Author: i-genie

Natural language interface to databases is a growing focus within artificial intelligence, particularly because it allows users to interact with structured databases using plain human language. This area, often known as NL2SQL (Natural Language to SQL), is centered on transforming user-friendly queries into SQL commands that can be directly executed on databases. The objective is to simplify data access for non-technical users and broaden the utility of data systems in various sectors like finance, healthcare, and retail. With the rise of LLMs, significant progress has made these conversions more accurate and context-aware, especially when dealing with simple queries or structured database layouts.

Despite progress, converting natural language into accurate SQL remains difficult in complex situations involving multiple table joins, nested queries, or ambiguous semantics. The challenge is not just about generating syntactically correct SQL but producing queries that correctly reflect the user’s intent and can be generalized across domains. Standard approaches struggle to scale in high-stakes fields where interpretability and precision are critical. Moreover, many current models depend heavily on fixed schemas and training data structures, which hampers their performance in new or evolving environments.

Most NL2SQL systems today rely on supervised fine-tuning, where large language models are trained on annotated datasets that pair questions with correct SQL answers. While this method has led to noticeable improvements, it introduces limitations in adaptability and interpretability. Because these models are tuned to specific datasets and schemas, they often fail in unfamiliar scenarios. Also, they follow a rigid generation strategy, which can lead to failures when the input diverges from training data. These systems also typically lack transparency in their reasoning processes, limiting their utility in domains where clear decision-making trails are necessary.

Researchers from IDEA Research, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, and DataArc Tech Ltd. introduced SQL-R1. This new NL2SQL model leverages reinforcement learning rather than traditional supervised learning. SQL-R1 uses feedback mechanisms during training to improve its performance. Instead of just learning from annotated examples, the model learns by generating SQL candidates, executing them, and receiving structured feedback on the outcome. This feedback includes whether the SQL was syntactically correct, whether it produced the proper result, and how efficient and interpretable it was. This dynamic learning process allows the model to optimize its SQL generation strategies over time and improves generalization in complex or unfamiliar scenarios.

To build SQL-R1, researchers first performed supervised fine-tuning on 200,000 samples drawn from a large synthetic dataset called SynSQL-2.5M. This process, known as a cold start, ensured the model could follow basic instructions and generate simple SQL outputs. Following this, reinforcement learning was introduced using the Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) algorithm. The model generated multiple SQL candidates for each query and was rewarded based on a composite scoring function. This function included four metrics: format reward (+1 or -1 depending on syntax correctness), execution reward (+2 for executable queries, -2 for failures), result reward (+3 for correct query outputs, -3 for incorrect ones), and length reward based on the depth and clarity of the reasoning trace. Each of these scores contributed to updating the model’s internal decision-making process.

SQL-R1 was evaluated on two industry-standard NL2SQL benchmarks: Spider and BIRD. On the Spider development set, the model achieved 87.6% execution accuracy, and on the Spider test set, it gained 88.7%. For the BIRD dataset, which covers 95 databases from 37 domains, the model scored 66.6%. These results are competitive with or superior to larger models, including closed-source solutions like GPT-4. Notably, SQL-R1 used the Qwen2.5-Coder-7B model, which is considerably smaller than many alternatives, demonstrating that high accuracy can be achieved with efficient architectures when combined with reinforcement learning. An ablation study confirmed the contribution of each reward component. Removing the format reward, for instance, caused accuracy to drop from 63.1% to 60.4%. Removing the result reward caused a 0.7% drop, indicating that each element in the reward mechanism plays a role in guiding the model.

Several Key Takeaways from the Research on SQL-R1:

SQL-R1 achieved 88.7% accuracy on the Spider test set and 66.6% on the BIRD development set, using only a 7B base model (Qwen2.5-Coder-7B).  

The model used 200,000 samples from the SynSQL-2.5M dataset for supervised fine-tuning and 5,000 complex samples for reinforcement learning.  

The GRPO algorithm powered reinforcement learning, which required no value model and worked efficiently with relative performance scores.  

The reward function included four components: Format (+1/-1), Execution (+2/-2), Result (+3/-3), and Length (proportional).  

SQL-R1 outperformed larger models like GPT-4, highlighting that model architecture and feedback training are as critical as size.  

Ablation studies revealed the importance of each reward: removing the format reward caused a 2.7% drop in performance, while eliminating the execution reward dropped accuracy by 2.4%.  

The approach promotes transparency, as the model provides reasoning traces using ‘<think>’ and ‘<answer>’ tags, improving end-user interpretability.

Here is the Paper. Also, don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and join our Telegram Channel and LinkedIn Group. Don’t Forget to join our 90k+ ML SubReddit.

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The post SQL-R1: A Reinforcement Learning-based NL2SQL Model that Outperforms Larger Systems in Complex Queries with Transparent and Accurate SQL Generation appeared first on MarkTechPost.

Large language models are increasingly used to solve math problems that mimic real-world reasoning tasks. These models are tested for their ability to answer factual queries and how well they can handle multi-step logical processes. Mathematical problem-solving offers a reliable way to examine whether models can extract the necessary information, navigate complex statements, and compute answers correctly. This field has become central to understanding the extent of AI’s logical and cognitive capabilities.

A key concern in this domain is how these models perform when their inputs aren’t neat or formatted. In many cases, the questions LLMs encounter in practice come with extra background information, irrelevant details, or even subtle hints that could lead them off track. While models can perform well on standard benchmark problems, their ability to isolate important information from cluttered prompts remains questionable. This has raised the need to examine how distractions influence their reasoning and whether current models are ready for unpredictable, real-world use cases.

Past tools and benchmarks have focused mostly on well-formed problem sets, such as GSM8K or MATH. Still, newer variants like GSM-Symbolic and GSM-PLUS began testing model performance under symbolic variations and distractor insertions. These tools uncovered significant weaknesses in LLMs when faced with small changes to the problem text. For instance, introducing one clause that seems relevant but is logically redundant can reduce model accuracy by as much as 65%. This led to the conclusion that models often rely on surface patterns rather than genuine reasoning, which prompted further exploration into more realistic and noisy testing conditions.

A team of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has introduced a research focused on measuring how LLMs handle four types of systematic perturbations: irrelevant context, pathological instructions, relevant but non-essential information, and a combination of the latter two. The team evaluated 13 large language models—both open-source and commercial—through APIs provided by OpenAI, Anthropic, Cohere, and TogetherAI. Instead of relying on full test sets, the team sampled 56 data points from the GSM8K dataset per experiment, ensuring they captured a balanced distribution of reasoning complexity.

To construct these altered prompts, the researchers added dense and irrelevant contexts like Wikipedia pages or financial reports into the input. This took up to 90% of the model’s context window. In the pathological scenario, misleading instructions were appended, designed to manipulate the reasoning path without altering the original question. New details that were factually correct but unnecessary were inserted for the relevant context case to see how the models handled distractions that looked informative. In the final variant, pathological and relevant perturbations were combined, increasing the input complexity while observing how this dual pressure influenced model output.

The performance dropped most sharply when irrelevant context was introduced. Across all models, the average accuracy dropped by 55.89%. Pathological instructions caused an 8.52% decline, while relevant context led to a 7.01% decrease. Combining the two types of perturbations produced a 12.91% drop in accuracy. Interestingly, performance didn’t correlate with model size—larger models like Mixtral-8x22B and Command-R-Plus experienced greater regressions compared to some smaller models. Also, the number of reasoning steps in a problem didn’t significantly affect the outcome, suggesting that complexity in logical structure wasn’t the dominant factor in performance variance.

This study shows that current large language models, even those with billions of parameters, still struggle when their prompts are altered relatively simply. The researchers from MIT demonstrate that model resilience doesn’t improve significantly with size and that the ability to filter and prioritize information is a major gap in LLM design. These findings push for developing models that are better equipped to deal with cluttered and misleading inputs—an essential step for moving closer to reliable AI in real-world environments.

Here is the Paper. Also, don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and join our Telegram Channel and LinkedIn Group. Don’t Forget to join our 90k+ ML SubReddit.

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The post From Logic to Confusion: MIT Researchers Show How Simple Prompt Tweaks Derail LLM Reasoning appeared first on MarkTechPost.

This post is co-written with Kim Nguyen and Shyam Banuprakash from Clario.
Clario is a leading provider of endpoint data solutions to the clinical trials industry, generating high-quality clinical evidence for life sciences companies seeking to bring new therapies to patients. Since Clario’s founding more than 50 years ago, the company’s endpoint data solutions have supported clinical trials more than 26,000 times with over 700 regulatory approvals across more than 100 countries. One of the critical challenges Clario faces when supporting its clients is the time-consuming process of generating documentation for clinical trials, which can take weeks.
The business challenge
When medical imaging analysis is part of a clinical trial it is supporting, Clario prepares a medical imaging charter process document that outlines the format and requirements of the central review of clinical trial images (the Charter). Based on the Charter, Clario’s imaging team creates several subsequent documents (as shown in the following figure), including the business requirement specification (BRS), training slides, and ancillary documents. The content of these documents is largely derived from the Charter, with significant reformatting and rephrasing required. This process is time-consuming, can be subject to inadvertent manual error, and carries the risk of inconsistent or redundant information, which can delay or otherwise negatively impact the clinical trial.

Clario’s imaging team recognized the need to modernize the document generation process and streamline the processes used to create end-to-end document workflows. Clario engaged with their AWS account team and AWS Generative AI Innovation Center to explore how generative AI could help streamline the process.
The solution
The AWS team worked closely with Clario to develop a prototype solution that uses AWS AI services to automate the BRS generation process. The solution involves the following key services:

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3): A scalable object storage service used to store the charter-derived and generated BRS documents.
Amazon OpenSearch Serverless: An on-demand serverless configuration for Amazon OpenSearch Service used as a vector store.
Amazon Bedrock: Amazon Bedrock is a fully managed service that offers a choice of high-performing foundation models (FMs) from leading AI companies through a single API, along with a broad set of capabilities you need to build generative AI applications with security, privacy, and responsible AI. Using Amazon Bedrock, you can experiment with and evaluate top FMs for your use case, privately customize them with your data using techniques such as fine-tuning and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) and build agents that execute tasks using your enterprise systems and data sources.

