AWS Weekly Roundup: Agentic workflows, Amazon Transcribe, AWS Lambda insights, and more (October 21, 2024)

Agentic workflows are quickly becoming a cornerstone of AI innovation, enabling intelligent systems to autonomously handle and refine complex tasks in a way that mirrors human problem-solving. Last week, we launched Serverless Agentic Workflows with Amazon Bedrock, a new short course developed in collaboration with Dr. Andrew Ng and DeepLearning.AI. This hands-on course, taught by my colleague Mike Chambers, teaches how to build serverless agents that can handle complex tasks without the hassle of managing infrastructure. You will learn everything you need to know about integrating tools, automating workflows, and deploying responsible agents with built-in guardrails on Amazon Web Services (AWS) with Amazon Bedrock. The hands-on labs provided with the course let you apply your knowledge directly in an AWS environment,…

Jamba 1.5 family of models by AI21 Labs is now available in Amazon Bedrock

Today, we are announcing the availability of AI21 Labs’ powerful new Jamba 1.5 family of large language models (LLMs) in Amazon Bedrock. These models represent a significant advancement in long-context language capabilities, delivering speed, efficiency, and performance across a wide range of applications. The Jamba 1.5 family of models includes Jamba 1.5 Mini and Jamba 1.5 Large. Both models support a 256K token context window, structured JSON output, function calling, and are capable of digesting document objects. AI21 Labs is a leader in building foundation models and artificial intelligence (AI) systems for the enterprise. Together, AI21 Labs and AWS are empowering customers across industries to build, deploy, and scale generative AI applications that solve real-world challenges and spark innovation through…

AWS Weekly Roundup: Llama 3.1, Mistral Large 2, AWS Step Functions, AWS Certifications update, and more (July 29, 2024)

I’m always amazed by the talent and passion of our Amazon Web Services (AWS) community members, especially in their efforts to increase diversity, equity, and inclusion in the tech community. Last week, I had the honor of speaking at the AWS User Group Women Bay Area meetup, led by Natalie. This group is dedicated to empowering and connecting women, providing a supportive environment to explore cloud computing. In Latin America, we recently had the privilege of supporting 12 women-led AWS User Groups from 10 countries in organizing two regional AWSome Women Community Summits, reaching over 800 women builders. There’s still more work to be done, but initiatives like these highlight the power of community in fostering an inclusive and diverse…

Knowledge Bases for Amazon Bedrock now supports additional data connectors (in preview)

Using Knowledge Bases for Amazon Bedrock, foundation models (FMs) and agents can retrieve contextual information from your company’s private data sources for Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). RAG helps FMs deliver more relevant, accurate, and customized responses. Over the past months, we’ve continuously added choices of embedding models, vector stores, and FMs to Knowledge Bases. Today, I’m excited to share that in addition to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), you can now connect your web domains, Confluence, Salesforce, and SharePoint as data sources to your RAG applications (in preview). New data source connectors for web domains, Confluence, Salesforce, and SharePoint By including your web domains, you can give your RAG applications access to your public data, such as your company’s…