[Aurornis]

If you are wondering why anyone would spend more money to use these APIs through AWS instead of going direct: In some companies it’s nearly impossible to get new vendors approved. If the company has an AWS contract then you have to use what AWS offers.

[Animats]

Wait, is AWS just reselling access to some AI company's servers, or is AWS running the models on their own hardware?

[ykl]

AWS Bedrock is other companies’ models running on separate dedicated AWS hardware, metered through AWS billing. AWS owns and operates all of the infrastructure and the client interface; the model provider basically hands over the model and weights to AWS and AWS Bedrock take it from there.

So, as an example, if you use Codex through Bedrock, that’s a totally separate instance of Codex from anything you would be interfacing with if you directly used OpenAI’s API; if you use Codex via Bedrock, OpenAI never sees your data or prompts because they stay sandboxed in an ephemeral Bedrock instance. For many large enterprise deployments this hard boundary is a big big deal.

Over the past year, Claude being available via Bedrock and ChatGPT/Codex not being available via Bedrock has been a huge competitive advantage for Anthropic in the enterprise space.

[powvans]

Even if you can get it approved you are adding surface area to your annual security audits, adding another vendor that needs to be disclosed on security assessments, spreading your data to yet another processor, and adding another invoice and budget discussion. Depending on your customer contracts you may need to notify them of a new vendor. This might trigger a new security review. Oh it’s just another model on Bedrock? Bliss.

[morpheuskafka]

Every CEO, board, and middle manager in the world is AI buzzword-obsessed now. Surely asking to sign a contract with the frontier labs directly would not get held up?

[thinkingtoilet]

We're talking global mega corps here. They are allergic to any real change. If they have an existing AWS contract and can easily spin up these bedrock instances they are going to do that 100% of the time. Vendor procurement is a nightmare in those companies (trust me), and for something as potentially sensitive and hot it will always be easier to stay in the AWS ecosystem. It's easy to underestimate how hard it can be to change something at these enormous companies.

[stronglikedan]

Every CEO, board, and middle manager in the world still has to go through infosec in large orgs.

[qurren]

If you're an engineer in the trenches of the company, good luck convincing the people above to sign that contract. You'll waste thousands of hours just trying.

[crubier]

The hard part is not the CEO, it's the CISO