Your guide to generative AI and ML at AWS re:Invent 2023
Yes, the AWS re:Invent season is upon us and as always, the place to be is Las Vegas! You marked your calendars, you booked your hotel, and you even purchased the airfare. Now all you need is some guidance on generative AI and machine learning (ML) sessions to attend at this twelfth edition of re:Invent. And although generative AI has appeared in previous events, this year we’re taking it to the next level. In addition to several exciting announcements during keynotes, most of the sessions in our track will feature generative AI in one form or another, so we can truly call our track “Generative AI and ML.” In this post, we give you a sense of how the track is organized and highlight a few sessions we think you’ll like. And although our track focuses on generative AI, many other tracks have related sessions. Use the “Generative AI” tag as you are browsing the session catalog to find them.
The technical sessions in our track are divided into five areas. First, we’ll have a few foundational sessions related to various aspects of Amazon Bedrock—a fully managed generative AI service we launched earlier this year. These will help you understand the building blocks of your generative AI applications. Second, we’ll have sessions covering the common generative AI use cases and applications. Here you’ll also have a chance to discover novel use cases and techniques. Third, a number of sessions will be of interest to ML practitioners who build, deploy, and operationalize both traditional and generative AI models. This year, learn about LLMOps, not just MLOps! Then, as we started doing last re:Invent, we’ll be offering several sessions on how to build AI responsibly. The greater the power of latest transformer-based models, the greater the responsibility of all ML practitioners to do this right. Be sure to check out the session on the just launched PartyRock, an educational tool for providing any builder with low-friction access to learn through experimentation in a foundation model playground built on Amazon Bedrock. And last but not least (and always fun!) are the sessions dedicated to AWS DeepRacer!
Generative AI is at the heart of the AWS Village this year. Interact with several demos that feature new applications, including a competition that involves using generative AI tech to pilot a drone around an obstacle course. Talk with AWS experts in 14 different industries and explore industry-specific generative AI use cases, including demos from advertising and marketing, aerospace and satellite, manufacturing, and more. The Emerging Tech Zone within the Expo features innovative startups that were selected into the AWS Generative AI Accelerator and the NVIDIA Inception 100 programs.
If you’re new to re:Invent, you can attend sessions of the following types:
- Keynotes – Join in person or virtually and learn about all the exciting announcements.
- Innovation Talks – Learn about the latest cloud technology from AWS technology leaders and discover how these advancements can help you push your business forward. These sessions will be livestreamed, recorded, and published to YouTube.
- Breakout sessions – These 60-minute sessions are expected to have broad appeal, are delivered to larger audiences, and will be recorded. If you miss them, you can watch them on demand after re:Invent.
- Chalk talks – Enjoy 60 minutes of content delivered to smaller audiences with an interactive whiteboarding session. Chalk talks are where discussions happen, and these offer you the greatest opportunity to ask questions or share your opinion.
- Workshops – In these hands-on learning opportunities, in the course of 2 hours, you’ll be able to build a solution to a problem, and understand the inner workings of the resulting infrastructure and cross-service interaction. Bring your laptop and be ready to learn!
- Builders’ sessions – These highly interactive 60-minute mini-workshops are conducted in small groups of fewer than 10 attendees. Some of these appeal to beginners, and others are on specialized topics.
- NEW! Code talks – In this new session type for re:Invent 2023, code talks are similar to our popular chalk talk format, but instead of focusing on an architecture solution with whiteboarding, the speakers lead an interactive discussion featuring live coding or code samples. These 60-minute sessions focus on the actual code that goes into building a solution. Attendees are encouraged to ask questions and follow along.
If you have reserved your seat at any of the sessions, great! If not, we always set aside some spots for walk-ins, so make a plan and come to the session early.
To help you plan your agenda for this year’s re:Invent, here are some highlights of the generative AI and ML track. So buckle up, and start registering for your favorite sessions.
Visit the session catalog to learn about all our generative AI and ML sessions.
Keynotes
Adam Selipsky, Chief Executive Officer, Amazon Web Services – Keynote
Tuesday November 28 | 8:30 AM – 10:30 AM (PST) | The Venetian
Join Adam Selipsky, CEO of Amazon Web Services, as he shares his perspective on cloud transformation. He highlights innovations in data, infrastructure, and artificial intelligence and machine learning that are helping AWS customers achieve their goals faster, mine untapped potential, and create a better future.
