Amazon, Hugging Face Partner to Streamline AI’s Run on Cloud

US e-commerce giant Amazon.com Inc. has announced a team-up between its cloud computing arm and French-American artificial intelligence (AI) startup Hugging Face Inc. to simplify operations of thousands of large language models (LLMs) on the online retailer’s bespoke computing chips.

The partnership is set to focus on addressing developers’ need to use AI models to power software applications on Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) specialized chip, Inferentia 2.

Hugging Face has provided developers with a platform for finding and customizing open-source LLMs such as Meta Platforms Inc.’s Llama 3. However, developers often want to deploy the custom AIs to run software.

Hugging Face Product Director Jeff Boudier said the collaboration aims to ‘democratize access’ to significant AI systems by easing the financial challenges of operating complex models.

Amazon Strengthening AI Role, AI’s Deeper Cloud Integration

The collaboration between the two companies highlights a larger trend in the tech sector of further involving AI with cloud services.

With Amazon’s chips, the New York City-based startup can optimize performance and cut costs for users, potentially providing it more momentum to innovate and adopt AI.

AWS expects the team-up to further AI developers’ interest in using its cloud services to deploy AI.

AWS Vice President of Product Matt Wood stated that Inferentia 2 is designed to improve the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of AI inference.

AI darling Nvidia Corp. has taken the lead in the LLM training market, but the cloud division of Seattle-based Amazon is trying to position its chips as a better choice for handling high-frequency inference tasks.

While training models can be done once a month, inference against them can occur thousands of times per hour, according to Wood, who suggested that AWS’s chips can operate such AI tools at lower cost over time.

The move also signals the US tech giant’s aim to further solidify its position in the AI industry, challenging other cloud companies by offering hardware services focused on handling various AI tasks.

Additionally, partnerships similar to AWS and Hugging Face might significantly impact the future of AI and cloud computing, considering AI’s continued advancement and growth.