It’s too early to say who will be among the winners of the AI (artificial intelligence) revolution according to the CEO of Amazon’s cloud division Amazon Web Services (AWS) Adam Selipsky.
In a conversation with WIRED editor Steven Levy at the 2023 Collision technology conference in Toronto, Selipsky was questioned about the ongoing narrative that Amazon broadly speaking is not considered to be amongst the winners from AI.
“Any one company that you or I could point to right now could be a huge winner or not,” Selipsky responded.
He compared it to the advent of the internet in the 1990s, when speculation ran rampant over would be a winner in the internet space.
It's similar now with AI, Selipsky said. “We’re about three steps into a 10K race."
In terms of Amazon’s AI offering, Selipsky highlighted that the company had been working with the technology for 25 years going back to personalization on its website.
Among its current AI initiatives, the company is developing its own Large Language Model (LLM) called Titan in addition to putting additional generative AI (GenAI) into Amazon’s virtual assistant Alexa.
Selipsky said the company had an “aggressive roadmap” to fulfil its vision of making Alexa a “true” personal assistant with deep knowledge of its users’ preferences.
He added that AWS was not taking a “code red,” urgent approach to GenAI but was instead focusing on understanding what its customers will need from the company in the future.
“GenAI will happen for the most part in the cloud as part of a broader data strategy [and] so many companies already have their data in AWS,” he said.
“Our customers need us to have great GenAI. If we do our jobs well, it will become an enabler of the next wave of things people want to do in the cloud.”
Levy also questioned Selipsky about the decline in growth experienced by AWS in recent quarters, noting Amazon CEO Andy Jassy’s warning from back in April that AWS was expected to face “short-term headwinds.”
The company in late April posted first quarter fiscal 2023 AWS segment sales growth of 16%, a sharp decline from 37% growth in the comparable quarter in 2022.
The AWS CEO noted that while he believed the business was “fundamentally sound and solid” that “almost every company has seen a slowing of growth across the last few quarters.”
“We’re not immune to that and we’re still growing, but our growth rates have come down over the past few quarters,” Selipsky said, adding that AWS had “good prospects ahead" in the medium term.
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