Amazon Web Services (AWS) has pledged USD 230 million to support startups worldwide in accelerating the development of generative AI (GenAI) applications.
This funding aims to empower early-stage companies by offering AWS credits, mentorship, and educational resources to enhance their use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies.
“For more than 18 years, AWS has helped more startups to build, launch, and scale their business than any other cloud provider—it’s no coincidence that 96% of all AI/ML unicorns run on AWS,” said Matt Wood, VP, Artificial Intelligence Products at AWS. "With this new effort, we will help startups launch and scale world-class businesses, providing the building blocks they need to unleash new AI applications that will impact all facets of how the world learns, connects, and does business.”
A significant portion of this investment will go towards the second cohort of the AWS Generative AI Accelerator, providing hands-on expertise and up to USD 1 million in credits to each of the top 80 startups leveraging generative AI to tackle complex problems.
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The AWS Generative AI Accelerator targets leading early-stage startups that employ generative AI to address complex issues across diverse sectors, including financial services, healthcare and life sciences, media and entertainment, business, and climate change.
“AWS has been instrumental in enabling us to scale our generative AI platform to meet the rapidly growing demand from our global user community. Their robust generative AI infrastructure helped us reduce inferencing costs by 60% and accelerate our language model inference speeds by up to 35%,” said Jachin Bhasme, Cofounder and COO of Leonardo.AI, one of the 21 startups to participate in the first cohort of the program.
Applications are open until July 19, 2024, with selected startups for the second cohort to be announced on September 10. The program begins on October 1 with in-person sessions at Amazon’s Seattle campus.
Participants in the 10-week program will engage in sessions focused on enhancing ML performance, optimizing tech stacks, and refining go-to-market strategies. Industry-specific business and technical mentors will guide the startups throughout the program, including NVIDIA.
Startups can utilize AWS credits for access to AWS compute, storage, and database solutions, including AWS Trainium and AWS Inferentia2 chips, which offer high-performance AI capabilities at reduced costs.
Additionally, these credits can be used alongside Amazon SageMaker, to build and train foundational models; and Amazon Bedrock, to securely create generative AI applications.
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