The solution is shown in the following figure:

Architecture walkthrough

Charter-derived documents are processed in an on-premises script in preparation for uploading.
Files are sent to AWS using AWS Direct Connect.
The script chunks the documents and calls an embedding model to produce the document embeddings. It then stores the embeddings in an OpenSearch vector database for retrieval by our application. Clario uses an Amazon Titan Text Embeddings model offered by Amazon Bedrock. Each chunk is called to produce an embedding.
Amazon OpenSearch Serverlessis used as the durable vector store. Document chunk embeddings are stored in an OpenSearch vector index, which enables the application to search for the most semantically relevant documents. Clario also stores attributes for the source document and associated trial to allow for a richer search experience.
A custom build user interface is the primary access point for users to access the system, initiate generation jobs, and interact with a chat UI. The UI is integrated with the workflow engine that manages the orchestration process.
The workflow engine calls the Amazon Bedrock API and orchestrates the business requirement specification document generation process. The engine:

Uses a global specification that stores the prompts to be used as input when calling the large language model.
Queries OpenSearch for the relevant Imaging charter.
Loops through every business requirement.
Calls the Claude 3.7 Sonnet large language model from Amazon Bedrock to generate responses.

Outputs the business requirement specification document to the user interface, where a business requirement writer can review the answers to produce a final document. Clario uses Claude 3.7 Sonnet from Amazon Bedrock for the question-answering and the conversational AI application.
The final documents are written to Amazon S3 to be consumed and published by additional document workflows that will be built in the future.
An as-needed AI chat agent to allow document-based discovery and enable users to converse with one or more documents.

Benefits and results
By using AWS AI services, Clario has streamlined the complicated BRS generation process significantly. The prototype solution demonstrated the following benefits:

Improved accuracy: The use of generative AI models minimized the risk of translation errors and inconsistencies, reducing the need for rework and study delays.
Scalability and flexibility: The serverless architecture provided by AWS services allows the solution to scale seamlessly as demand increases, while the modular design enables straightforward integration with other Clario systems.
Security: Clario’s data security strategy revolves around confining all its information within the secure AWS ecosystem using the security features of Amazon Bedrock. By keeping data isolated within the AWS infrastructure, Clario helps ensure protection against external threats and unauthorized access. This approach enables Clario to meet compliance requirements and provide clients with confidence in the confidentiality and integrity of their sensitive data.

Lessons learned
The successful implementation of this prototype solution reinforced the value of using generative AI models for domain-specific applications like those prevalent in the life sciences industry. It also highlighted the importance of involving business stakeholders early in the process and having a clear understanding of the business value to be realized. Following the success of this project, Clario is working to productionize the solution in their Medical Imaging business during 2025 to continue offering state-of-the-art services to its customers for best quality data and successful clinical trials.
Conclusion
The collaboration between Clario and AWS demonstrated the potential of AWS AI and machine learning (AI/ML) services and generative AI models, such as Anthropic’s Claude, to streamline document generation processes in the life sciences industry and, specifically, for complicated clinical trial processes. By using these technologies, Clario was able to enhance and streamline the BRS generation process significantly, improving accuracy and scalability. As Clario continues to adopt AI/ML across its operations, the company is well-positioned to drive innovation and deliver better outcomes for its partners and patients.

About the Authors
Kim Nguyen serves as the Sr Director of Data Science at Clario, where he leads a team of data scientists in developing innovative AI/ML solutions for the healthcare and clinical trials industry. With over a decade of experience in clinical data management and analytics, Kim has established himself as an expert in transforming complex life sciences data into actionable insights that drive business outcomes. His career journey includes leadership roles at Clario and Gilead Sciences, where he consistently pioneered data automation and standardization initiatives across multiple functional teams. Kim holds a Master’s degree in Data Science and Engineering from UC San Diego and a Bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley, providing him with the technical foundation to excel in developing predictive models and data-driven strategies. Based in San Diego, California, he leverages his expertise to drive forward-thinking approaches to data science in the clinical research space.
Shyam Banuprakash serves as the Senior Vice President of Data Science and Delivery at Clario, where he leads complex analytics programs and develops innovative data solutions for the medical imaging sector. With nearly 12 years of progressive experience at Clario, he has demonstrated exceptional leadership in data-driven decision making and business process improvement. His expertise extends beyond his primary role, as he contributes his knowledge as an Advisory Board Member for both Modal and UC Irvine’s Customer Experience Program. Shyam holds a Master of Advanced Study in Data Science and Engineering from UC San Diego, complemented by specialized training from MIT in data science and big data analytics. His career exemplifies the powerful intersection of healthcare, technology, and data science, positioning him as a thought leader in leveraging analytics to transform clinical research and medical imaging.
John O’Donnell is a Principal Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services (AWS) where he provides CIO-level engagement and design for complex cloud-based solutions in the healthcare and life sciences (HCLS) industry. With over 20 years of hands-on experience, he has a proven track record of delivering value and innovation to HCLS customers across the globe. As a trusted technical leader, he has partnered with AWS teams to dive deep into customer challenges, propose outcomes, and ensure high-value, predictable, and successful cloud transformations. John is passionate about helping HCLS customers achieve their goals and accelerate their cloud native modernization efforts.
Praveen Haranahalli is a Senior Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services (AWS) where he provides expert guidance and architects secure, scalable cloud solutions for diverse enterprise customers. With nearly two decades of IT experience, including over ten years specializing in Cloud Computing, he has a proven track record of delivering transformative cloud implementations across multiple industries. As a trusted technical advisor, Praveen has successfully partnered with customers to implement robust DevSecOps pipelines, establish comprehensive security guardrails, and develop innovative AI/ML solutions. Praveen is passionate about solving complex business challenges through cutting-edge cloud architectures and helping organizations achieve successful digital transformations powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies.

Organizations are constantly seeking ways to harness the power of advanced large language models (LLMs) to enable a wide range of applications such as text generation, summarizationquestion answering, and many others. As these models grow more powerful and capable, deploying them in production environments while optimizing performance and cost-efficiency becomes more challenging.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides highly optimized and cost-effective solutions for deploying AI models, like the Mixtral 8x7B language model, for inference at scale. The AWS Inferentia and AWS Trainium are AWS AI chips, purpose-built to deliver high throughput and low latency inference and training performance for even the largest deep learning models. The Mixtral 8x7B model adopts the Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture with eight experts. AWS Neuron—the SDK used to run deep learning workloads on AWS Inferentia and AWS Trainium based instances—employs expert parallelism for MoE architecture, sharding the eight experts across multiple NeuronCores.
This post demonstrates how to deploy and serve the Mixtral 8x7B language model on AWS Inferentia2 instances for cost-effective, high-performance inference. We’ll walk through model compilation using Hugging Face Optimum Neuron, which provides a set of tools enabling straightforward model loading, training, and inference, and the Text Generation Inference (TGI) Container, which has the toolkit for deploying and serving LLMs with Hugging Face. This will be followed by deployment to an Amazon SageMaker real-time inference endpoint, which automatically provisions and manages the Inferentia2 instances behind the scenes and provides a containerized environment to run the model securely and at scale.
While pre-compiled model versions exist, we’ll cover the compilation process to illustrate important configuration options and instance sizing considerations. This end-to-end guide combines Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)-based compilation with SageMaker deployment to help you use Mixtral 8x7B’s capabilities with optimal performance and cost efficiency.
Step 1: Set up Hugging Face access
Before you can deploy the Mixtral 8x7B model, there some prerequisites that you need to have in place.

The model is hosted on Hugging Face and uses their transformers library. To download and use the model, you need to authenticate with Hugging Face using a user access token. These tokens allow secure access for applications and notebooks to Hugging Face’s services. You first need to create a Hugging Face account if you don’t already have one, which you can then use to generate and manage your access tokens through the user settings.
The mistralai/Mixtral-8x7B-Instruct-v0.1 model that you will be working with in this post is a gated model. This means that you need to specifically request access from Hugging Face before you can download and work with the model.

Step 2: Launch an Inferentia2-powered EC2 Inf2 instance
To get started with an Amazon EC2 Inf2 instance for deploying the Mixtral 8x7B, either deploy the AWS CloudFormation template or use the AWS Management Console.
To launch an Inferentia2 instance using the console:

Navigate to the Amazon EC2 console and choose Launch Instance.
Enter a descriptive name for your instance.
Under the Application and OS Images search for and select the Hugging Face Neuron Deep Learning AMI, which comes pre-configured with the Neuron software stack for AWS Inferentia.
For Instance type, select 24xlarge, which contains six Inferentia chips (12 NeuronCores).
Create or select an existing key pair to enable SSH access.
Create or select a security group that allows inbound SSH connections from the internet.
Under Configure Storage, set the root EBS volume to 512 GiB to accommodate the large model size.
After the settings are reviewed, choose Launch Instance.

With your Inf2 instance launched, connect to it over SSH by first locating the public IP or DNS name in the Amazon EC2 console. Later in this post, you will connect to a Jupyter notebook using a browser on port 8888. To do that, SSH tunnel to the instance using the key pair you configured during instance creation.

ssh -i “<pem file>” ubuntu@<instance DNS name> -L 8888:127.0.0.1:8888

After signing in, list the NeuronCores attached to the instance and their associated topology:

neuron-ls

For inf2.24xlarge, you should see the following output listing six Neuron devices:

instance-type: inf2.24xlarge
instance-id: i-…
+——–+——–+——–+———–+———+
| NEURON | NEURON | NEURON | CONNECTED |   PCI   |
| DEVICE | CORES  | MEMORY |  DEVICES  |   BDF   |
+——–+——–+——–+———–+———+
| 0      | 2      | 32 GB  | 1         | 10:1e.0 |
| 1      | 2      | 32 GB  | 0, 2      | 20:1e.0 |
| 2      | 2      | 32 GB  | 1, 3      | 10:1d.0 |
| 3      | 2      | 32 GB  | 2, 4      | 20:1f.0 |
| 4      | 2      | 32 GB  | 3, 5      | 10:1f.0 |
| 5      | 2      | 32 GB  | 4         | 20:1d.0 |
+——–+——–+——–+———–+———+

For more information on the neuron-ls command, see the Neuron LS User Guide.
Make sure the Inf2 instance is sized correctly to host the model. Each Inferentia NeuronCore processor contains 16 GB of high-bandwidth memory (HBM). To accommodate an LLM like the Mixtral 8x7B on AWS Inferentia2 (inf2) instances, a technique called tensor parallelism is used. This allows the model’s weights, activations, and computations to be split and distributed across multiple NeuronCores in parallel. To determine the degree of tensor parallelism required, you need to calculate the total memory footprint of the model. This can be computed as:
total memory = bytes per parameter * number of parameters
The Mixtral-8x7B model consists of 46.7 billion parameters. With float16 casted weights, you need 93.4 GB to store the model weights. The total space required is often greater than just the model parameters because of caching attention layer projections (KV caching). This caching mechanism grows memory allocations linearly with sequence length and batch size. With a batch size of 1 and a sequence length of 1024 tokens, the total memory footprint for the caching is 0.5 GB. The exact formula can be found in the AWS Neuron documentation and the hyper-parameter configuration required for these calculations is stored in the model config.json file.
Given that each NeuronCore has 16 GB of HBM, and the model requires approximately 94 GB of memory, a minimum tensor parallelism degree of 6 would theoretically suffice. However, with 32 attention heads, the tensor parallelism degree must be a divisor of this number.
Furthermore, considering the model’s size and the MoE implementation in transformers-neuronx, the supported tensor parallelism degrees are limited to 8, 16, and 32. For the example in this post, you will distribute the model across eight NeuronCores.
Compile Mixtral-8x7B model to AWS Inferentia2
The Neuron SDK includes a specialized compiler that automatically optimizes the model format for efficient execution on AWS Inferentia2.

