Amazon Has a Better Idea about Catching Up with Other AI Outfits
September 25, 2024
AWS Program to Bolster 80 AI Startups from Around the World
Can boosting a roster of little-known startups help AWS catch up with Google’s and Microsoft’s AI successes? Amazon must hope so. It just tapped 80 companies from around the world to receive substantial support in its AWS Global Generative AI Accelerator program. Each firm will receive up to $1 million in AWS credits, expert mentorship, and a slot at the AWS re:Invent conference in December.
India’s CXOtoday is particularly proud of the seven recipients from that country. It boasts, “AWS Selects Seven Generative AI Startups from India for Global AWS Generative AI Accelerator.” We learn:
“The selected Indian startups— Convrse, House of Models, Neural Garage, Orbo.ai, Phot.ai, Unscript AI, and Zocket, are among the 80 companies selected by AWS worldwide for their innovative use of AI and their global growth ambitions. The Indian cohort also represents the highest number of startups selected from a country in the Asia-Pacific region for the AWS Global Generative AI Accelerator program.”
The post offers this stat as evidence India is now an AI hotspot. It also supplies some more details about the Amazon program:
“Selected startups will gain access to AWS compute, storage, and database technologies, as well as AWS Trainium and AWS Inferentia2, energy-efficient AI chips that offer high performance at the lowest cost. The credits can also be used on Amazon SageMaker, a fully managed service that helps companies build and train their own foundation models (FMs), as well as to access models and tools to easily and securely build generative AI applications through Amazon Bedrock. The 10-week program matches participants with both business and technical mentors based on their industry, and chosen startups will receive up to US$1 million each in AWS credits to help them build, train, test, and launch their generative AI solutions. Participants will also have access to technology and technical sessions from program presenting partner NVIDIA.”
See the write-up to learn more about each of the Indian startups selected, or check out the full roster here.
The question is, “Will this help Amazon which is struggling to make Facebook, Google, and Microsoft look like the leaders in the AI derby?”
Cynthia Murrell, September 25, 2024