Swami Sivasubramanian, Vice President of AWS Data and Machine Learning – Keynote
Wednesday November 29 | 8:30 AM – 10:30 AM (PST) | The Venetian
A powerful relationship between humans, data, and AI is unfolding right before us. Generative AI is augmenting our productivity and creativity in new ways, while also being fueled by massive amounts of enterprise data and human intelligence. Join Swami Sivasubramanian, Vice President of Data and AI at AWS, to discover how you can use your company data to build differentiated generative AI applications and accelerate productivity for employees across your organization. Also hear from customer speakers with real-world examples of how they’ve used their data to support their generative AI use cases and create new experiences for their customers.
Innovation Talks
Dr. Bratin Saha, VP of AWS AI and ML Services | AIM245-INT | Innovate faster with generative AI
Wednesday November 29 | 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM (PST) | Venetian | Level 5 | Palazzo Ballroom B
With the emergence of generative AI, we are at a tipping point in the widespread adoption of machine learning. Join Dr. Bratin Saha, VP of AWS AI and ML Services, to hear how customers across industries are transforming their business with the latest breakthroughs in AI and ML, including generative AI. Discover the latest AWS innovations, hear from top customers, and explore where AI/ML is headed.
Francessca Vasquez, Vice President of Professional Services | ARC217-INT | From hype to impact: Building a generative AI architecture
Wednesday November 29 | 11:30 AM – 12:30 PM (PST) | Venetian | Level 5 | Palazzo Ballroom B
Generative AI represents a paradigm shift for how companies operate today. Generative AI is empowering developers to reimagine customer experiences and applications while transforming virtually every industry. Organizations are rapidly innovating to create the right architecture for scaling generative AI securely, economically, and responsibly to deliver business value. In this talk, learn how leaders are modernizing their data foundation, selecting industry-leading foundation models, and deploying purpose-built accelerators to unlock the possibilities of generative AI.
Shaown Nandi, AWS Director of Technology for Industries and Strategic Accounts | AIM248-INT | Unlocking the industry potential of generative AI
Wednesday November 29 | 4:00 PM – 5:00 PM (PST) | Venetian | Level 5 | Palazzo Ballroom B
Generative AI has captured the imagination of many industries and is poised to bring in the next wave of technological advancements. In this innovation talk, hear how the largest industries, from healthcare and financial services to automotive and media and entertainment, are using generative AI to drive outcomes for their customers. Join Shaown Nandi, AWS Director of Technology for Industries and Strategic Accounts, and industry leaders to hear how generative AI is accelerating content creation and helping organizations reimagine customer experiences.
Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec, Vice President, Technology | AIM250-INT | Putting your data to work with generative AI
Thursday November 30 | 12:30 PM – 1:30 PM (PST) | Venetian | Level 5 | Palazzo Ballroom B
How can you turn your data lake into a business advantage with generative AI? In this talk, explore strategies for putting your proprietary datasets to work when building unique, differentiated generative AI solutions. Learn how to utilize your datasets using Amazon SageMaker and Amazon Bedrock as well as popular frameworks like PyTorch with AWS compute, storage, and analytics. Hear best practices for using unstructured (video, image, PDF), semi-structured (Parquet), and table-formatted (Iceberg) data for training, fine-tuning, checkpointing, and prompt engineering. Also hear different architectural patterns that customers use today to harness their business data for customized generative AI solutions.
Breakout sessions
AIM218 (LVL 200) | Build your first generative AI application with Amazon Bedrock
Monday November 27 | 2:30 PM – 3:30 PM (PST)
We are truly at an exciting inflection point in the widespread adoption of ML with the growth of generative AI applications. In this session, learn how to build your first generative AI application with key services such as Amazon Bedrock. Get hints and tips for getting started fast, and see example reference architectures for common use cases built with AWS AI and ML such as self-service customer support, text analysis, report generation, post-call analysis, and forecasting trends.
