Amazon’s Cloud Unit Partners With Startup Hugging Face to Target AI Developers

Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud computing arm of Amazon.com, on Tuesday said it is collaborating with startup Hugging Face, a software development hub, to make it easier to carry out artificial intelligence work (AI) in Amazon's cloud.

While new generative AI services like chat-based search engines from Microsoft and Alphabet's Google have captured the public's imagination, tech companies such as AWS are also vying behind the scenes to supply the tools and services that software developers will need to weave similar technology into their own products.

AWS, the biggest cloud computing provider, already offers tools to help developers create AI-based software, including proprietary computing chips for raining AI algorithms on huge amounts of data at lower cost than rivals to services that reduce how much time it takes to create a chatbot or other AI products.

On Tuesday, AWS said it will work with Hugging Face, a New York-based company that has become a central place online where AI developers share open-source code and models. Clem Delangue, Hugging Face's chief executive, said that while the deal is not exclusive, the startup is working closely with AWS on making it easy for developers to take code from the site and run it on the AWS cloud.

"For this product collaboration, we're dedicating significant engineering resources to build our shared products," Delangue told Reuters in interview.

Delangue also said the next generation of Bloom, an open-source AI model that competes in size and scope with the model that Microsoft-backed OpenAI used to create ChatGPT, will be run on Trainium, a proprietary artificial intelligence chip created by AWS.

Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of database, analyst and machine learning at AWS, said he believes technologies like Trainium can help developers save money as AI takes up more computing power and AWS wants to make it less time consuming for developers to adopt them.

"We want to make sure they have access to our silicon and networking innovations," Sivasubramanian told Reuters.

© Thomson Reuters 2023