Microsoft-owned GitHub announced on Wednesday a free version of its popular Copilot code completion/AI pair programming tool, which will also now ship by default with Microsoft’s popular VS Code editor. Until now, most developers had to pay a monthly fee, starting at $10 per month, with only verified students, teachers, and open source maintainers getting […]

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Stigg (not The Stig, just Stigg) describes itself as “the first scalable monetization platform for the modern billing stack.” There’s a lot going on in that sentence, but what it comes down to is that the startup, which on Wednesday announced a $17.5 million Series A round, helps SaaS companies model pricing, create pricing pages, […]

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In what has become a bit of an annual tradition, I sat down with Amazon CTO Werner Vogels at AWS re:Invent this week. Another annual tradition now is that Vogels, who joined Amazon in 2004, publishes a series of predictions for the next year. It’d be easy to think that this year’s predictions are all […]

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AWS, Amazon’s cloud computing unit, today announced the Education Equity Initiative, which aims to provide “education organizations with technologies to build digital learning innovations for underrepresented communities.” AWS is committing $100 million in cloud credits to this effort over the next five years. Tom Berry, who leads the education work within AWS’ Social Impact and […]

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As businesses move from trying out generative AI in limited prototypes to putting them into production, they are becoming increasingly price conscious. Using large language models (LLMs) isn’t cheap, after all. One way to reduce cost is to go back to an old concept: caching. Another is to route simpler queries to smaller, more cost-efficient […]

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At last year’s AWS re:Invent conference, Amazon’s cloud computing unit launched SageMaker HyperPod, a platform for building foundation models. It’s no surprise, then, that at this year’s re:Invent, the company is announcing a number of updates to the platform, with a focus on making model training and fine-tuning on HyperPod more efficient and cost-effective for […]

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SageMaker has long been AWS’ fully managed platform for building, training, and deploying machine learning and generative AI models. Over time, however, an ecosystem of applications has sprung up around AI and ML models for performing tasks like managing experiments, evaluating model quality, and security. Those always lived outside of SageMaker and had to be […]

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A year ago, AWS announced Q, its AI assistant platform for business users and developers. Q Developer is getting a wide range of updates today and so is Q Business. The focus for Q Business is on new integrations that can help businesses bring in more data from third-party tools, the ability for third-party platforms […]

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At its re:Invent conference, AWS announced on Tuesday a series of updates to Q Developer, its coding assistant platform that competes with the likes of GitHub Copilot. The focus here is on going beyond code completion and helping developers with a wider range of routine tasks involved in the end-to-end software life cycle. The service, […]

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GitLab, the popular developer and security platform, and AWS, the popular cloud computing and AI service, today announced that they have teamed up to combine GitLab’s Duo AI assistant with Amazon’s Q autonomous agents. The goal here, the two companies say, is to accelerate software innovation and developer productivity, and unlike so many partnerships in […]

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At its re:Invent conference, Amazon’s AWS cloud computing unit today announced Amazon Aurora DSQL, a new serverless, distributed SQL database that promises high availability (99.999% for multi-region availability), strong consistency, PostgreSQL compatibility, and, the company says, “4x faster reads and writes compared to other popular distributed SQL databases.” AWS argues that Aurora DSQL will offer […]

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At its re:Invent conference, AWS today announced the general availably of its Trainium2 (T2) chips for training and deploying large language models (LLMs). These chips, which AWS first announced a year ago, will be four times as fast as their predecessors, with a single Trainium2-powered EC2 instance with 16 T2 chips providing up to 20.8 […]

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It’s AWS re:Invent 2024 this week, Amazon’s annual cloud computing extravaganza in Las Vegas, and as is tradition, the company has so much to announce, it can’t fit everything into its five (!) keynotes. Ahead of the show’s official opening, AWS on Monday detailed a number of updates to its overall data center strategy that […]

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Slowly but surely, Amazon’s AWS cloud computing unit has become a major player in the call/contact center space with its Amazon Connect cloud-based (and AI-centric) contact center service, which launched back in 2017. Today, companies like Air Canada, Dish Network and U.S. Bank use the platform for their customer service needs. At its annual re:Invent […]

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