AIM225 (LVL 200) | Drive personalized CX using generative AI and Amazon Personalize
Tuesday November 28 | 5:00 PM – 6:00 PM (PST)
Delivering the best experience is critical to capture and retain customers today. With generative AI, it is possible to hyper-personalize targeted recommendations for shopping and streaming. While standard taglines like “People who bought this also bought . . .” or “Because you watched . . .” entice some, they don’t fully address individual interests. Companies must find ways to dynamically generate compelling, highly customized content. Amazon Personalize delivers capabilities powered by ML and generative AI to help brands create meaningful experiences. Join this session to hear from powerhouse AWS media customer FOX and learn how hyper-personalized experiences can be used to build engagement and drive revenue.
AIM327 (LVL 300) | Scaling FM inference to hundreds of models with Amazon SageMaker
Wednesday November 29 | 4:30 PM – 5:30 PM (PST)
Companies need robust and cost-effective solutions to deploy foundation models at scale. Additionally, SaaS providers need scalable and cost-effective ways to serve hundreds of models to their customers. This session explores how to use Amazon SageMaker to roll out hundreds of FMs cost-effectively at scale. Get a detailed overview of deployment strategies to support large-scale generative AI inferencing for SaaS, and learn how to architect solutions that maximize scaling capabilities for performance and cost.
AIM333 (LVL 300) | Explore text-generation FMs for top use cases with Amazon Bedrock
Tuesday November 28| 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM (PST)
Foundation models can be used for natural language processing tasks such as summarization, text generation, classification, open-ended Q&A, and information extraction. With Amazon Bedrock, you can choose powerful FMs from AI21 Labs, Anthropic, and Cohere to find the right FM for your use case such as the Jurassic-2, Claude, and Command families of text-generation FMs. Join this session to learn which FM is best suited for your use case.
AIM332 (LVL 300) | Explore image generation and search with FMs on Amazon Bedrock
Thursday November 30 | 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM (PST)
Foundation models understand multiple forms of input, such as images and texts. Join this session to learn how to build transformational experiences using images in Amazon Bedrock.
AIM377 (LVL 300) | Prompt engineering best practices for LLMs on Amazon Bedrock
Monday November 27 | 9:00 AM – 10:00 AM (PST)
Prompt engineering is the process of guiding large language models to produce desired outputs. In this session, get an overview of prompt engineering best practices and learn how to choose the most appropriate formats, phrases, words, and symbols to get the most out of generative AI solutions while improving accuracy and performance. This session uses the Claude 2 LLM as an example of how prompt engineering helps to solve complex customer use cases. Also learn how prompts can be integrated with your architecture and how to use API parameters for tuning the model parameters using Amazon Bedrock.
Chalk talks
AIM341 (LVL 300) | Deliver customized search capabilities using Amazon Bedrock
Wednesday November 29 | 5:30 PM – 6:30 PM (PST)
Vector embeddings are numerical representations of your text, image, audio, and video data that can be used to understand the relationship between sentences or words to find more relevant and contextual information in response to a user query. Embeddings can be stored in a database and are used to enable streamlined and more accurate searches. You can use an embeddings model in Amazon Bedrock to create vectors of your organization’s data, which can then be used to enable semantic search. Join this hands-on chalk talk to learn how.
AIM340-R (LVL 300) | Customize your FMs securely to deliver differentiated experiences
Wednesday November 29 | 6:00 PM – 7:00 PM (PST)
Foundation model customizations help you build differentiated generative AI applications using your own data. It’s easy to securely customize models in Amazon Bedrock. You can point Amazon Bedrock at a few labeled examples in Amazon S3, and the service can fine-tune the FM for a particular task without having to annotate large volumes of data; none of your data is used to train the original base FMs. Join this chalk talk for a deep dive on FM customizations through an interactive demo.
This session will be repeated Thursday, November 30 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM (PST), and Friday, December 1 8:30 AM – 9:30 AM PST.
AIM342 (LVL 300) | Advancing responsible AI: Assessing and mitigating risk
Wednesday November 29 | 4:30 PM – 5:30 PM (PST)
Risk assessment is an essential part of developing AI solutions responsibly, especially with emerging industry standards and laws regarding AI risk, such as ISO 42001 and the EU AI Act. This chalk talk provides an introduction to best practices for risk assessment related to fairness, robustness, explainability, privacy and security, transparency, and governance. Explore examples to estimate the severity and likelihood of potential events that could be harmful. Learn about Amazon SageMaker tooling for model governance, bias, explainability, and monitoring, and about transparency in the form of service cards as potential risk mitigation strategies.
