Adam Selipsky, CEO of Amazon's dominant cloud computing platform AWS, is one of the most powerful figures in the computing industry at a time when the industry is rushing to embrace generative artificial intelligence. Although he's a fan of technology, he also has a warning for those trying to make sense of the current situation. Some of his AI companies at the center of the storm are greatly overhyped.
Selipsky likens the rush for generative AI to the early days of the dot-com bubble, when there was widespread hope that the internet would transform many industries almost overnight. In the long term, the Internet was certainly transformative, but in the short term, many projects failed and many Silicon Valley companies went bankrupt.
“For example, if you go back to 1997 and ask, “Was the Internet overrated or overrated?'' “I would argue that they were undervalued,” Selipsky said in an interview with “But then, if you ask me, “Were the companies that were leaders at the time dramatically overvalued?'' Ta. Yes, it was. ” Selipsky did not name the companies he has in mind. So far, the most prominent companies in generative AI include Amazon's cloud rival Microsoft and its partner, ChatGPT developer OpenAI. included.
Selipsky says companies looking to apply generative AI to their business or industry should be careful not to fall for the hype. “A lot of companies and organizations have a hard time figuring out, ‘Which of his 100 pilots and proofs of concepts that I have going on right now should I put into production?’” he says. Masu. “And they're starting to realize that it can be very expensive once it goes into production.” The implication? The many generative AI projects that have sprung up in a hurry over the past year may not last long. Generative AI projects require many high-performance computer chips, so implementing this technology can be expensive.
Amazon is not widely seen as a leader in the generative AI boom sparked by OpenAI's surprise hit ChatGPT, which may give Selipsky a reason to downplay its impact. But despite what he sees as problems, he says he sees long-term innovation afoot at Amazon. “We believe generative AI is transformative and will change the way nearly every application in the world operates, and ultimately the way people work,” he says.
Executives and boards of directors across all industries are currently under pressure to explore and experiment with generative AI. Investors, academic research, and industry reports all predict massive disruption to businesses in the future, with potential revenues in the trillions of dollars.
At the same time, while generative AI has clearly boosted business for AI providers like OpenAI and some hardware companies like Nvidia, the benefits of generative AI for business applications have been less clear. Issues such as algorithmic bias and hallucinations continue to plague the deployment of generative AI, and disputes over copyrighted data fed to AI models also pose legal challenges to some applications of the technology. It casts a dark cloud.
The great competition in AI
Selipsky joined AWS in 2005 as a marketing executive, but left in 2016 to become CEO of analytics company Tableau, which was later sold to Salesforce. He was hired back to head AWS in 2021 by Andy Jassy, who had just stepped down as Amazon CEO to replace Jeff Bezos. It also originally hired Selipsky for his first role at Amazon.
While Amazon has been the clear leader in the cloud computing market for years, its main rival Microsoft has significant support in the AI contest thanks to being a major backer of ChatGPT maker OpenAI. I am receiving Amazon's other major cloud rival, Google, long considered a leader in AI development, is committed to generative AI, actively developing a rival to ChatGPT, and rolling out its technology to a number of services. It is incorporated into.