Cohere's family of Command R models arrives in Amazon Bedrock

Amazon Bedrock developers can now access Cohere's Command R and Command R+ large language models. This addition gives enterprise customers more LLMs to choose from, joining Anthropic's Claude 3 Sonnet and Haiku, Claude 3 Opus, Mistral 7B and Mixtral 8x7B, and Mistral Large.

Today's developments come weeks after Cohere, a Toronto, Canada-based startup co-founded by former Google AI researchers and a Transformer paper co-author, debuted Command R+. That model surpassed OpenAI's GPT-4 in performance benchmarks and has been available on Microsoft Azure and Amazon Sagemaker. It and its sibling LLM are now available on AWS' AI development platform.

"We're excited to add Cohere's latest state-of-the-art Command R model family to Amazon Bedrock to offer enterprise customers more choice and flexibility in selecting the optimal models for their use case. The Command R and R+ models are highly scalable, RAG-optimized, and multilingual across 10 languages to deliver strong solutions for organizations around the world," Atul Deo, Amazon Web Services' general manager of Amazon Bedrock, says in a statement.

For AWS, it's about giving companies more choices in which LLMs they want to use to turn proof-of-concept ideas into reality and develop ways to make workloads easier. Cohere benefits because it makes its powerful models accessible to a larger audience, which Command R is designed to cater to. As a result, it could create an opportunity for Cohere to generate more revenue for its AI work.

The timing couldn't be better, as perhaps its strongest competitor, OpenAI, recently announced new enterprise-grade features for building and programming atop GPT-4 Turbo. At the time, OpenAI's Head of Product for its API, Olivier Godement, told VentureBeat: "When you talk to developers and businesses about meaningful work for AI models, OpenAI still has the lead. That said, we always welcome more competition — it’s how everyone gets better."

Game on, right?

Developers can access Command R and Command R+ within Amazon Bedrock by selecting the AI from a list of supported base models. The newest LLMs join Cohere's other models, Command, Command Light, Embed English and Embed Multilingual. They are available on Amazon Bedrock in the US East (N. Virginia) and US West (Oregon) regions today. More regions should be supported in the future.