Data is Your Differentiator: Building Secure and Tailored AI Systems — Mani Khanuja, AWS

The Foundation of Generative AI: Data 01:19

  • Generative AI adds significant business value but requires a deep and robust data foundation.
  • This foundation, representing a company's brand and organization, necessitates careful data management.
  • Data requirements for generative AI applications are distinct from traditional machine learning.
  • It's crucial to address how data interacts with technology and people, eliminating data silos for effective model utilization.

Data Requirements for Different AI Use Cases 02:51

  • Building a virtual travel agent requires customer profile data for personalization and company policies for rules like refunds.
  • Handling customer data involves significant responsibility, especially regarding PII disclosure and maintaining brand image.
  • A conversational chatbot for employee productivity needs company-specific data with strict access controls to prevent over-provisioning.
  • Such chatbots also require integration with various data sources and platforms like Slack or custom applications.
  • Marketing applications for brands will have their own distinct data requirements.

Core Components for Building Generative AI Applications 05:12

  • Effective generative AI applications depend on well-crafted prompts, which include system prompts and user queries.
  • Context for the AI is dynamic and sourced from various data services and sources.
  • The choice and fine-tuning of models are critical, with fine-tuning requiring specific company-representative data.
  • Data is essential at every stage of the process to achieve meaningful output.

Leveraging Amazon Bedrock for AI Development 06:35

  • Amazon Bedrock provides a choice of models and features for building generative AI applications.
  • Bedrock Data Automation enables custom data pipelines and transformations with a single API.
  • Model customization, evaluation, and Bedrock Knowledge Bases accelerate the development of RAG applications by reducing time to market.
  • Amazon Bedrock Guardrails are crucial for ensuring responsible AI, security, and privacy in all applications, including agents, RAG, summarization, and chatbots.

Deep Dive: Building a RAG Chatbot with Bedrock 07:46

  • Bedrock Data Automation facilitates data processing for RAG applications, handling diverse data types like video, text, images, and financial documents to extract business insights.
  • Bedrock Knowledge Bases offer native support for data processing and allow for defining custom or leveraging out-of-the-box chunking strategies, including hierarchical and semantic chunking.
  • It supports prompt augmentation, selection of embedding models, and choice of vector stores for embeddings.
  • Knowledge Bases provide out-of-the-box data ingestion and incremental updates, eliminating the need for custom logic.
  • Retrieval APIs (e.g., retrieve for similar content, hybrid search for optimization) and the retrieve and generate API simplify the process, offering built-in controls for reranking, post-processing, and query decomposition.

Ensuring Responsible AI with Bedrock Guardrails 11:15

  • Amazon Bedrock Guardrails help generate AI responses responsibly by preventing PII disclosure and filtering undesirable keywords.
  • Users can create custom policies and guardrails, providing examples of content to avoid.
  • Guardrails contribute to grounding responses and reducing hallucinations.
  • All user interactions are logged, allowing for identification of user patterns and triggers.

Best Practices for Generative AI Application Success 13:18

  • The right chunking strategy is vital for the accuracy of generated responses in RAG applications.
  • Application optimization involves techniques like re-ranking, parsing, hybrid search, query reformulation, and decomposition, focusing on performance, latency, and cost.
  • Semantic caching improves performance by storing responses to similar (not exact) queries, reducing model invocation costs and latency.
  • Observability, through logging user queries, retrieval hits, and model responses, is a critical component for monitoring, troubleshooting, and continuous improvement.
  • Regular evaluation based on application-specific metrics (e.g., context relevance for RAG, summarization metrics) is essential for refining results and avoiding wasted resources.
  • Continuous updates to stale data or strategies, followed by rigorous, automated testing with a defined test suite, are necessary to ensure high-quality production applications and scalability.