AIM347-R (LVL 300) | Next-generation ML builder experience
Thursday November 30 | 4:00 PM – 5:00 PM (PST)
Amazon SageMaker offers different integrated development environments (IDEs) that are purpose-built for machine learning. In this chalk talk, learn how to select and use your preferred environment to perform end-to-end ML development steps, from preparing data to building, training, and deploying your ML models. Discover how you can quickly upload data, create new notebooks, train and tune models, move back and forth between steps to adjust experiments, collaborate seamlessly within your organization, and deploy models to production all in one place.
This session will be repeated Friday, December 1 9:00 AM – 10:00 AM (PST), and Friday, December 1 11:30 AM – 12:00 PM (PST).
AIM352-R (LVL 300) | Securely build generative AI apps and control data with Amazon Bedrock
Monday November 27 | 11:30 AM – 12:30 PM (PST)
Generative AI applications have captured widespread attention; however, they have also introduced new security challenges, especially around the handling of customer data. Organizations want to ensure that their data remains safe and secure while working with foundation models and don’t want to worry about their data being used to train an FM. Amazon Bedrock provides comprehensive data protection and privacy. In this chalk talk, explore architectures, data flows, and security-related aspects of model fine-tuning, as well as prompting and inference, while you learn about Amazon Bedrock’s security capabilities.
This session will be repeated Wednesday, November 29 6:00 PM – 7:00 PM (PST), and Thursday, November 30 4:00 PM – 5:00 PM (PST).
AIM404 (LVL 400) | Train and deploy FMs on Amazon EC2 and Amazon SageMaker, feat. Flip AI
Wednesday November 29 | 2:30 PM – 3:30 PM (PST)
Organizations that are running machine learning systems and generative AI applications on their local laptops/servers want to take advantage of the scalability and performance of the AWS Cloud. In this chalk talk, hear about compute and ML services from self-managed Amazon EC2 to fully managed Amazon SageMaker that you can use to build, train, and deploy foundation models. See a demo of how you can fine-tune a Stable Diffusion model on Amazon EC2 and then deploy it on SageMaker using the AWS Deep Learning AMIs (DLAMI) and AWS Deep Learning Containers. Also, hear how Flip AI built their own models using these AWS services.
Workshops
AIM302 (LVL 300) | Use generative AI to extract insights from contact center recordings
Monday November 27 | 8:30 AM – 10:30 AM (PST)
Learn how to derive insights from contact center recordings and other media using Amazon Transcribe and generative AI. In this workshop, learn how to combine automatic call recording, transcription, post-call analysis, sentiment analysis, issue detection, and call summarization from your own telephony recordings (Cisco, Genesys, Talkdesk, Avaya, and more) using AWS Contact Center Intelligence (CCI) solutions and generative AI. See demos on how to build analytics dashboards and integrations between LLMs and Amazon QuickSight to visualize your key metrics. You must bring your laptop to participate.
AIM307 (LVL 300) | Retrieval Augmented Generation with Amazon Bedrock
Wednesday November 29 | 8:30 AM – 10:30 AM (PST)
Large language models are often limited by the data they were trained on and don’t always provide up-to-date responses—or worse, they make things up. To overcome this limitation, you can supplement prompts with up-to-date information using embeddings stored in vector databases, a process known as Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). With supplemental information in the prompt providing more context, the LLM can respond more accurately and is less likely to hallucinate. In this workshop, learn how to use vector databases with Amazon Bedrock, a service that makes foundation models from Amazon and leading AI companies available via a single API. You must bring your laptop to participate.
AIM304 (LVL 300) | How to generate text responsibly using foundation models on AWS
Wednesday November 29 | 5:30 PM – 7:30 PM (PST)
Foundation models such as Claude are commonly used to create new pieces of original content, such as short stories, essays, social media posts, and webpage copy, and also to summarize text from articles, blog posts, books, and more. In this workshop, learn how you can generate text in minutes using foundation models available through Amazon Bedrock in a responsible way. You must bring your laptop to participate.
