Tuesday 28/11
Tuesday, the second day of the annual AWS conference re:Invent. It seemed like all people in Las Vegas were making their way to the Venetian to attend the keynote of Adam Selipsky, the CEO of AWS. So much news was shared in these 2,5 hours, all around the theme of reinventing! I’ll sum up some of the highlights.
Fundamental improvements to the platform with:
The release of the Graviton4 processor, not necessarily only for GenAI but for any workload that requires the highest computing power possible and benefiting from the up to 45% performance improvement.
New and innovating NVIDIA GPU’s for slicing the time needed for model training in half and thus reducing the cost of training dramatically.
Amazon S3 Express One Zone, a new offering designed to deliver up to 10x better performance.
With these new fundamental improvements, the highlight of the keynote can be made possible: Amazon Q! A new generative AI powered assistant to work for you at work. The big differentiator in comparison to the well-known alternative is the awareness of context of the user in the organization & the appreciation of access rights to the user's data. And, more importantly, any personal and corporate data is not shared with the platform for learning purposes. Some use cases where shown how Amazon Q makes the knowledge work so much more productive. More use cases are to come!
During the keynote, Pfizer and BMW Group showcased how they leverage AWS technology, in completely different ways but both very impressive. I can only advise you to watch the whole keynote or at least these two customer stories here.
Throughout the day we met with several leaders of the Amazon team from all over the globe. The perfect opportunity to meet in person and catch up now that we have the Strategic Collaboration Agreement in place.
In one of the many break-out sessions, Mercedes Benz shared their experiences in the cloud transformation of their Aftersales application landscape. A very interesting session in which the complete setup of the platform from a technical and, more importantly, from an organizational side was discussed. Key take away: change takes time and energy, but once the transition is made, the organization really starts to reap the benefits of the cloud.
In the evening we had the pleasure of having been selected to visit the new Las Vegas Sphere. What a humbling experience to be immersed in the beauty of nature and be confronted with the fragility of it. Puts all the developments that were shared throughout the day in a different perspective and the paradox in using technology to take on the challenges of today.
