Amazon.com Inc’s (NASDAQ:AMZN) cloud division, Amazon Web Services (AWS), announced on Wednesday that it has formed a partnership with AI startup Hugging Face. This collaboration aims to simplify the deployment of thousands of AI models using Amazon’s proprietary Inferentia2 computing chips.
Hugging Face, valued at $4.5 billion, has become a crucial resource for AI researchers and developers to share and modify chatbots and other AI software. The company is supported by several tech giants, including Amazon, Alphabet Inc (Google’s parent company), and Nvidia Corp.
The partnership addresses a common challenge faced by developers who want to use open-source AI models, such as Meta Platforms Inc’s Llama 3, in software applications. With the Hugging Face and AWS integration, developers can now easily run these models on AWS’s Inferentia2 chips.
Jeff Boudier, Hugging Face’s Director of Product and Growth, emphasized the importance of efficiency, stating, “Efficiency is crucial for us – ensuring that as many people as possible can run models and do so in the most cost-effective way.”
AWS aims to attract more AI developers to its cloud services by offering a cost-effective solution for running AI. While Nvidia is renowned for its superiority in training AI models, AWS claims that its Inferentia2 chips excel at inference, the process of running trained models, which can be more cost-effective in the long run.
Matt Wood, responsible for AI products at AWS, explained the advantage of their chips: “You might train these models maybe once a month. But you could be making tens of thousands of inferences per hour. That’s where Inferentia2 really shines.”
This move is expected to strengthen AWS’s position in the cloud computing market by providing developers with a more efficient and cost-effective tool for large-scale AI model deployment.
Source: investing.com