To start this process, launch the container and pass the Inferentia devices to the container. For more information about launching the neuronx-tgi container see Deploy the Text Generation Inference (TGI) Container on a dedicated host.

docker run -it –entrypoint /bin/bash
–net=host -v $(pwd):$(pwd) -w $(pwd)
–device=/dev/neuron0
–device=/dev/neuron1
–device=/dev/neuron2
–device=/dev/neuron3
–device=/dev/neuron4
–device=/dev/neuron5
ghcr.io/huggingface/neuronx-tgi:0.0.25

Inside the container, sign in to the Hugging Face Hub to access gated models, such as the Mixtral-8x7B-Instruct-v0.1. See the previous section for Setup Hugging Face Access. Make sure to use a token with read and write permissions so you can later save the compiled model to the Hugging Face Hub.

huggingface-cli login –token hf_…

After signing in, compile the model with optimum-cli. This process will download the model artifacts, compile the model, and save the results in the specified directory.
The Neuron chips are designed to execute models with fixed input shapes for optimal performance. This requires that the compiled artifact shapes must be known at compilation time. In the following command, you will set the batch size, input/output sequence length, data type, and tensor-parallelism degree (number of neuron cores). For more information about these parameters, see Export a model to Inferentia.

Let’s discuss these parameters in more detail:

The parameter batch_size is the number of input sequences that the model will accept.
sequence_length specifies the maximum number of tokens in an input sequence. This affects memory usage and model performance during inference or training on Neuron hardware. A larger number will increase the model’s memory requirements because the attention mechanism needs to operate over the entire sequence, which leads to more computations and memory usage; while a smaller number will do the opposite. The value 1024 will be adequate for this example.
auto_cast_type parameter controls quantization. It allows type casting for model weights and computations during inference. The options are: bf16, fp16, or tf32. For more information about defining which lower-precision data type the compiler should use see Mixed Precision and Performance-accuracy Tuning. For models trained in float32, the 16-bit mixed precision options (bf16, f16) generally provide sufficient accuracy while significantly improving performance. We use data type float16 with the argument auto_cast_type fp16.
The num_cores parameter controls the number of cores on which the model should be deployed. This will dictate the number of parallel shards or partitions the model is split into. Each shard is then executed on a separate NeuronCore, taking advantage of the 16 GB high-bandwidth memory available per core. As discussed in the previous section, given the Mixtral-8x7B model’s requirements, Neuron supports 8, 16, or 32 tensor parallelism The inf2.24xlarge instance contains 12 Inferentia NeuronCores. Therefore, to optimally distribute the model, we set num_cores to 8.

optimum-cli export neuron
  –model mistralai/Mixtral-8x7B-Instruct-v0.1
  –batch_size 1
  –sequence_length 1024
  –auto_cast_type fp16
  –num_cores 8
  ./neuron_model_path

Download and compilation should take 10–20 minutes. After the compilation completes successfully, you can check the artifacts created in the output directory:

neuron_model_path
├── compiled
│ ├── 2ea52780bf51a876a581.neff
│ ├── 3fe4f2529b098b312b3d.neff
│ ├── …
│ ├── …
│ ├── cfda3dc8284fff50864d.neff
│ └── d6c11b23d8989af31d83.neff
├── config.json
├── generation_config.json
├── special_tokens_map.json
├── tokenizer.json
├── tokenizer.model
└── tokenizer_config.json

Push the compiled model to the Hugging Face Hub with the following command. Make sure to change <user_id> to your Hugging Face username. If the model repository doesn’t exist, it will be created automatically. Alternatively, store the model on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).

huggingface-cli upload <user_id>/Mixtral-8x7B-Instruct-v0.1 ./neuron_model_path ./
Deploy Mixtral-8x7B SageMaker real-time inference endpoint
Now that the model has been compiled and stored, you can deploy it for inference using SageMaker. To orchestrate the deployment, you will run Python code from a notebook hosted on an EC2 instance. You can use the instance created in the first section or create a new instance. Note that this EC2 instance can be of any type (for example t2.micro with an Amazon Linux 2023 image). Alternatively, you can use a notebook hosted in Amazon SageMaker Studio.
Set up AWS authorization for SageMaker deployment
You need AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) permissions to manage SageMaker resources. If you created the instance with the provided CloudFormation template, these permissions are already created for you. If not, the following section takes you through the process of setting up the permissions for an EC2 instance to run a notebook that deploys a real-time SageMaker inference endpoint.
Create an AWS IAM role and attach SageMaker permission policy

Go to the IAM console.
Choose the Roles tab in the navigation pane.
Choose Create role.
Under Select trusted entity, select AWS service.
Choose Use case and select EC2.
Select EC2 (Allows EC2 instances to call AWS services on your behalf.)
Choose Next: Permissions.
In the Add permissions policies screen, select AmazonSageMakerFullAccess and IAMReadOnlyAccess. Note that the AmazonSageMakerFullAccess permission is overly permissive. We use it in this example to simplify the process but recommend applying the principle of least privilege when setting up IAM permissions.
Choose Next: Review.
In the Role name field, enter a role name.
Choose Create role to complete the creation.
With the role created, choose the Roles tab in the navigation pane and select the role you just created.
Choose the Trust relationships tab and then choose Edit trust policy.
Choose Add next to Add a principal.
For Principal type, select AWS services.
Enter sagemaker.amazonaws.com and choose Add a principal.
Choose Update policy. Your trust relationship should look like the following:

{
“Version”: “2012-10-17”,
“Statement”: [
{
“Effect”: “Allow”,
“Principal”: {
“Service”: [
“ec2.amazonaws.com”,
“sagemaker.amazonaws.com”
]
},
“Action”: “sts:AssumeRole”
}
]
}

Attach the IAM role to your EC2 instance

Go to the Amazon EC2 console.
Choose Instances in the navigation pane.
Select your EC2 instance.
Choose Actions, Security, and then Modify IAM role.
Select the role you created in the previous step.
Choose Update IAM role.

Launch a Jupyter notebook
Your next goal is to run a Jupyter notebook hosted in a container running on the EC2 instance. The notebook will be run using a browser on port 8888 by default. For this example, you will use SSH port forwarding from your local machine to the instance to access the notebook.

Continuing from the previous section, you are still within the container. The following steps install Jupyter Notebook:

pip install ipykernel
python3 -m ipykernel install –user –name aws_neuron_venv_pytorch –display-name “Python Neuronx”
pip install jupyter notebook
pip install environment_kernels

Launch the notebook server using:

jupyter notebook

Then connect to the notebook using your browser over SSH tunneling

http://localhost:8888/tree?token=…
If you get a blank screen, try opening this address using your browser’s incognito mode.
Deploy the model for inference with SageMaker
After connecting to Jupyter Notebook, follow this notebook. Alternatively, choose File, New,  Notebook, and then select Python 3 as the kernel. Use the following instructions and run the notebook cells.

In the notebook, install the sagemaker and huggingface_hub libraries.

!pip install sagemaker

Next, get a SageMaker session and execution role that will allow you to create and manage SageMaker resources. You’ll use a Deep Learning Container.

import os
import sagemaker
from sagemaker.huggingface import get_huggingface_llm_image_uri

os.environ[‘AWS_DEFAULT_REGION’] = ‘us-east-1’

sess = sagemaker.Session()
role = sagemaker.get_execution_role()
print(f”sagemaker role arn: {role}”)

# retrieve the llm image uri
llm_image = get_huggingface_llm_image_uri(
“huggingface-neuronx”,
version=”0.0.25″
)

# print ecr image uri
print(f”llm image uri: {llm_image}”)

Deploy the compiled model to a SageMaker real-time endpoint on AWS Inferentia2.

Change user_id in the following code to your Hugging Face username. Make sure to update HF_MODEL_ID and HUGGING_FACE_HUB_TOKEN with your Hugging Face username and your access token.

from sagemaker.huggingface import HuggingFaceModel

# sagemaker config
instance_type = “ml.inf2.24xlarge”
health_check_timeout=2400 # additional time to load the model
volume_size=512 # size in GB of the EBS volume

# Define Model and Endpoint configuration parameter
config = {
“HF_MODEL_ID”: “user_id/Mixtral-8x7B-Instruct-v0.1”, # replace with your model id if you are using your own model
“HF_NUM_CORES”: “4”, # number of neuron cores
“HF_AUTO_CAST_TYPE”: “fp16”,  # dtype of the model
“MAX_BATCH_SIZE”: “1”, # max batch size for the model
“MAX_INPUT_LENGTH”: “1000”, # max length of input text
“MAX_TOTAL_TOKENS”: “1024”, # max length of generated text
“MESSAGES_API_ENABLED”: “true”, # Enable the messages API
“HUGGING_FACE_HUB_TOKEN”: “hf_…” # Add your Hugging Face token here
}

# create HuggingFaceModel with the image uri
llm_model = HuggingFaceModel(
role=role,
image_uri=llm_image,
env=config
)

You’re now ready to deploy the model to a SageMaker real-time inference endpoint. SageMaker will provision the necessary compute resources instance and retrieve and launch the inference container. This will download the model artifacts from your Hugging Face repository, load the model to the Inferentia devices and start inference serving. This process can take several minutes.

