Amazon CEO Andy Jassy revealed details about the company’s investments in generative AI in his annual shareholder letter published Thursday morning. It costs money to make money and before many companies can reap outsized rewards from selling new AI products and services, they are expected to outlay enormous sums to build them. From the energy required to power data centers that run AI models, to the price of new chips to AI worker salaries that can reach $900,000, Wall Street is watching the way Big Tech companies create growth and manage costs. “[T]here are three distinct layers in the GenAI stack, each of which is gigantic, and each of which we’re deeply investing,” Jassy writes. The “bottom layer” of Amazon’s AI strategy is to help developers and companies train models and produce predictions. Amazon says having its own custom AI training and inference chips will bring down costs for customers. A “middle layer” serves companies that want to use their own data to customize existing foundational models and gain security and other features to build and scale generative AI applications.
The “top layer” is where Amazon builds generative AI applications for its own consumer businesses. For example, there’s “Rufus,” Amazon’s AI-powered shopping assistant, and the Amazon Web Services “Amazon Q.” A year ago, Amazon was emerging from a state of transition as pandemic-era trends melted away into a new state of normal. Not only had e-commerce sales slowed from peak stay-at-home periods, tech companies were pulling back on cloud spending amid economic jitters. Now, Amazon aims to expand from cloud computing through AWS to becoming the world’s largest AI playground, Axios’ Ryan Heath reported in March. Alongside Thursday’s annual shareholder letter, Amazon also announced the addition of a new AI-focused board member Andrew Ng, who is the managing general partner of a venture studio that helps entrepreneurs launch AI companies.
Full report : Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says the benefits of AI ‘will astound us all.’
