AI

There is an old line about the software industry: cloud eats open source, open source eats software. Each layer commoditizes the one below it, and value moves up. Open source made writing code less of a differentiator. Cloud made running software into a paid service. Every generation, whatever was the moat becomes the utility. Naturally people expect AI to be the next step. Something that eats cloud the way cloud ate open source....

AWS offers a family of ready-made machine learning services that handle a single, well-defined task each: recognize faces, transcribe speech, translate text, recommend products, and so on. You call an API and get a result — no model training, no GPUs, no data science required. SageMaker sits alongside them for the cases where you do want to build your own model. This is a tour of what each service is, what it is for, and when to reach for it....