AWS re:Invent 2024 live: All the news and updates as they happen

It seems like its time to start wrapping up. Garman closes out his talk and thanks everyone for coming. It’s been non-stop announcements at this mornings keynotes, and there’s a lot more to come over the next few days. Make sure to keep tuning in for our rolling coverage.

This is followed up with the announcement of the Amazon SageMaker Lakehouse, which grants unified access to user data across S3, Amazon Redshift, and a number of other platforms.

It’s time for the final area that Garman will be covering today, analytics. The headline announcement in this area is a new generation of Amazon Sagemaker, Amazon’s machine learning (ML) platform.

This new version of Sagemaker will be the center of all a users data, analytics, and AI needs, Garman says. To operate the platform, customers will be able to use the Amazon Sagemaker Unified Studio.

Developers aren’t the only ones who can see gains in AI, Garman says. Other departments, such as finance, can find a lot of value in the technology too. This is where Amazon Q Business comes in, an AI assistant for businesses as a whole.

Amazon Q Business indexes data from other software, such as Microsoft or Salesforce platforms. Customers need to be able to query both structured and unstructured data, Garman says.

This year, AWS is announcing that it’s bringing data from QuickSight and Amazon Q together. That means businesses can combine databases, data lakes, and data warehouses with document reports, purchase orders, emails, and other sources of data.

There’s also a new AWS capability for operations targeted at troubleshooting and issue investigation within AWS environments. It provides a guided workflow from investigation accessible from wherever a user interacts with data.

After dropping these bombshell announcements, Garman is back on stage to rollout some more announcements. The first of these is related to Amazon Q Developer, Amazon’s developer-focused AI assistant.

Garman unveils three new agents for Amazon Q Developer, one that focuses on automating unit testing, one that generates code documentation, and another that automates code reviews.

While these are all important tasks, they can be tedious, Garman says. This new tool will help reduce the burden of these tasks on developers.

With barely a pause for breath, Jassy announces another, image-based foundation model, Amazon Nova Canvas. He also announces Amazon Nova Reel, a video-focused foundation model. Coming soon, Jassy says, will be a speech-to-speech model, and eventually a multi-modal ‘any-to-any’ model.

“There is never going to be one tool to rule the world,” Jassy says, referring to the range of AI models being used throughout the tech community. Customers will always want choice and will always be using different AI offerings.

Now, Jassy makes an exciting announcement - a new foundational model called Amazon Nova. It comes in four forms, Amazon Nova Micro, Amazon Nova Lite, Amazon Nova Pro, and Amazon Nova Premier.

There’s notable excitement about this announcement in the crowd, as Jassy moves on to discussing the benchmarking score of Nova against other key foundation model competitors. Jassy says they’re really cost-effective, being 75% more cost-effective than other models.

They’re also very fast, he goes on, and geared for the model distillation process which was outlined earlier.

In a surprise visit, Garman welcomes Amazon CEO Andy Jassy to the stage. The crowd claps and cheers as the tech exec walks on stage to talk about generative AI and technological innovation at Amazon.

He says that a customer service tool at Amazon has been redesigned using AI and that it’s seen a huge improvement in predictive behavior - it can even sense when a user is getting frustrated and when they might need to be connected to a human operator. AI is also being used in optimizing seller pages, inventory management, and robotics.

“We’re also seeing altogether brand new shopping experiences,” Jassy says. Amazon’s Rufus tool is one such example, a chatbot that seeks to mimic the human experience of in-store shopping by responding to questions about products. He also mentions Amazon Alexa and Amazon Lens.

Another big topic in AI is agents and AI tools with agentic capabilities. This is when an AI can complete an entire task or workflow autonomously. Garman says these work well for smaller tasks, but customers want agents to do more complex tasks.

That’s why AWS is unveiling Amazon Bedrock Multi-agent Collaboration - users will be able to build, deploy, and orchestrate teams of agents, and assign specific agents to instruct other agents.

AI hallucinations are a big worry, but AWS says it's been working on a way to stop them. One possible technique is automated reasoning, which can use mathematical reasoning to determine if a system is operating correctly. Automated reasoning is already used across other AWS products, Garman says.

Now Garman unveils Automated Reasoning Checks, to enthusiastic applause from the crowd. AI hallucinations have been a big concern for businesses, and this could be a game changer if it’s successful.

Once Garman’s back on stage, it’s time to talk about inference. Users need a platform to deliver inference at scale, Garman says, and Amazon Bedrock is a great place for people to build and scale generative AI tools.

