So Amazon announced Bedrock yesterday. If you missed it, thats fair, honestly, because at this point announcing an AI product is starting to feel like announcing that your company has a website. Bedrock is AWSs new managed service for renting access to foundation models over an API, and instead of building just one model and shipping it, Amazon did the very Amazon thing of building a shelf and putting other peoples stuff on it alongside their own. Youve got models from AI21 Labs, Anthropic, and Stability AI all sitting next to Amazons own in house model, which they named Titan.
Titan. I keep coming back to that name. Its not a bad name exactly, its just so aggressively generic-big-tech-product that it almost loops back around to being funny. Weve had Watson, weve had Bard, and now weve got Titan, and I genuinely could not tell you which company made any of those if you stripped the branding off and just showed me the word. Somewhere theres a naming meeting that produced a shortlist of "Titan, Atlas, Colossus" and I would pay real money to see the runner ups.
The actual substance here is more interesting than the branding though, even if its less fun to make fun of. What Amazon is doing with Bedrock is basically admitting that AWS doesnt need to win the "who has the best model" fight, it just needs to be the place where you go rent whichever model you want, with the billing and the infrastructure and the security compliance paperwork already sorted out. Thats a very AWS move. They didnt win at retail by having the best products, they won by being the boring reliable pipe everyone eventually plugs into. Feels like theyre trying to do the same thing here, except the product this time is "access to somebody elses neural network," which is a stranger thing to commoditize than storage or compute, but I guess money is money.
Whats a little wild is how unbothered everyone seems about this. Two years ago a major cloud provider launching a whole new API category for AI models would have been the story of the month. Now its Tuesday. Ive scrolled past maybe four separate "new AI thing" headlines just this week and I couldnt tell you what two of them even were without going back and checking my browser history. My personal theory, and this is just a gut feeling not anything I can back up with data, is that everyones announcement fatigue is setting in way faster than it did during any previous tech cycle, because the gap between "announced" and "actually usable by a normal person" keeps shrinking, which means we get the hype and the letdown-or-the-actual-product back to back instead of spread out over a year like it used to be.
Small aside, but the same day all this Bedrock stuff was making the rounds, the Journal ran a piece saying Elon Musk quietly incorporated a new company called X.AI back in Nevada, apparently to compete in this exact space. No product, no details, just a filing and a name that is, and I cannot stress this enough, somehow an even more boring choice than Titan. The guy renamed his own son something unpronounceable but cant be bothered to come up with a company name thats not just his initial plus the category hes entering. I dont know why that amuses me as much as it does. Maybe its that the naming laziness feels like the most honest signal in the whole industry right now, everyone is moving fast enough that nobody has time to think of a good name, they just ship the filing and move on.
Anyway. Im not going to pretend I have some grand take on where this all lands. I dont use Bedrock, I probably wont for a while, my day job doesnt touch AWS in any way that would make this relevant to me personally. But Ive been running this blog for going on twelve years now and if theres one pattern Ive watched repeat itself over and over, its that the boring infrastructure announcement usually matters more in three years than the flashy demo does in three weeks. Remember when EC2 launching felt like a footnote compared to whatever consumer gadget was out that same month? Yeah. Im not saying Bedrock is that. Im saying I wouldnt bet against it either, and Id rather be the annoying guy who wrote that down in April 2023 than the guy who didnt.