Highlights from the 2024 AWS Summit Washington, DC keynote

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) innovation and inspiration dominated today’s AWS Summit Washington, DC keynote. But there was no shortage of newsworthy moments and key takeaways that extended beyond generative AI.

Dave Levy, vice president of Worldwide Public Sector at Amazon Web Services (AWS), delivered the DC Summit keynote. His introductory remarks included a new video that showcased four AWS public sector customers who are inventing new possibilities with generative AI.

Three special guests joined Levy on stage during the hour-long keynote and helped him set the tone for the DC Summit, an annual two-day event that brings the public sector cloud community together in the nation’s capital.

Continue reading to learn about the announcements and guest speakers from today’s keynote.

Announcements

New generative AI initiative for public sector organizations

Levy announced the AWS Worldwide Public Sector Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) Impact Initiative, a two-year, $50 million commitment to help public sector organizations accelerate generative AI innovation. As part of this initiative, AWS is committing up to $50 million in AWS Promotional Credits, training, and technical expertise across generative AI projects that use AWS services and infrastructure, such as Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Q, Amazon SageMaker, AWS HealthScribe, AWS Trainium, and AWS Inferentia. The Impact Initiative is open to new or existing AWS Worldwide Public Sector customers and partners from enterprises worldwide who are building generative AI solutions to help solve society’s most pressing challenges. Learn more about the Impact Initiative and get started.

Advancing pediatric healthcare and research efforts

The new AWS IMAGINE Grant: Children’s Health Innovation Award is a $7 million strategic grant that will invite proposals and fund the use of cloud-enabled technologies, such as generative AI. Pilot projects, proofs of concept, and programs that help accelerate pediatric research, improve child well-being, or empower the professional workforce and caregivers who support children, are encouraged to apply.

AWS also announced a $3 million philanthropic commitment to three nonprofit organizations who are mission-driven innovators for pediatric and children’s causes. Children’s National Hospital, Nationwide Children’s Hospital, and the Children’s Brain Tumor Network will receive $1 million each from AWS to support their work.

Saving lives and restoring communities in the world’s conflict zones

Landmines and unexploded ordnance (UXO) maim and kill people decades after conflicts end. The HALO Trust is the world’s largest humanitarian landmine clearing organization and it recently deactivated its two millionth landmine. To help HALO increase the pace at which it performs its life-saving work, AWS is providing a $4 million support package to pilot the use of AI and machine learning (ML) models to identify mines and other hazards of war from drone imagery. This investment will help HALO’s current work in Ukraine while supporting the organization’s ability to store, process, and analyze the vast quantity of data it collects more safely and efficiently.

Expanded access to Anthropic’s Claude models for the intelligence community

AWS and Anthropic announced the availability of Anthropic’s Claude 3 Sonnet and Claude 3 Haiku AI models in the AWS Marketplace for the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC). Today’s news builds on the strategic collaborative agreement between the two companies, and will further empower government customers to leverage generative AI to transform their organizations and tackle some of the biggest challenges facing our nation. This expands access to government customers and offers them selection among speed, performance, and price.

Research points to cloud as a more sustainable choice

A new study released yesterday that was commissioned by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and conducted by Accenture estimates AWS’s infrastructure is up to 4.1 times more efficient than on-premises, and when workloads are optimized on AWS, the associated carbon footprint can be reduced by up to 99 percent.

Guest speakers

The CIA’s perspective on AI

The keynote’s first guest speaker was Lakshmi Raman, the CIA’s Director of Artificial Intelligence Innovation. Raman joined Levy onstage for a wide-ranging fireside chat that touched on how the CIA is approaching and using AI, emerging technologies, and how investing in workforce development helps keep pace with rapid technological advancements.

How the Army is developing its AI strategy

Young Bang, the U.S. Army’s Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Acquisition, Logistics, and Technology was the second guest speaker to take the stage. Bang discussed the Department of Defense’s (DoD) appetite for emerging capabilities, the potential benefits of AI, and the Army’s layered defense framework.

Cloud-enabled precision medicine

The keynote’s final guest speaker was Dr. Adam Resnick, the director of the Center for Data-Driven Discovery in Biomedicine (D³B) at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP). Dr. Resnick and his colleagues have built generative AI capabilities using AWS that are helping accelerate breakthroughs in pediatric health.