He returns to a theme expressed in AWS Summit London earlier this year, that Amazon Bedrock is so useful and so popular because it allows users to take advantage of different AI models.

Then, he mentions model distillation. This is a technique in which users can train a smaller, more agile model on the data of a larger more powerful model. This is useful for creating AI that deals with more specific tasks.

That’s why AWS is introducing Amazon Bedrock Model Distillation, which can do all the hard work of distilling a larger model into a smaller one.

Next on the stage is Lori Beer, global CIO of bank JPMorganChase. She talks about the firm’s partnership with AWS, including the core principles of JPMorganChase’s cloud journey. These include security, modernization, cloud innovation, and cloud migration. She explains some of the journey the firm has had with AWS, using it’s cloud infrastructure and GPUs to innovate.

The next building block is databases, Garman says. Amazon DynamoDB is one of AWS’ current offerings in this area, as well as Amazon Aurora. AWS is celebrating the 10-year anniversary of the latter, Garman says.

One problem AWS looked to solve is achieving multi-region consistency with low latency across its database offering. Garman explains the complexity of this issue, as transactions take a longer time to go through.

To solve this problem, AWS has innovated within the infrastructure of its cloud offerings to reduce latency between these database transactions. These innovations can be found in its new product, Amazon Aurora DSQL. This multi-region consistency is also being added to Amazon DynamoDB global tables.

It can be difficult to manage tables though, Garman says, when using Apache Iceberg specifically. What if S3 could do this for customers as well, Garman asks? Well, now it can, with Amazon S3 Tables, which offers up to 3x faster query performance and 10x higher transactions per second for Apache Iceberg tables.

He also announces a new metadata feature, Amazon S3 Metadata. This tool will allow users to search and manage data by using the metadata associated with their stored objects. S3 will automatically update object metadata as well.

After this. Garman’s back on stage. He says generative AI is moving at “lightning speed” and that AWS isn’t slowing down. Cue another announcement - Trainium 3 which will be coming next year.

Then it’s time for another building block, storage. He takes the crowd on a trip down memory lane back to 2006, when Amazon launched S3 and kicked off the industry-wide adoption of cloud computing.

“Today, we have thousands of customers all storing more than a petabyte,” Garman says, illuminating AWS’ huge customer base.

The AWS CEO now gets an exec from Apple up on stage to talk about the pair’s collaboration. He talks about Apple’s reliance on Graviton and its partnership with AWS, mentioning also the importance of AWS’ infrastructure for developing the firm’s flagship AI offering, Apple Intelligence.

Next, Garman announces Amazon EC2 Trn2 UltraServers, which allows much larger models to be loaded into single nodes with far lower latency. It also means customers can build much larger training clusters, by creating UltraClusters with UltraServers.

For the first buildling block, Garman talks about compute and AWS’ EC2 offering. He covers some brief background on the product, including some stats on AWS Graviton and its latest iteration, AWS Graviton4. By way of example of the product’s quality, he brings up Pinterest, which managed to achieve 47% cost savings by using Graviton.

But what’s next? Well, in the world of generative AI, it’s GPUs, and Garman is excited to announce a new P6 instance of Nvidia Blackwell GPUs in partnership with Nvidia. This builds on an ongoing collaboration between AWS and Nvidia.

Of course, AWS has its own AI chips - AWS Inferentia and AWS Trainium. On that note, Garman unveils another announcement, the next generation of Trainium. It’s called Amazon EC2 Trn 2 Instances, and it's in general availability, Garman says.

After an impressive (and quite loud) introductory video, it’s time for AWS CEO Matt Garman to hit the stage. There are cheers and applause from the crowd as he walks out, greeting those in attendance as the noise begins to die down.

“This year we have almost 60,000 people here in person,” Garman says, gesturing to the vast scale of the event. He offers a thanks to those in the crowd, including the huge community of builders and developers.

Garman talks about ‘building blocks, key components that a technology firm can provide individually and that customers can combine in interesting ways. To illustrate how customers might use these building blocks, Garman plays a video from one of the startups operating on AWS.

Attendees flood into the vast keynote hall, no doubt eager to hear about all AWS’ latest announcements.

With not long until the keynote starts, seats are starting to fill up as the crowds file in.

Taking place in The Venetian, Las Vegas, AWS’ sprawling event takes place in multiple rooms and areas across the hotel’s conference facilities.

While we wait for the keynote to start, why not check out some of our recent coverage of AWS:

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