, whereas AWS excels at the bottom part.
Talking about their GPU instances. I have customers who have done everything this side of "slitting throats" to get more of them. This is a very real, very painful challenge for customers today.
And Nvidia Jensen Huang takes the stage at what, his eighth cloud company keynote this year? At this point I think he's a DevRel guy who got frustrated at having his CFP submissions turned down so he found an alternate path to get to talk at more conferences.
Feels like he's going a bit off script here. But what's AWS gonna do, upset the guy who controls the only GPUs the industry is talking about? I think not!
Adam takes over again. "Now let's talk about capacity."
You just talked to the guy who could do something about it! You missed the window, Adam! If you want something from someone, you've gotta ask them in a situation in which they cannot possibly refuse!
Announcing AWS Trainium2. I'd be more excited about it if I saw any of the AI blog posts from folks way smarter than me talking about using Trainium chips.
Instead we're here, where if I want to use Trainium instead of Nvidia chips I have to get a whole lot better at a lot of stuff very quickly...
Instead we're here, where if I want to use Trainium instead of Nvidia chips I have to get a whole lot better at a lot of stuff very quickly...
Giant logo wall of customers using Bedrock.
I do wonder what the inclusion criteria is. "One engineer somewhere spins it up for ten minutes," or something more strategic.
Talking about how multiple providers of multiple models is the future. He kinda has to say that, otherwise he's ceding the sector to Microsoft / OpenAI / they're the same thing.
Guest speaker Dario Amodei from Anthropic is up next. I've been playing with the Claude line a bit; they've got something going over there for sure.
Didn't love the reference Adam made to "the events of the last ten days." Everyone knows OpenAI was a clownshow, but when YOU say it it just comes across as petty and insecure.
I'd love to see the OpenAI models in AWS and I am not even slightly kidding: I *do not trust* the OpenAI / Azure data security story. Run them on AWS and a lot of that fear goes away. I doubt I'm alone here.
Now talking about Titan. "25 year track record with AI and ML." Yes, we all remember such hits as "Alexa," and "the awesome Amazon search results."
RAG with knowledge base s now available in Bedrock. This may be what I've been looking for in my "tune a model on my corpus of work" experiments...
Talking about Bedrock at Delta. Because nobody does "subterranean" quite like an airline?
Try the veal.
My overall problem with Bedrock is that it's supposed to provide a common API for different FMs, but each model wants its own payload format.
Okay, apparently the gloves are off and there's no reason to be diplomatic anymore when it comes to comparing AWS's AI offerings to OpenAI's?
I don't think you've thought your cunning plan all the way through.
Announcement: Guardrails for Bedrock.
On some level this is the most corporate thing ever: "OMG computers have a sense of humor now" --> "holy crap how do we rip out its sense of humor?"
Pfizer is the next pfeatured customer; talking about how AI has saved them money on drug research.
Now talking about Amazon CodeWhisperer which I misheard earlier as GoatWhisperer and will forever be using instead.
It's GitHub Copilot before Copilot started being slapped everywhere as a brand and also massively improved.
Announcing Amazon Q, a generative AI assistant designed to help you at work and also storm the Capitol. Or alternately, to hurl you through time and space to help teach you life lessons.
Oh, this is what I stumbled across by accident a few days ago. Going super well!
Ooh, Amazon Q Code Transformation. It's designed to keep things current by replacing deprecated code and whatnot.
Here's an acid test: can it automatically upgrade my Lambda functions to use the latest runtime of its given language so I don't have to care about deprecations of things I haven't touched in years anymore?
Bill, organizer of stuff@Quinnypig Wow, yeah, that's, uhhhh, spiffy.
Ric Harvey 🇪🇺🌍💚@Quinnypig please tell me that’s photoshopped 🙈
Douglas Kilpatrick@Quinnypig ... ... ... fry-eyes.gif
Matt "msw" Wilson@Quinnypig Weird. For me, I get this response:
"""To hide the chat window, please click on the icon on the top-right of the window, then select "Minimize window". You can also clear the conversation history by clicking the icon on the top-right of this window and selecting "Clear conversation".
"""
Sebastian Jackel@Quinnypig It barged into my console view this morning, spewed a bunch of noncontextual examples of what I could ask it, and couldn't understand my first question at all.
I nicknamed it "Qlippy".
\u2014
Matthew Martin@Quinnypig Did we learn nothing about names from X
shana@Quinnypig roflol, are they going to hire John de Lancie to do the ads?
@Quinnypig As someone working for a FAANG with a large investment in AI...
It's kinda scary the extent to which the coding portion of my job is "wait for autocomplete to suggest something, and then hit tab"
Major Hayden 🤠@Quinnypig you think that is pfunny? 😜
seismo!allegra!utzoo@Quinnypig drugs and AI.... What could go wrong?
Mike Mol@Quinnypig Sparky the Computer! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_r7sh75258
Garibaldi vs The Computer (Funny Babylon 5)
@Quinnypig There once was a user with EC2
Who wanted to change its security
Just open the console
And pick from the options
Add, remove groups as you need be.
Who wanted to change its security
Just open the console
And pick from the options
Add, remove groups as you need be.
@Quinnypig Any large company I've worked at has an internal process for performing a security review of a proposed external vendor+product before permitting that vendor's product offering to be used for company purposes. Basic liability management. There are plenty of mundane technical and legal reasons for concern before passing your confidential and sensitive data through an external party's hosted service, so I would find it shocking if there *hadn't* been a period of restriction on the tool's use.
(Maybe there's more context I'm missing here, but the photo shown doesn't give me much.)
@mikemol Yeah, wholeheartedly agree. But I wouldn't have put the screenshot of the article in my corporate keynote...
Andy@Quinnypig “bedrock at delta” sounds like a snippet out of a crash post mortem
Jon@Quinnypig That's interesting. Can't speak to OpenAI, but "data security" between AWS and Azure seems to be a coin toss to me. What in particular are you concerned about? Adherence to compliance (27001 kinda stuff)? Security surface (IAM etc)? Specific concerns with privacy policy/T&C?
@jjlupa Azure had 5 cross-tenant exploits within a year. https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/azures_vulnerabilities_are_quack/
@Quinnypig I see, from a not faceplanting on securing their own service infrastructure perspective. I wasn't thinking of their service level concerns as being directly related to OpenAI.
Makes sense, thanks.
@Quinnypig yeah I had the best results with their llm on partyrock 🤘
Daniel Schaaff@Quinnypig In our case, spinning it up and going “heh, this thing sucks” and then promptly forgetting about it.
Steve Loughran@Quinnypig one engineer forgets to turn it off for two weeks
@Quinnypig yeah this is a bit like tpu’s on that other cloud, and no one uses them either
Hector Sanchez@Quinnypig I wish I had a lol reaction for posts, bc lol
NosirrahSec 🏴☠️ guillotine enthusiastI have a client who spun up a HUGE azure machine with a dedicated GPU and I said, "those exist?!" and the rest of my team said, "THOSE EXIST?!" and it turns out we didn't think they did because they were so expensive and rare to find availability of.
These are in such massive demand in the biotech, pharmaceuticals, and life sciences fields I work in.