Oct 1, 2023 3 min read

AI is Getting Easier for Devs 🤖

Last week I attended a workshop on setting up large language models from the ground up on Amazon Web Services. The setup process involved installing a whole bunch of Python libraries into Amazon Sagemaker over quite a few steps with a huge warning up front that attendees should "Ignore all the errors"....and there were a lot of them. Most of the developers I spoke to came away thinking it was all a little complex for them to actually use this way. It’s a really steep learning curve.

We were told that Amazon would soon be releasing Bedrock, a much simpler to use API which would enable access to a number of different models from third-party base model providers like OpenAI and Anthropic. It wasn't yet generally available so we couldn't try it out but lo and behold a week later it's here. This means that those businesses that already are using Amazon now need not step outside of their offerings, or spend months getting another service through procurement.

I've heard of several API's becoming available recently from major tech companies so developers need only make a couple of API calls to start using these models. Vercel has had an AI offering since July. Cloudflare also announced their AI workers this week, which allows access to a bunch of open source models for use case like text generation, speech recognition and translation. For startups and solopreneurs this makes things even easier.

This race to make AI accessible to the everyday dev is truly crazy right now and I've only covered the companies you've probably heard of before.

Hope you enjoy this issues links, if you have any comments feel free to get in touch.

Until next time, keep on shipping!

Ian