# Deploy model to an endpoint
# https://sagemaker.readthedocs.io/en/stable/api/inference/model.html#sagemaker.model.Model.deploy

llm_model._is_compiled_model = True # We precompiled the model

llm = llm_model.deploy(
initial_instance_count=1,
instance_type=instance_type,
container_startup_health_check_timeout=health_check_timeout,
volume_size=volume_size
)

Next, run a test to check the endpoint. Update user_id to match your Hugging Face username, then create the prompt and parameters.

# Prompt to generate
messages=[
{ “role”: “system”, “content”: “You are a helpful assistant.” },
{ “role”: “user”, “content”: “What is deep learning?” }
]

# Generation arguments
parameters = {
“model”: “user_id/Mixtral-8x7B-Instruct-v0.1”, # replace user_id
“top_p”: 0.6,
“temperature”: 0.9,
“max_tokens”: 1000,
}

Send the prompt to the SageMaker real-time endpoint for inference

chat = llm.predict({“messages” :messages, **parameters})

print(chat[“choices”][0][“message”][“content”].strip())

In the future, if you want to connect to this inference endpoint from other applications, first find the name of the inference endpoint. Alternatively, you can use the SageMaker console and choose Inference, and then Endpoints to see a list of the SageMaker endpoints deployed in your account.

endpoints = sess.sagemaker_client.list_endpoints()

for endpoint in endpoints[‘Endpoints’]:
print(endpoint[‘EndpointName’])

Use the endpoint name to update the following code, which can also be run in other locations.

from sagemaker.huggingface import HuggingFacePredictor

endpoint_name=”endpoint_name…”

llm = HuggingFacePredictor(
endpoint_name=endpoint_name,
sagemaker_session=sess
)

Cleanup
Delete the endpoint to prevent future charges for the provisioned resources.

llm.delete_model()
llm.delete_endpoint()

Conclusion
In this post, we covered how to compile and deploy the Mixtral 8x7B language model on AWS Inferentia2 using the Hugging Face Optimum Neuron container and Amazon SageMaker. AWS Inferentia2 offers a cost-effective solution for hosting models like Mixtral, providing high-performance inference at a lower cost.
For more information, see Deploy Mixtral 8x7B on AWS Inferentia2 with Hugging Face Optimum.
For other methods to compile and run Mixtral inference on Inferentia2 and Trainium see the Run Hugging Face mistralai/Mixtral-8x7B-v0.1 autoregressive sampling on Inf2 & Trn1 tutorial located in the AWS Neuron Documentation and Notebook.

About the authors
Lior Sadan is a Senior Solutions Architect at AWS, with an affinity for storage solutions and AI/ML implementations. He helps customers architect scalable cloud systems and optimize their infrastructure. Outside of work, Lior enjoys hands-on home renovation and construction projects.
Stenio de Lima Ferreira is a Senior Solutions Architect passionate about AI and automation. With over 15 years of work experience in the field, he has a background in cloud infrastructure, devops and data science. He specializes in codifying complex requirements into reusable patterns and breaking down difficult topics into accessible content.

Modern banking faces dual challenges: delivering rapid loan processing while maintaining robust security against sophisticated fraud. Amazon Q Business provides AI-driven analysis of regulatory requirements and lending patterns. Additionally, you can now report fraud from the same interface with a custom plugin capability that can integrate with Amazon Connect. This fusion of technology transforms traditional lending by enabling faster processing times, faster fraud prevention, and a seamless user experience.
Amazon Q Business is a generative AI-powered assistant that can answer questions, provide summaries, generate content, and securely complete tasks based on data and information in your enterprise systems. Amazon Q Business provides plugins to interact with popular third-party applications, such as Jira, ServiceNow, Salesforce, PagerDuty, and more. Administrators can enable these plugins with a ready-to-use library of over 50 actions to their Amazon Q Business application. Where pre-built plugins are not available, Amazon Q Business provides capabilities to build custom plugins to integrate with your application. Plugins help streamline tasks and boost productivity by integrating external services into the Amazon Q Business chat interface.
Amazon Connect is an AI-powered application that provides one seamless experience for your contact center customers and users. It’s comprised of a full suite of features across communication channels. Amazon Connect Cases, a feature of Amazon Connect, allows your agents to track and manage customer issues that require multiple interactions, follow-up tasks, and teams in your contact center. Agents can document customer issues with the relevant case details, such as date/time opened, issue summary, customer information, and status, in a single unified view.
The solution integrates with Okta Identity Management Platform to provide robust authentication, authorization, and single sign-on (SSO) capabilities across applications. Okta can support enterprise federation clients like Active Directory, LDAP, or Ping.
For loan approval officers reviewing mortgage applications, the seamless integration of Amazon Q Business directly into their primary workflow transforms the user experience. Rather than context-switching between applications, officers can harness the capabilities of Amazon Q to conduct research, analyze data, and report potential fraud cases within their mortgage approval interface.
In this post, we demonstrate how to elevate business productivity by leveraging Amazon Q to provide insights that enable research, data analysis, and report potential fraud cases within Amazon Connect.
Solution overview
The following diagram illustrates the solution architecture.

The solution includes the following steps:

Users in Okta are configured to be federated to AWS IAM Identity Center, and a unique ID (audience) is configured for an Amazon API Gateway
When the user chooses to chat in the web application, the following flow is initiated:

The Amazon Q Business application uses the client ID and client secret key to exchange the Okta-generated JSON Web Token (JWT) with IAM Identity Center. The token includes the AWS Security Token Service (AWS STS) context identity.
A temporary token is issued to the application server to assume the role and access the Amazon Q Business API.

The Amazon Q Business application fetches information from the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) data source to answer questions or generate summaries.
The Amazon Q custom plugin uses an Open API schema to discover and understand the capabilities of the API Gateway API.
A client secret is stored in AWS Secrets Manager and the information is provided to the plugin.
The plugin assumes the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) role with the kms:decrypt action to access the secrets in Secret Manager.
When a user wants to send a case, the custom plugin invokes the API hosted on API Gateway.
API Gateway uses the same Okta user’s session and authorizes the access.
API Gateway invokes AWS Lambda to create a case in Amazon Connect.
Lambda hosted in Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) internally calls the Amazon Connect API using an Amazon Connect VPC interface endpoint powered by AWS PrivateLink.
The contact center agents can also use Amazon Q in Connect to further assist the user.

Prerequisites
The following prerequisites need to be met before you can build the solution:

Have a valid AWS account.
Have an Amazon Q Business Pro subscription to create Amazon Q applications.
Have the service-linked IAM role AWSServiceRoleForQBusiness. If you don’t have one, create it with the amazonaws.com service name.
Have an IAM role in the account that will allow the AWS CloudFormation template to create new roles and add policies. If you have administrator access to the account, no action is required.
Enable logging in AWS CloudTrail for operational and risk auditing.

Okta prerequisites:

Have an Okta developer account and setup an application and API. If you do not have an Okta, please see the following instructions.

Set up an application and API in Okta
Complete the following steps to set up an application and API in Okta:

Log in to the Okta console.
Provide credentials and choose Login.
Choose Continue with Google.
You might need to set up multi-factor authentication following the instructions on the page.
Log in using the authentication code.
In the navigation pane, choose Applications and choose Create App Integration.

Select OIDC – OpenID for Sign-in method and Web Application for Application type, then choose Next.

For App integration name, enter a name (for example, myConnectApp).
Select Authorization Code and Refresh Token for Grant type.
Select Skip group assignment for now for Control Access.
Choose Save to create an application.
Take note of the client ID and secret.

Add Authentication server and metadata

In the navigation pane, choose Security, then choose API.
Choose Add Authorization Server, provide the necessary details, and choose Save.

Take note of the Audience value and choose Metadata URI.

Audience is provided as an input to the CloudFormation template later in the section.

The response will provide the metadata.

From the response, take note of the following:

issuer
authorization_endpoint
token_endpoint

Under Scopes, choose Add Scope, provide the name write/tasks, and choose Create.

On the Access Policies tab, choose Add Policy.
Provide a name and description.
Select The following clients and choose the application by entering my in the text box and choosing the application created earlier.
Choose Create Policy to add a policy.

Choose Add Rule to add a rule and select only Authorization Code for Grant type is.
For Scopes requested, select The following scopes, then enter write in the text box and select the write/tasks
Adjust Access token lifetime is and Refresh token lifetime is to minutes.
Add but will expire if not used every as 5 minutes.
Choose Create rule to create the rule.

Add users

In the navigation pane, choose Directory and choose People.
Choose Add person.

Complete the fields:

First name
Last name
Username (use the same as the primary email)
Primary email

Select Send user activation email now.
Choose Save to save the user.

You will receive an email. Choose the link in the email to activate the user.
Choose Groups, then choose Add group to add the group.
Provide a name and optional description.
Refresh the page and choose the newly created group.
Choose Assign people to assign users.
Add the newly created user by choosing the plus sign next to the user.

Under Applications, select the application name created earlier.
On the Assignments tab, choose Assign to People.

Select the user and choose Assign.
Choose Done to complete the assignment.

Set up Okta as an identity source in IAM Identity Center
Complete the following steps to set up Okta as an identity source:

Enable an IAM Identity Center instance.
Configure SAML and SCIM with Okta and IAM Identity Center.
On the IAM Identity Center console, navigate to the instance.
Under Settings, copy the value Instance ARN. You will need it when you run the CloudFormation template.

Deploy resources using AWS CloudFormation
In this step, we use a CloudFormation template to deploy a Lambda function, configure the REST API, and create identities. Complete the following steps:

Open the AWS CloudFormation console in the us-east-1 AWS Region.
Choose Create stack.
Download the CloudFormation template and upload it in the Specify template
Choose Next.
For Stack name, enter a name (for example, QIntegrationWithConnect).
In the Parameters section, provide values for the following:

Audience
AuthorizationUrl
ClientId
ClientSecret
IdcInstanceArn
Issuer
TokenUrl

Choose Next.
Keep the other values as default and select I acknowledge that AWS CloudFormation might create IAM resources in the Capabilities.
Select I acknowledge that AWS CloudFormation might require the following capability: CAPABILITY_AUTO_EXPAND in the Capabilities.
Choose Submit to create the CloudFormation stack.
After the successful deployment of the stack, on the Outputs tab, note the value for ALBDNSName.

