Amazon CEO Andy Jassy called generative A.I. “one of the biggest technical transformations of our lifetimes” in an interview with CNBC on Thursday. He also called many of today’s A.I. chatbots and other generative A.I. tools part of the “hype cycle,” declaring that Amazon was focused on the “substance cycle.”
Amazon’s bona fides in the space are well established, having been a player in artificial intelligence and machine learning long before the ChatGPTs and Bards of the world were publicly released. Former Fortune editor Brian Dumaine wrote a book in 2020 about how Amazon founder Jeff Bezos realized early on that imbuing machine learning into every facet of the company would allow it to gather data to constantly improve itself.
Much as it did with Amazon Web Services, which practically birthed the cloud computing industry that now powers the internet’s biggest companies, including its competitors, Amazon’s A.I. strategy is focused on cementing its position as a major player across the entirety of the A.I. supply chain.
“Every single business unit inside of Amazon is working intensely and very broadly on generative A.I.,” Jassy says.
Jassy shed some light on Amazon’s A.I. game plan, outlining three macro layers: the computing capabilities, the underlying models, and what Jassy refers to as the “application layer,” for example, ChatGPT or Bard.