Stephen Nellis
(Reuters) – Amazon.com Inc.'s cloud division said on Wednesday it has partnered with artificial intelligence startup Hugging Face to make it easier to run thousands of AI models on Amazon's custom computing chips.
Hugging Face, valued at $4.5 billion, is a central hub for AI researchers and developers to share chatbots and other AI software, backed by Amazon, Alphabet Inc.'s Google, Nvidia and others. There is. This is the main place for developers to pick up and tinker with open source AI models, such as his Meta Platforms' Llama 3.
But once developers tweak an open-source AI model, they typically want to use it to power their software. Amazon and Hugging Face announced Wednesday they've partnered to make that possible on a custom Amazon Web Services (AWS) chip called Inferentia2.
“One of the things that's really important to us is efficiency — making sure that as many people as possible can run the model and do it in the most cost-effective way,” said Jeff Boudier, head of product and growth at Hugging Faith.
For its part, AWS wants to entice more AI developers to use its cloud services to deliver AI, and while Nvidia dominates the market for training models, AWS argues that its chips can operate those trained models — a process called inference — at low cost over the long term.
“You train these models maybe once a month, but you're potentially running tens of thousands of inferences on them per hour. That's where Inferentia2 really shines,” said Matt Wood, who oversees artificial intelligence products at AWS.
(Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Editing by Michael Perry)
