Amazon CEO says not to count e-commerce giant out of AI race: Generative AI part of 'hype cycle'
Andy Jassy says AI is one of the 'biggest technical transformations in our lifetimes'
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Amazon chief executive Andy Jassy said that his company should not be counted out of the artificial intelligence race, with its future in AI-specific chips.
The business leader told CNBC on Thursday that generative AI is part of the "hype cycle" right now.
There is a difference, he said, between that and the "substance cycle."
Nevertheless, Jassy deemed generative AI "one of the biggest technical transformations in our lifetimes."
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Andy Jassy, chief executive officer of Amazon.vom Inc., during the GeekWire Summit in Seattle, Washington, U.S., on Tuesday, Oct. 5, 2021. (David Ryder/Bloomberg via Getty Images / Getty Images)
"And, I think it has the ability to transform, virtually, every customer experience that we know," he noted.
Jassy said he agreed with Amazon Web Services CEO Adam Selipsky's position on the AI race.
"We’re about three steps into a 10K race," Selipsky told 2023 Collision Conference attendees last month, adding that he does nevertheless believe that generative AI "is the next big wave, and it's a really big one."
AWS is launching its own generative AI product, called Bedrock.
Adam Selipsky, chief executive officer of Amazon.com Inc. Web Services (AWS), during the Collision conference in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, on Tuesday, June 27, 2023. (Chloe Ellingson/Bloomberg via Getty Images / Getty Images)
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"I think most people are focused on the applications, you know, things like ChatGPT brought everybody’s awareness up, but I think of generative AI as having, kind of, three macro layers," Jassy continued. "I think they’re all really big and important."
The bottom layer, he said, is the compute, and what matter there are the chips.
Andy Jassy arrives at the Los Angeles premiere of the Prime Video series "Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power" held at The Culver Studios on August 15, 2022, in Los Angeles, California. (Michael Buckner/Variety via Getty Images / Getty Images)
Jassy noted the dominance of semiconductor provider Nvidia Corp., which has recently seen shares soar and outpaced some of the biggest names in tech and AI.
"It's why we've invested, over the last few years, in our own customized training chips that we call Trainium and inference chips that we call Inferentia," he explained.
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Jassy explained that the e-commerce giant is on the second version of the chips which will be at a "much better price-performance than you’ll find anywhere else."
"And, we're quite optimistic that a lot of machine learning and training inference will be done on AWS chips and compute," he said.