The CloudFormation template does not deploy certificates for Application Load Balancer. We strongly recommend creating a secure listener for the Application Load Balancer and deploying at least one certificate.
Assign user to Amazon Q Application

On the Amazon Q Business console, navigate to the application named qbusiness-connect-case.
Under User Access, choose Manage user access.
On the user tab, choose Add groups and users and search for the user you created in Okta and propagated in IAM Identity Center.
Choose Assign and Done.

Choose Confirm to confirm the subscription.
Copy the link for Deployed URL.

Create a callback URL: <Deployed URL>/oauth/callback.

We recommend that you enable a budget policy notification to prevent unwanted billing.
Configure login credentials for the web application
Complete the following steps to configure login credentials for the web application:

Navigate to the Okta developer login.
Under Applications, choose the web application myConnectApp created earlier.
Choose Edit in the General Settings
Enter the callback URL for Sign-in redirect URIs.
Choose Save.

Sync the knowledge base
Complete the following steps to sync your knowledge base:

On the Amazon S3 console, choose Buckets in the navigation pane.
Search for AmazonQDataSourceBucket and choose the bucket.
Download the sample AnyBank regulations document.
Upload the PDF file to the S3 bucket.
On the Amazon Q Business console, navigate to the Amazon Q Business application.
In the Data sources section, select the data source.
Choose Sync now to sync the data source.

Embed the web application
Complete the following steps to embed the web application:

On the Amazon Q Business console, under Enhancements, choose Amazon Q embedded.
Choose Add allowed website.
For Enter website URL, enter http://<ALBDNSName>.

Test the solution
Complete the following steps to test the solution:

Copy the ALBDNSName value from the outputs section of the CloudFormation stack and open it in a browser.

You will see an AnyBank website.

Choose Chat with us and the Okta sign-in page will pop up.
Provide the sign-in details.

Upon verification, close the browser tab.
Navigate to the Amazon Q Business application in the chat window.
In the chat window, enter “What are the Fraud Detection and Prevention Measures?”

Amazon Q Business will provide the answers from the knowledge base.
Next, let’s assume that you detected a fraud and want to create a case.

Choose the plugin CreateCase and ask the question, “Can you create a case reporting fraud?”

Amazon Q Business generates the title of the case based on the question.

Choose Submit.
If Amazon Q Business asks you to authorize your access, choose Authorize.

The CreateCase plugin will create a case in Amazon Connect

Navigate to Amazon Connect and open the access URL in a browser.
Provide the user name admin and get the password from visiting the parameter store in AWS Systems Manager.

Choose Agent Workspace.

You can see the case that was created by Amazon Q Business using the custom plugin.

Clean up
To avoid incurring future charges, delete the resources that you created and clean up your account:

Empty the contents of the S3 buckets you created as part of the CloudFormation stack.
Delete the CloudFormation stack you created as part of this post.
Disable the application from IAM Identity Center.

Conclusion
As businesses navigate the ever-changing corporate environment, the combination of Amazon Q Business and Amazon Connect emerges as a transformative approach to optimizing employee assistance and operational effectiveness. Harnessing the capabilities of AI-powered assistants and advanced contact center tools, organizations can empower their teams to access data, initiate support requests, and collaborate cohesively through a unified solution. This post showcased a banking portal, but this can be used for other industrial sectors or organizational verticals.
Stay up to date with the latest advancements in generative AI and start building on AWS. If you’re seeking assistance on how to begin, check out the Generative AI Innovation Center.

About the Authors
Sujatha Dantuluri is a seasoned Senior Solutions Architect in the US federal civilian team at AWS, with over two decades of experience supporting commercial and federal government clients. Her expertise lies in architecting mission-critical solutions and working closely with customers to ensure their success. Sujatha is an accomplished public speaker, frequently sharing her insights and knowledge at industry events and conferences. She has contributed to IEEE standards and is passionate about empowering others through her engaging presentations and thought-provoking ideas.
Dr Anil Giri is a Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services. He works with enterprise software and SaaS customers to help them build generative AI applications and implement serverless architectures on AWS. His focus is on guiding clients to create innovative, scalable solutions using cutting-edge cloud technologies.

In this hands-on tutorial, we’ll build an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server that allows Claude Desktop to fetch stock news sentiment and daily top gainers and movers via the AlphaVantage API. Since most LLMs can’t directly access real-time financial data, this solution uses MCP to provide real-time insights.

We’ll expose two tools from our server:

get_news_sentiment

get_top_movers

Let’s walk through each step.

Step 1: Setting Up the Environment

We will first set up our environment and start with installing the uv package manager. For Mac or Linux:

Copy CodeCopiedUse a different Browsercurl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh

For Windows (PowerShell):

Copy CodeCopiedUse a different Browserpowershell -ExecutionPolicy ByPass -c “irm https://astral.sh/uv/install.ps1 | iex”

We will then create a new project directory and initialize it with uv

Copy CodeCopiedUse a different Browseruv init stockNews
cd stockNews

We can now create and activate a virtual environment. For Mac or Linux:

Copy CodeCopiedUse a different Browseruv venv
source .venv/bin/activate

For Windows:

Copy CodeCopiedUse a different Browseruv venv
.venvScriptsactivate

We will now install the required dependencies

Copy CodeCopiedUse a different Browseruv add mcp httpx python-dotenv

Step 3: Setting Up the Environment Variables

We will now create a .env file that contains the API key for AlphaVantage. To generate a free API key:

Go to https://www.alphavantage.co/

Click on Get free API key button, or use the following url https://www.alphavantage.co/support/#api-key

Enter your email and other required details. You’ll receive an API key—copy it and keep it safe, as this will be used to authenticate your requests.

Now, create a .env file and add the following line:

Copy CodeCopiedUse a different BrowserALPHA_VANTAGE_API_KEY = your_api_key

Step 4: Implementing the MCP Server and integrating AlphaVantage

First create a stockNews.py file in the directory that we created and add the following code snippets:

Importing packages and setting up the instance:

We will first import the necessary packages and set up instance to use the API

Copy CodeCopiedUse a different Browserfrom typing import Any
import os
import httpx
from mcp.server.fastmcp import FastMCP
from dotenv import load_dotenv

# Load .env variables
load_dotenv()
API_KEY = os.getenv(“ALPHA_VANTAGE_API_KEY”)

# Initialize FastMCP server
mcp = FastMCP(“alpha-finance”)

# Constants
BASE_URL = “https://www.alphavantage.co/query”

Helper functions

Next, let’s add our helper functions for querying the data from AlphaVantage.

Copy CodeCopiedUse a different Browserasync def call_alpha_vantage(endpoint: str, params: dict[str, Any]) -> dict[str, Any] | None:
“””Generic async caller to Alpha Vantage.”””
params[“apikey”] = API_KEY
params[“function”] = endpoint
async with httpx.AsyncClient() as client:
try:
response = await client.get(BASE_URL, params=params, timeout=30.0)
response.raise_for_status()
return response.json()
except Exception:
return None

Implementing tool execution

The tool execution handler is responsible for executing the logic of each tool.

Copy CodeCopiedUse a different Browser@mcp.tool()
async def get_news_sentiment(ticker: str) -> str:
“””Get news sentiment data for a stock ticker.

Args:
ticker: Stock ticker symbol (e.g., MSFT, AAPL)
“””
data = await call_alpha_vantage(“NEWS_SENTIMENT”, {“tickers”: ticker.upper()})
if not data or “feed” not in data:
return “Couldn’t retrieve news sentiment.”

articles = data[“feed”][:3]
result = []
for item in articles:
result.append(f”””
{item[‘title’]}
Summary: {item[‘summary’]}
Source: {item[‘source’]} | Published: {item[‘time_published’]}
“””)
return “n—n”.join(result)

@mcp.tool()
async def get_top_movers() -> str:
“””Get top gainers and losers from the stock market.

No arguments required.
“””
data = await call_alpha_vantage(“TOP_GAINERS_LOSERS”, {})
if not data:
return “Couldn’t retrieve top movers.”

gainers = data.get(“top_gainers”, [])[:3]
losers = data.get(“top_losers”, [])[:3]

result = “**Top Gainers**n”
result += “n”.join([
f”{g[‘ticker’]} ({g.get(‘change_percentage’, ‘N/A’)})”
for g in gainers
])

result += “nn**Top Losers**n”
result += “n”.join([
f”{l[‘ticker’]} ({l.get(‘change_percentage’, ‘N/A’)})”
for l in losers
])

return result

Running the server

Finally, let’s initialize and run the server:

Copy CodeCopiedUse a different Browserif __name__ == “__main__”:
mcp.run(transport=”stdio”)

We will now test our server from an existing MCP host, Claude for Desktop.

Step 5: Testing the server

First, ensure you have Claude for Desktop installed. If not, download and install the latest version from the official source. If you already have it, make sure it’s up to date.

Next, you’ll need to configure Claude to connect with your MCP server. To do this, open the claude_desktop_config.json file located in the Claude directory using any text editor. If the file doesn’t exist, go ahead and create it manually.

For MacOS/Linux:

Copy CodeCopiedUse a different Browser{
“mcpServers”: {
“stockNews”: {
“command”: “uv”,
“args”: [
“–directory”,
“/ABSOLUTE/PATH/TO/PARENT/FOLDER/stockNews”,
“run”,
“stockNews.py”
]
}
}
}

For Windows:

Copy CodeCopiedUse a different Browser{
“mcpServers”: {
“stockNews”: {
“command”: “uv”,
“args”: [
“–directory”,
“C:\ABSOLUTE\PATH\TO\PARENT\FOLDER\stockNews”,
“run”,
“stockNews.py”
]
}
}
}

This configuration lets Claude for Desktop know that:

There’s an MCP server called “stockNews”.

It should be launched using the following command:uv –directory /ABSOLUTE/PATH/TO/PARENT/FOLDER/stockNews run stockNews.py

Once you’ve added this to your config file, save the file and restart Claude for Desktop to apply the changes.