Code talks
AIM364-R (LVL 300) | Boost ML development with Amazon SageMaker Studio notebooks
Tuesday November 28 | 4:00 PM – 5:00 PM (PST)
Amazon SageMaker Studio notebooks are collaborative notebooks that you can launch quickly and that can help you integrate with purpose-built ML tools in SageMaker and other AWS services for complete ML development. In this code talk, learn how to prepare data at scale using built-in data preparation assistance, co-edit the same notebook in real time, and automate conversion of notebook code to production-ready jobs. This talk also introduces the new generative AI-powered features that can help you maximize productivity, write higher-quality code, and improve security.
This session will be repeated Wednesday, November 29 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM (PST).
Builders’ sessions
AIM219-R (LVL 200) | Learn and experiment with LLMs in Amazon SageMaker Studio Lab
Monday November 27 | 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM (PST)
Machine learning can sound complicated, but Amazon SageMaker Studio Lab makes it easier for anyone to get started at no cost. In this hands-on builders’ session, be guided through the basics of experimenting with large language models in Amazon SageMaker Studio Lab. No prior machine learning experience is required. You must bring your laptop to participate.
This session will be repeated Monday, November 27 4:00 PM – 5:00 PM (PST), Tuesday, November 28 3:30 PM – 4:30 PM (PST), Wednesday, November 29, 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM (PST), and Thursday, November 30 11:30 AM – 12:30 PM (PST).
AWS DeepRacer
Get ready to race with AWS DeepRacer at re:Invent 2023!
Developers, fasten your seatbelts—AWS DeepRacer is bringing ML to everyone at re:Invent! Whether you’re looking to get started with ML or improve your skills, AWS DeepRacer offers an exciting way to get hands-on with ML.
Watch the world’s top 72 racers of the AWS DeepRacer 2023 League battle it out Monday through Wednesday at our Championship Stadium at the Venetian Expo. It will all come down to the finale on Wednesday (November 29) at 2:30 PM (PST) as the eight finalists compete for the cup and $44,000 in prize money. You can also get behind the wheel yourself on November 30, when the track opens for the 2024 Open Racing. Post the fastest time and you’ll win a ticket back to Vegas for the 2024 Championship!
Dive into 10 not-to-miss workshops where you’ll learn to train reinforcement learning models, solve business problems with generative AI, and more. Want to learn tips and tricks from the best racers in the world? Be sure to check out our DPR301 workshop featuring five of our top AWS DeepRacer League Champions who will be sharing their approaches for training their AWS DeepRacer models and answering questions during an open Q&A.
Don’t forget to check out the rest of the AWS DeepRacer workshops before they fill up to reserve your spot! Whether you take a workshop, take a spin in our gamified virtual racing simulator, catch the global competition, or test your own ML model on the track, AWS DeepRacer brings the thrill of high-speed racing to hands-on machine learning at re:Invent. Let the countdown begin. We can’t wait to see you in Las Vegas!
See you at re:Invent!
Make sure to check out the re:Invent content catalog and the generative AI at re:Invent guide for more gen AI and ML content at re:Invent. We’ll see you there!
About the authors
Denis V. Batalov is a 17-year Amazon veteran and a PhD in Machine Learning, Denis worked on such exciting projects as Search Inside the Book, Amazon Mobile apps and Kindle Direct Publishing. Since 2013 he has helped AWS customers adopt AI/ML technology as a Solutions Architect. Currently, Denis is a Worldwide Tech Leader for AI/ML responsible for the functioning of AWS ML Specialist Solutions Architects globally. Denis is a frequent public speaker, you can follow him on Twitter @dbatalov.
Paxton Hall is a Marketing Program Manager for the AWS AI/ML Community on the AI/ML Education team at AWS. He has worked in retail and experiential marketing for the past 7 years, focused on developing communities and marketing campaigns. Out of the office, he’s passionate about public lands access and conservation, and enjoys backcountry skiing, climbing, biking, and hiking throughout Washington’s Cascade mountains.
Shared by: AWS Machine Learning
November 23, 2023
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