What just happened? Amazon boss Andy Jassy has joined the list of CEOs who are so excited about generative AI (and the money it will save their companies) that they can't contain their glee. Jassy believes that genAI will be the biggest technological revolution since the cloud, and maybe even the internet itself.
In his annual letter to shareholders, Jassy wrote that "Generative AI may be the largest technology transformation since the cloud – which itself, is still in the early stages – and perhaps since the internet."
"Unlike the mass modernization of on-premises infrastructure to the cloud, where there's work required to migrate, this [Generative] AI revolution will be built from the start on top of the cloud. The amount of societal and business benefit from the solutions that will be possible will astound us all," he added.
Jassy mentions AI and GenAI more than 30 times in his letter, emphasizing that he sees the tech as foundational building blocks for improving the Amazon customer experience and boosting the company's business.
Amazon's AI push will be a three-layered effort consisting of building foundational models, leveraging and customizing existing ones, and utilizing AI applications, including a more intelligent Alexa.
Jassy notes that virtually all leading generative AI foundation models have been trained on Nvidia chips. He adds that while Amazon continues to offer the broadest collection of Nvidia instances of any provider, supply has been scarce and cost remains an issue as customers scale their models and applications. As such, Amazon has built its own custom AI training chips, Trainium and Inferentia, as alternatives to Nvidia's hardware for training and deploying foundation models.
AI company Anthropic announced last fall that it plans to build, train, and deploy its future FMs using Trainium and Inferentia, joining other customers who use Amazon's home-grown silicon, including Airbnb, Hugging Face, and Snap.
The Amazon CEO also warned not to underestimate the importance of security when it comes to GenAI, especially as these models contain sensitive data. It's partly why several companies ban or restrict their use for official work purposes.
Leaning into generative AI means job cuts – a recent survey showed that 41% of executives expect the technology will shrink workforce sizes. Amazon laid off around 27,000 workers last year and has been cutting numbers in 2024. Jassy said in his letter that the company isn't done with lowering costs and it has found areas where it can reduce them even further, which certainly sounds like more cuts are coming. Amazon's restrictions on corporate employees working from home have also been causing discontent.