Test with commands

To confirm that Claude for Desktop has recognized the two tools from your stockNews server, look for the hammer icon in the Claude interface — this icon indicates tool access.

After clicking on the hammer icon, you should see two tools listed:

We can test the server by running the following prompts:

What is the news sentiment for Apple?

Who are the top gainers and losers from the stock market?

When you ask Claude a question:

The client sends your query to Claude.

Claude reviews the available tools (like get_news_sentiment or get_top_movers) and determines which one(s) to use based on your question.

The selected tool is executed via the MCP server you configured earlier.

The tool returns the results back to Claude.

Claude uses those results to craft a natural language response.

The final response is shown to you in the chat interface.

This seamless flow is what allows Claude to interact with real-time data in a structured and controlled way.

Conclusion:

Our MCP-based stock insights server extends Claude Desktop’s capabilities by enabling real-time financial data retrieval. By integrating the AlphaVantage API with a custom MCP server, users can fetch live news sentiment and track top market movers directly through Claude. This setup empowers users with timely, actionable stock insights—all within a conversational interface—making financial analysis more efficient, contextual, and interactive.
The post Code Implementation to Building a Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server and Connecting It with Claude Desktop appeared first on MarkTechPost.

Many organizations rely on multiple third-party applications and services for different aspects of their operations, such as scheduling, HR management, financial data, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, and more. However, these systems often exist in silos, requiring users to manually navigate different interfaces, switch between environments, and perform repetitive tasks, which can be time-consuming and inefficient.
Moreover, while many enterprise systems are equipped with APIs for integration, users often lack the technical expertise to interact with these APIs directly. As a result, organizations need an intuitive and seamless way to query data and perform actions across these applications using natural language, without requiring specialized knowledge of each system or its APIs.
To address the challenge of integrating multiple third-party applications into a unified, natural language-driven interface, users can use plugins for Amazon Q Business. Plugins provide a way to bridge the gap between complex, siloed enterprise applications in a user-friendly interfacing empowering users to take action across systems with easy. Amazon Q Business supports multiple enterprise systems with pre-built plugins, as well as custom plugins, that users can use to integrate a variety of enterprise systems with Amazon Q Business applications.
Solution overview
In this post, we demonstrate how you can use custom plugins for Amazon Q Business to build a chatbot that can interact with multiple APIs using natural language prompts. We showcase how to build an AIOps chatbot that enables users to interact with their AWS infrastructure through natural language queries and commands. The chatbot is capable of handling tasks such as querying the data about Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) ports and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets access settings. For example, users can ask the chatbot questions like “Which EC2 instances have port 3389 open?” or request actions such as “Please close public access for S3 buckets.”
By integrating other AWS services with Amazon Q using OpenAPI schemas, the chatbot can not only retrieve real-time information (such as checking which S3 buckets have public access), but also take corrective actions (such as closing open ports or public access) in response to user commands. This solution reduces manual intervention and simplifies complex cloud operations by enabling IT teams to manage infrastructure through natural language interactions. The chatbot will streamline operational tasks, reduce the need for switching between different tools, and improve the efficiency of IT and operations teams by allowing them to interact with complex systems using simple, intuitive language.
Architecture
To implement the solution, you will build the following architecture.

Users sign in the AIOps Chatbot using the credentials configured in AWS IAM Identity Center. You will use finding and removing public access from S3 buckets along with finding and closing specific open ports on Amazon EC2 instances as the use cases to demonstrate the capability of this AIOps chatbot using Amazon Q Business custom plugins. However, you can extend the architecture to support other operations use cases through API based integration.
You deploy the required infrastructure using the AWS Serverless Application Model (AWS SAM).
The following is a summary of the functionality of the architecture:

The UI for the chatbot is built using an Amazon Q Business web experience.
The user authentication and authorization are handled by AWS IAM Identity Center.
Relevant actions are identified based on natural language queries from the users using Amazon Q Business custom plugins. Amazon Q Business uses the configured third-party OpenAPI specifications to dynamically determine which API operations to perform to fulfill an end user request.
The APIs are implemented using Amazon API Gateway and AWS Lambda functions.

Prerequisites

Create an AWS account if you do not already have one.
Have access to an AWS account through the AWS Management Console and the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI). The AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) user that you use must have permissions to make the necessary AWS service calls and manage AWS resources mentioned in this post. While providing permissions to the IAM user, follow the principle of least-privilege.
Have Git installed.
Have AWS Serverless Application Model (AWS SAM)
You must have an Amazon Q Business subscription.
You must enable AWS IAM Identity Center.
[Optional] You can pre-create the user in the Identity Center directory that you will be using to sign in to the Amazon Q Business application.

Deploy and run the solution
The resources in this demonstration will be provisioned in the US East (N. Virginia) AWS Region (us-east-1). You walk through the following phases to implement the model customization workflow:

Deploy the solution using the AWS SAM template
Configure a user for the AIOps Q Business chatbot application
Test the AIOps Q Business chatbot application
Clean up

Step 1: Deploy the solution using the AWS SAM template
See the GitHub repository for the latest instructions. Run the following steps to deploy the AWS Step Functions workflow using the AWS SAM template.

Create a new directory, navigate to that directory in a terminal, and clone the GitHub repository:

git clone https://github.com/aws-samples/ai-ops-with-amazon-q-business.git

2. Change directory to the solution directory:

cd ai-ops-with-amazon-q-business

3. Run the following command to deploy the resources using SAM.

sam deploy -g

4. When prompted, enter the following parameter values:

Stack Name [sam-app]: aiops
AWS Region [us-east-1]: us-east-1
Confirm changes before deploy [y/N]: N

Allow SAM CLI IAM role creation [Y/n]: Y

Disable rollback [y/N]: N

FindS3BucketsWithPublicAccessFunction has no authentication. Is this okay? [y/N]: y

RemovePublicAcessFromS3BucketFunction has no authentication. Is this okay? [y/N]: y

FindEC2WithSpecificOpenPortFunction has no authentication. Is this okay? [y/N]: y

CloseUnwantedPortForEC2Function has no authentication. Is this okay? [y/N]: y

Save arguments to configuration file [Y/n]: Y

SAM configuration file [samconfig.toml]: hit enter

SAM configuration environment [default]: hit enter  

5. Note the outputs from the AWS SAM deployment process. This contains the Amazon Q Business web experience (chatbot) URL. Before you can sign in to the chatbot application, you must set up a user.
Step 2: Configure a user for the AIOps Amazon Q Business chatbot application
Use the following steps to configure a user for the AIOps chatbot application.

Open Amazon Q Business from the console and select the AIOps application.

2. Choose Manage access and subscription.

3. Choose Add groups and users.

4. Select either Add and assign new users or Assign existing users and groups depending on if you pre-created the user as mentioned in the prerequisites and choose Next.

5. If you have an existing user that you want to provide access to your AIOps application, search for and select the username and choose Assign.

6. On the review page, select the current subscription and choose Confirm.

Step 3: Test the AIOps Q Business chatbot application
Use the following steps to log into the chatbot and test it. Responses from large language models are non-deterministic. Hence, you may not get the exact same response every time.

Take the QBusinessWebExperienceURL from the sam deploy output using the user credential configured in the previous step.
After signing in to the AIOps Chatbot, select the kebab menu option (three dots) at the bottom right corner and select the AIOpsCustomPlugin as follows:

3. Enable public access on an Amazon S3 bucket. This is done for testing purposes only, so check your organization policies before performing this test. For this demo we used a bucket named aiops-chatbot-demo.
4. Return to the AIOps Chatbot and enter a question such as: Do I have any S3 bucket with public access? and choose Submit. Provide the bucket prefix to narrow down the search.

5. The AIOps chatbot identifies the buckets that have public access:

6. Ask a follow up question such as: Please block the public access. The chat bot blocks public access. Validate the change from the S3 console.

7. Open a port, such as 1234, for an Amazon EC2 instance using security group inbound rules.

8. Return to the chat bot and enter a question such as: Do I have any EC2 instance with port 1234 open?
9. After the chat bot identifies the EC2 instance with the open port, confirm that you want to close the port.
10. The chat bot closes the open port and confirms.

Clean up
Properly decommissioning provisioned AWS resources is an important best practice to optimize costs and enhance security posture after concluding proofs of concept and demonstrations. To delete the resources deployed to your AWS account through AWS SAM, run the following command:

sam delete

OpenAPI schema definition
After the custom plugin is deployed, Amazon Q Business will process a user’s prompt and use the OpenAPI schema to dynamically determine the appropriate APIs to call to accomplish the user’s goal. Therefore, the OpenAPI schema definition has a big impact on API selection accuracy. Follow the best practices for OpenAPI schema definition for ideal results. This AIOps chatbot demonstrated four operations supported by the following API operations:

find-s3-bucket-with-public-access – This API finds S3 buckets that have the specified prefix and are configured for public access.
remove-public-access-from-s3-bucket – This API removes public access from a specific S3 bucket.
find-ec2-with-specific-open-port – This API finds EC2 instances that have a specified port open for inbound access.
close-unwanted-port-for-ec2 – This API removes a specified port from a given EC2 instance.

The API operations are implemented using API Gateway and Lambda functions.
Troubleshooting
The following are some troubleshooting steps if you encounter errors while using the AIOps chatbot.

As Amazon Q Business dynamically determines the appropriate API operations to be invoked, the questions (prompts) must be unambiguous. Be specific rather than asking generic questions. For example: Do I have any EC2 instance with port 1234 open? instead of Do I have any EC2 exposed to internet?
The APIs are exposed using API Gateway backed by Lambda functions. Check that you can invoke the API operations using Curl or API testing tools.
Check the Lambda function logs in Amazon CloudWatch for errors. Follow the Lambda debugging steps if needed.

