AWS re:Invent 2023 - My Reflection

What is AWS re:Invent

AWS re:Invent is an annual conference hosted by Amazon Web Services (AWS). The event typically takes place in Las Vegas, Nevada, also been held in virtual formats

Thank you Raft for sponsoring me to attend AWS re:Invent 2023. I absolutely love to be part of Raft's Mission

This years AWS re:Invent was a transformative event with a big focus on Generative AI. It featured following Keynotes

Keynotes

Adam Selipsky

• Several new AWS services were announced, S3 Express One Zone, Graviton4, and various features and foundational model releases in Bedrock, EC2 Capacity Block for Machine Learning, Trainium 2, and other services were introduced.
• Generative AI Powered Assistant, enter Amazon Q !!! it Rocks !!!
• The AWS-Nvidia partnership was highlighted and how it facilitated the launch of EC2 Capacity Blocks for ML, leveraging the Grace Hopper Superchip Cluster.
• AWS Anthropic partnership was discussed. This collaboration led to the release of Claude 2.0, a foundational model within Bedrock

Dr. Swami Sivasubramanian

• Several new announcements were covered with Bedrock overview as a guideline and the relationship between Data and GenerativeAI. New announcements were: Availability of Foundational Models - Claude 2.1 from Anthropic, Llama 2 70B, Titan Multimodal embeddings, Titan Text Lite and Express General availability , Titan Image Generator with Invisible Watermarks, SageMaker HyperPod and many SageMaker Innovations Vector Capabilities in DynamoDB, Neptune Analytics, Clean Rooms for ML.

Dr. Werner Vogels

• The laws of The Frugal Architect. https://thefrugalarchitect.com/
• Special Shoutout to Dr. Rebecca Portnoff and Thorn team on their incredible contribution to combat child sexual abuse.

Sessions

In the plethora of available sessions on the catalog, trying not to get overwhelmed and stay focused I ended up attending following sessions over the course of 4 Days

Workshop - Build a generative AI chatbot using your own data with Amazon Titan
Learnt how to build an AI chatbot using custom data with AWS’s very own foundational model - Titan. It touched upon many AWS AI services such as SageMaker, Bedrock, OpenSearch Service etc. Learnt concept of Vector Search and Vector Embeddings and the use of LangChanins to integrate LLMs into Applications

Breakout Session - Data Mesh
OLTP/OLAP patterns and how Data Mesh can solve some of the issues with these patterns decentralizing data and building governance capabilities.

Builder Session - Building protein language models for life science generative AI
Learnt LLMs variant pLMs - Protein Language Models to classify if a given protein is attached to the membrane or an organelle inside the cell. Very cool to see the use case of LLMs

Chalk Talk - Supercharge agent productivity with Amazon Transcribe & generative AI
Leant how AWS Transcribe Service and Generative AI can work together, Take for example a phone call, It can be converted to text with the help of Transcribe service, This text has loads of insights for example sentiments. It can be summarized with the help of Generative AI !

Chalk Talk - An immersive experience with Amazon Bedrock
Focused on the basics of Bedrock and its application in various use cases, including Chat Assistants, Image Generation, and Question-Answering systems. This session featured live coding to demonstrate the implementation process. It covered concepts such as vector embeddings, Fine Tuning and Model Parameters(Temperature, Top P, and Top K). Foundational models like the Titan family and Claude 2.0 were discussed.

Chalk talk - Drive ML strategies with data extracted from chat messages
Covered how ML strategies can be developed based on data that is extracted from chat messages. A use case of a Trading platform was discussed to run a sentiment analysis on the chat data in Trading Platform. How NLP can be used in conjunction with ML to develop end of-day-strategies for a Trading Platform.

Innovation talk - From hype to impact: Building a generative AI architecture
This talk demystified the Generative AI topic from the hype and buzz words to the real architectures. Generative AI Concepts with AWS Services and the reference architecture were discussed.

Chalk Talk Session - Train and deploy FMs on Amazon EC2 and Amazon SageMaker
A live demo of training a model using an EC2 instance and Deep Learning AMIs, building Model Artifacts and deploying it to SageMaker. It featured the implementation Stable Diffusion use case to generate new images

Chalk talk - Code faster with Amazon CodeWhisperer
The talk features basics of Code Whisperer in IDE as well as new feature such as command line support. Code Whisperer can now be used to generate AWS CLI commands in the form of shell script. Session also covered security scanning features and support for various programming languages and IAC frameworks

Special highlights

My honor to meet in person, the Leaders of cutting edge tech
Dr. Swami Sivasubramanian, Jeff Barr, Allie K Miller, Viktoria Semaan, Linda Haviv, Faye Ellis

How can one plan better

• Session Catalog is published few months before. Take some time to really plan for which sessions you plan to attend and mark them as favorites.
• Review the conference schedule in advance and try to cluster your sessions together at a single venue or nearby venues to minimize the need for long-distance travel between sessions.
• Breakout Sessions are typically recorded and you can watch them later online. So prioritize Chalk Talks, Builder Sessions, Workshops when you register for events.
• Have fun, take some time and explore Expo, Builders Fair and do lots of networking.
• Signup and attend after hours events by AWS and Partners