Some quick observations from AWS re:Invent

Quick notes from watching the keynote and walking the conference floor

✈️ Wrapping up at AWS Re:invent today. Spent half the day yesterday walking the exhibit floor. The main purpose was to observe traffic hot spots and booth placement on the floor, to get at sense of which areas folks are interested in, and how important of a partner these companies were to AWS. Here were my high-level observations:

-- overall, I felt there was still a massive discrepancy in crowd size and interest between incumbents and startups. One reason might be that most people who come to Re:invent come from larger enterprises and are either less familiar with startups or don’t align well with startup’s ICPs. This was noticeably different from other AI conferences I’ve been to such as Databricks + ai summit or NeurIPS.

-- startups that had the most traffic/attention: Anthropic, Unstructured, some of the code gen players like Poolside, Codieum, etc. Glean’s booth had a massive amount of traffic. Poolside had a massive booth relative to their company stage (maybe owing to the amount of compute they spend with AWS). The Anthropic booth was very nice and centrally placed on the floor. They seem increasingly tied to the hip with Amazon.

-- startups that weren’t getting a lot of traffic: MLOps, RAG-as-a-service, vector DBs, “build you own agent” platforms – again, not sure if this reflects overall market interest or simply the attendee profile at this conference. Also could be that their booth positioning wasn’t that great – many of these startups may not be major AWS customers or could even compete with AWS in certain areas.

In terms of specific things from AWS:

-- Bedrock got a lot of new upgrades including multimodal processing, graphRAG, and structured data retrieval. Also, announced some features around multi-agent orchestration, distillation, and prompt caching. It appears that they’re increasingly consolidating the middle layer.

-- They’re also pushing Bedrock Guardrails a lot as it was mentioned during the keynote and by separately by folks I spoke with. For those unfamiliar, the Guardrail platform does a few things such as using automated reasoning to check against factual errors and prevent hallucination, and filtering toxicity and PII. As these things get rolled out into production, I see trust and safety becoming increasingly important so I see why they’re pushing this.

-- They also announced some cool things around RPA with Amazon Q. They showed a demo where Q Business was able to create an automated workflow simply by watching a video recording of how it was done. Under the hood, this is probably leveraging Computer Use recently announced by Anthropic and incorporated into Claude 3.5.

My overall feeling was that the middle layer is increasingly going to be owned by the CSPs like Amazon as they continuing to push up the stack. I expect acquisitions to happen in the next few years in this layer, but perhaps not at the valuations that investors/founders were originally hoping for.