Conclusion
In this post, you learned an end-to-end process for creating an AIOps chatbot using Amazon Q Business custom plugins, demonstrating how users can use natural language processing to interact with AWS resources and streamline cloud operations. By integrating other AWS services with Amazon Q Business, the chatbot can query infrastructure for security and compliance status while automating key actions such as closing open ports or restricting public access to S3 buckets. This solution enhances operational efficiency, reduces manual intervention, and enabled teams to manage complex environments more effectively through intuitive, conversational interfaces. With custom plugins and OpenAPI schemas, users can build a powerful, flexible chatbot solution tailored to their specific operational needs, transforming the way they manage IT operations and respond to business challenges.
Further study
For more information on Amazon Q Business and custom plugins:

Amazon Q Business
Custom plugins for Amazon Q Business
Prerequisites for Amazon Q Business custom plugins
Defining OpenAPI schemas for custom plugins
Creating an Amazon Q Business custom plugin
Using an Amazon Q Business custom plugin
Best practices for OpenAPI schema definition for custom plugins

About the authors
Upendra V is a Sr. Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services, specializing in Generative AI and cloud solutions. He helps enterprise customers design and deploy production-ready Generative AI workloads, implement Large Language Models (LLMs) and Agentic AI systems, and optimize cloud deployments. With expertise in cloud adoption and machine learning, he enables organizations to build and scale AI-driven applications efficiently.
Biswanath Mukherjee is a Senior Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services. He works with large strategic customers of AWS by providing them technical guidance to migrate and modernize their applications on AWS Cloud. With his extensive experience in cloud architecture and migration, he partners with customers to develop innovative solutions that leverage the scalability, reliability, and agility of AWS to meet their business needs. His expertise spans diverse industries and use cases, enabling customers to unlock the full potential of the AWS Cloud.

This post is co-written with Keith Brazil, Julien Didier, and Bryan Rand from TransPerfect.
TransPerfect, a global leader in language and technology solutions, serves a diverse array of industries. Founded in 1992, TransPerfect has grown into an enterprise with over 10,000 employees in more than 140 cities on six continents. The company offers a broad spectrum of services, including translation, localization, interpretation, multicultural marketing, website globalization, subtitling, voiceovers, and legal support services. TransPerfect also uses cutting-edge technology to offer AI-driven language solutions, such as its proprietary translation management system, GlobalLink.
This post describes how the AWS Customer Channel Technology – Localization Team worked with TransPerfect to integrate Amazon Bedrock into the GlobalLink translation management system, a cloud-based solution designed to help organizations manage their multilingual content and translation workflows. Organizations use TransPerfect’s solution to rapidly create and deploy content at scale in multiple languages using AI.
Amazon Bedrock is a fully managed service that simplifies the deployment and management of generative AI models. It offers access to a variety of foundation models (FMs), enabling developers to build and scale AI applications efficiently. Amazon Bedrock is designed to be highly scalable, secure, and straightforward to integrate with other AWS services, making it suitable for a broad array of use cases, including language translation.
The AWS Customer Channel Technology – Localization Team is a long-standing TransPerfect customer. The team manages the end-to-end localization process of digital content at AWS, including webpages, technical documentation, ebooks, banners, videos, and more. The AWS team handles billions of words in multiple languages across digital assets. Given the growing demand for multilingual content by internationally minded businesses and new local cloud adoption journeys, the AWS team needs to support an ever-increasing load and a wider set of languages. To do so, the team relies on the GlobalLink technology suite to optimize and automate translation processes.
The challenge
The AWS team and TransPerfect created streamlined custom workflows and toolsets that enable the translation and delivery of billions of words each year. Content localization is a multi-step process consisting minimally of asset handoff, asset preprocessing, machine translation, post-editing, quality review cycles, and asset handback. These steps are often manual, costly, and time-consuming. AWS and TransPerfect are continually striving to optimize this workflow to enable the processing of more content at a lower cost and to decrease those assets’ time to market—providing valuable, salient content faster for non-English-speaking customers. Additionally, transcreation of creative content posed a unique challenge, because it traditionally required highly skilled human linguists and was resistant to automation, resulting in higher costs and longer turnaround times. To address these issues, TransPerfect worked with AWS to evaluate generative AI-powered initiatives for transcreation and automatic post-editing within TransPerfect’s GlobalLink architecture.
Security and data safety
Amazon Bedrock helps make sure data is neither shared with FM providers nor used to improve base models. Amazon Bedrock adheres to major compliance standards like ISO and SOC and is also a FedRAMP-authorized service, making it suitable for government contracts. The extensive monitoring and logging capabilities of Amazon Bedrock allow TransPerfect to align with stringent auditability requirements.
Although data safety is a key requirement, there are many other factors to take into account, such as responsible AI. Amazon Bedrock Guardrails enabled TransPerfect to build and customize truthfulness protections for the automatic post-edit offering. Large language models (LLMs) can generate incorrect information due to hallucinations. Amazon Bedrock supports contextual grounding checks to detect and filter hallucinations if the responses are factually incorrect or inconsistent. This is a critical feature for a translation solution that requires perfect accuracy.
Harnessing LLMs for automatic post-editing
To translate at scale, Amazon Translate powered machine translation is used in AWS team workflows. Segments whose translations can’t be recycled from translation memories (databases of previous high-quality human translations) are routed to machine translation workflows. Depending on the language or content, Amazon either uses a machine translation-only workflow where content is translated and published with no human touch, or machine translation post-edit workflows. Post-editing is when a linguist finesses the machine-translated output of a given segment to make sure it correctly conveys the meaning of the original sentence and is in line with AWS style guides and agreed glossaries. Because this process can add days to the translation timeline, automating some or all of the process would have a major impact on cost and turnaround times.
The following diagram illustrates the machine translation workflow.

The workflow consists of the following components:

TM (translation memory) – The translation memory is a client-specific repository of previously translated and approved content. It’s always applied first and maximizes the reuse of existing translations.
MT (machine translation) – After existing translations are applied, new content is processed through machine translation using Amazon Translate.
APE (automated post-edit) – An LLM is employed to edit, improve, and correct machine-translated content.
HPE (human post-edit) – A subject matter expert linguist revises and perfects the machine-translated content.

The following example follows the path through the preceding workflow for one source segment.

Source
To choose user name attributes, don’t select User name as a sign-in option when you create your user pool.

MT
Pour choisir des attributs de nom d’utilisateur, évitez de sélectionner User name (Nom d’utilisateur) comme option de connexion au moment de créer votre groupe d’utilisateurs.

APE
Pour choisir des attributs de nom d’utilisateur, évitez de sélectionner User name (Nom d’utilisateur) comme option de connexion lorsque vous créez votre groupe d’utilisateurs.

HPE
Pour choisir les attributs de nom d’utilisateur, évitez de sélectionner User name (Nom d’utilisateur) comme option de connexion lorsque vous créez votre groupe d’utilisateurs.

TransPerfect began working with generative AI and LLMs several years ago with the foresight that AI was on track to disrupt the translation industry. As expected, localization workflows have mostly shifted to “expert in the loop”, and are striving toward “no human touch” models. In pursuit of this, TransPerfect chose to use Amazon Bedrock within its GlobalLink Enterprise solution to further automate and optimize these workflows. Amazon Bedrock, by design, provides data ownership and security. This is a critical feature for TransPerfect clients, especially those in sensitive industries such as life sciences or banking.
With Amazon Bedrock and GlobalLink, machine-translated content is now routed through one of the LLMs available in Amazon Bedrock for automatic post-editing. By using style guides, relevant examples of approved translations, and examples of errors to avoid, the LLM is prompted to improve existing machine translations. This post-edited content is either handed off to a linguist for a lighter post-edit (a less difficult task) or is applied in “no human touch workflows” to greatly improve the output. The result is enhanced quality across the board and the ability for post-editors to focus on higher-value edits.
For post-editing, over 95% of all edits suggested by Amazon Bedrock LLMs showed markedly improved translation quality, leading to up to 50% overall cost savings for translations for Transperfect and freeing human linguists for higher-level tasks.
Harnessing LLMs for transcreation
Although machine translation shows great strength in technical, formal, and instructional content, it hasn’t historically performed as well with creative content that leans into nuance, subtlety, humor, descriptiveness, and cultural references. Creative content can sound stiff or unnatural when machine translated. Because of this, TransPerfect has traditionally relied on human linguists to manually transcreate this type of content.
Transcreation is the process of adapting a message from one language to another while maintaining its intent, style, tone, and context. In German, for example, Nike’s “Just do it” tagline is transcreated to “Du tust es nie nur für dich,” which actually means “you never do it just for yourself.”
A successfully transcreated message evokes the same emotions and carries the same implications in the target language as it does in the source language. The AWS team uses transcreation for highly creative marketing assets to maximize their impact in a given industry. However, transcreation historically hasn’t benefitted from the automation solutions used in other types of localization workflows due to the highly customized and creative nature of the process. This means there has been a lot of interest in using generative AI to potentially decrease the costs and time associated with transcreation.
TransPerfect sought to use LLMs to cut down on time and costs typically associated with transcreation. Rather than an all-human or fully automated process, translations are produced through Anthropic’s Claude or Amazon Nova Pro on Amazon Bedrock, with the prompt to create multiple candidate translations with some variations. Within the translation editor, the human linguist chooses the most suitable adapted translation instead of composing it from scratch.
The following screenshot shows an LLM-powered transcreation within the GlobalLink Translate online editor.

Using GlobalLink powered by Amazon Bedrock for transcreation, users are seeing linguist productivity gains of up to 60%.
Conclusion
Thanks to LLM-powered transcreation and post-editing, customers in industries ranging from life sciences to finance to manufacturing have seen cost savings of up to 40% within their translation workflows and up to an 80% reduction in project turnaround times. In addition, the automatic post-edit step added to machine translation-only workflows provides a major quality boost to the no human touch output.
Amazon Bedrock safeguards data by not allowing sharing with FM providers and excluding it from model improvements. Beyond data security, responsible AI is essential. Amazon Bedrock Guardrails allows TransPerfect to customize truthfulness protections for post-editing. To address AI hallucinations, it offers contextual grounding checks to identify and filter inaccuracies—critical for producing precise translations.
Try out LLM-powered transcreation and post-editing with Amazon Bedrock for your own use case, and share your feedback and questions in the comments.

About the authors
Peter Chung is a Senior Solutions Architect at AWS, based in New York. Peter helps software and internet companies across multiple industries scale, modernize, and optimize. Peter is the author of “AWS FinOps Simplified”, and is an active member of the FinOps community.
Franziska Willnow is a Senior Program Manager (Tech) at AWS. A seasoned localization professional, Franziska Willnow brings over 15 years of expertise from various localization roles at Amazon and other companies. Franziska focuses on localization efficiency improvements through automation, machine learning, and AI/LLM. Franziska is passionate about building innovative products to support AWS’ global customers.
Ajit Manuel is a product leader at AWS, based in Seattle. Ajit heads the content technology product practice, which powers the AWS global content supply chain from creation to intelligence with practical enterprise AI. Ajit is passionate about enterprise digital transformation and applied AI product development. He has pioneered solutions that transformed InsurTech, MediaTech, and global MarTech.
Keith Brazil is Senior Vice President of Technology at TransPerfect, with specialization in Translation Management technologies as well as AI/ML data collection and annotation platforms. A native of Dublin, Ireland, Keith has been based in New York city for the last 23 years.
Julien Didier is Vice-President of Technology for translations.com and is responsible for the implementation of AI for both internal workflows and client-facing products. Julien manages a worldwide team of engineers, developers and architects who ensure successful deployments in addition to providing feedback for feature requests.
Bryan Rand is Senior Vice President of Global Solutions at TransPerfect, specializing in enterprise software, AI-driven digital marketing, and content management strategies. With over 20 years of experience leading business units and implementing customer experience innovations, Bryan has played a key role in driving successful global transformations for Fortune 1000 companies. He holds a BA in Economics from the University of Texas.

The AWS DeepRacer League is the world’s first autonomous racing league, open to anyone. Announced at re:Invent 2018, it puts machine learning in the hands of every developer through the fun and excitement of developing and racing self-driving remote control cars. Through the past 7 years, over 560 thousand developers of all skill levels have competed in the league at thousands of Amazon and customer events globally. While the final championships concluded at re:Invent 2024, that same event played host to a brand new AI competition, ushering in a new era of gamified learning in the age of generative AI.
In December 2024, AWS launched the AWS Large Language Model League (AWS LLM League) during re:Invent 2024. This inaugural event marked a significant milestone in democratizing machine learning, bringing together over 200 enthusiastic attendees from diverse backgrounds to engage in hands-on technical workshops and a competitive foundation model fine-tuning challenge. Using learnings from DeepRacer, the primary objective of the event was to simplify model customization learning while fostering a collaborative community around generative AI innovation through a gamified competition format.
AWS LLM League structure and outcomes
The AWS LLM League was designed to lower the barriers to entry in generative AI model customization by providing an experience where participants, regardless of their prior data science experience, could engage in fine-tuning LLMs. Using Amazon SageMaker JumpStart, attendees were guided through the process of customizing LLMs to address real business challenges adaptable to their domain.

As shown in the preceding figure, the challenge began with a workshop, where participants embarked on a competitive journey to develop highly effective fine-tuned LLMs. Competitors were tasked with customizing Meta’s Llama 3.2 3B base model for a specific domain, applying the tools and techniques they learned. The submitted model would be compared against a bigger 90B reference model with the quality of the responses decided using an LLM-as-a-Judge approach. Participants score a win for each question where the LLM judge deemed the fine-tuned model’s response to be more accurate and comprehensive than that of the larger model.

In the preliminary rounds, participants submitted hundreds of unique fine-tuned models to the competition leaderboard, each striving to outperform the baseline model. These submissions were evaluated based on accuracy, coherence, and domain-specific adaptability. After rigorous assessments, the top five finalists were shortlisted, with the best models achieving win rates above 55% against the large reference models (as shown in the preceding figure). Demonstrating that a smaller model can achieve competitive performance highlights significant benefits in compute efficiency at scale. Using a 3B model instead of a 90B model reduces operational costs, enables faster inference, and makes advanced AI more accessible across various industries and use cases.
The competition culminates in the Grand Finale, where finalists showcase their models in a final round of evaluation to determine the ultimate winner.
The fine-tuning journey
This journey was carefully designed to guide participants through each critical stage of fine-tuning a large language model—from dataset creation to model evaluation—using a suite of no-code AWS tools. Whether they were newcomers or experienced builders, participants gained hands-on experience in customizing a foundation model through a structured, accessible process. Let’s take a closer look at how the challenge unfolded, starting with how participants prepared their datasets.
Stage 1: Preparing the dataset with PartyRock
During the workshop, participants learned how to generate synthetic data using an Amazon PartyRock playground (as shown in the following figure). PartyRock offers access to a variety of top foundation models through Amazon Bedrock at no additional cost. This enabled participants to use a no-code AI generated app for creating synthetic training data that were used for fine-tuning.

Participants began by defining the target domain for their fine-tuning task, such as finance, healthcare, or legal compliance. Using PartyRock’s intuitive interface, they generated instruction-response pairs that mimicked real-world interactions. To enhance dataset quality, they used PartyRock’s ability to refine responses iteratively, making sure that the generated data was both contextually relevant and aligned with the competition’s objectives.
This phase was crucial because the quality of synthetic data directly impacted the model’s ability to outperform a larger baseline model. Some participants further enhanced their datasets by employing external validation methods, such as human-in-the-loop review or reinforcement learning-based filtering.
Stage 2: Fine-tuning with SageMaker JumpStart
After the datasets were prepared, participants moved to SageMaker JumpStart, a fully managed machine learning hub that simplifies the fine-tuning process. Using a pre-trained Meta Llama 3.2 3B model as the base, they customized it with their curated datasets, adjusting hyperparameters (shown in the following figure) such as:

Epochs: Determining how many times the model iterates over the dataset.
Learning rate: Controlling how much the model weights adjust with each iteration.
LoRA parameters: Optimizing efficiency with low-rank adaptation (LoRA) techniques.

One of the key advantages of SageMaker JumpStart is that it provides a no-code UI, shown in the following figure, allowing participants to fine-tune models without needing to write code. This accessibility enabled even those with minimal machine learning experience to engage in model customization effectively.

By using the distributed training capabilities of SageMaker, participants were able to run multiple experiments in parallel, optimizing their models for accuracy and response quality. The iterative fine-tuning process allowed them to explore different configurations to maximize performance.
Stage 3: Evaluation with Sagemaker Clarify
To make sure that their models were not only accurate but also unbiased, participants had the option to use Amazon SageMaker Clarify for evaluation, shown in the following figure.

This phase included:

Bias detection: Identifying skewed response patterns that might favor specific viewpoints.
Explainability metrics: Understanding why the model made certain predictions.
Performance scoring: Comparing model output against ground truth labels.

While not mandatory, the integration of SageMaker Clarify provided an additional layer of assurance for participants who wanted to validate their models further, verifying that their outputs were reliable and performant.
Stage 4: Submission and evaluation using LLM-as-a-Judge from Amazon Bedrock
After fine-tuned models were ready, they were submitted to the competition leaderboard for evaluation using the Amazon Bedrock Evaluations LLM-as-a-Judge approach. This automated evaluation system compares the fine-tuned models against the reference 90B model using predefined benchmarks, as shown in the following figure.

Each response was scored based on:

Relevance: How well the response addressed the question.
Depth: The level of detail and insight provided.
Coherence: Logical flow and consistency of the answer.

Participants’ models earned a score each time their response outperformed the 90B model in a head-to-head comparison. The leaderboard dynamically updated as new submissions were evaluated, fostering a competitive yet collaborative learning environment.
Grand Finale showcase
The Grand Finale of the AWS LLM League was an electrifying showdown, where the top five finalists, handpicked from hundreds of submissions, competed in a high-stakes live event. Among them was Ray, a determined contender whose fine-tuned model had consistently delivered strong results throughout the competition. Each finalist had to prove not just the technical superiority of their fine-tuned models, but also their ability to adapt and refine responses in real-time.

The competition was intense from the outset, with each participant bringing unique strategies to the table. Ray’s ability to tweak prompts dynamically set him apart early on, providing optimal responses to a range of domain-specific questions. The energy in the room was palpable as finalists’ AI-generated answers were judged by a hybrid evaluation system—40% by an LLM, 40% by expert panelists from Meta AI and AWS, and 20% by an enthusiastic live audience against the following rubric:

Generalization ability: How well the fine-tuned model adapted to previously unseen questions.
Response quality: Depth, accuracy, and contextual understanding.
Efficiency: The model’s ability to provide comprehensive answers with minimal latency.

One of the most gripping moments came when contestants encountered the infamous Strawberry Problem, a deceptively simple letter-counting challenge that exposed an inherent weakness in LLMs. Ray’s model delivered the correct answer, but the AI judge misclassified it, sparking a debate among the human judges and audience. This pivotal moment underscored the importance of human-in-the-loop evaluation, highlighting how AI and human judgment must complement each other for fair and accurate assessments.
As the final round concluded, Ray’s model consistently outperformed expectations, securing him the title of AWS LLM League Champion. The Grand Finale was not just a test of AI—it was a showcase of innovation, strategy, and the evolving synergy between artificial intelligence and human ingenuity.

Conclusion and looking ahead
The inaugural AWS LLM League competition successfully demonstrated how large language model fine-tuning can be gamified to drive innovation and engagement. By providing hands-on experience with cutting-edge AWS AI and machine learning (ML) services, the competition not only demystified the fine-tuning process, but also inspired a new wave of AI enthusiasts to experiment and innovate in this space.
As the AWS LLM League moves forward, future iterations will expand on these learnings, incorporating more advanced challenges, larger datasets, and deeper model customization opportunities. Whether you’re a seasoned AI practitioner or a newcomer to machine learning, the AWS LLM League offers an exciting and accessible way to develop real-world AI expertise.
Stay tuned for upcoming AWS LLM League events and get ready to put your fine-tuning skills to the test!

About the authors
Vincent Oh is the Senior Specialist Solutions Architect in AWS for AI & Innovation. He works with public sector customers across ASEAN, owning technical engagements and helping them design scalable cloud solutions across various innovation projects. He created the LLM League in the midst of helping customers harness the power of AI in their use cases through gamified learning. He also serves as an Adjunct Professor in Singapore Management University (SMU), teaching computer science modules under School of Computer & Information Systems (SCIS). Prior to joining Amazon, he worked as Senior Principal Digital Architect at Accenture and Cloud Engineering Practice Lead at UST.
Natasya K. Idries is the Product Marketing Manager for AWS AI/ML Gamified Learning Programs. She is passionate about democratizing AI/ML skills through engaging and hands-on educational initiatives that bridge the gap between advanced technology and practical business implementation. Her expertise in building learning communities and driving digital innovation continues to shape her approach to creating impactful AI education programs. Outside of work, Natasya enjoys traveling, cooking Southeast Asian cuisines and exploring nature trails.