Amazon CEO Andy Jassy on why generative AI may be more transformative than the internet

Amazon generative AI

Like most big tech companies, Amazon has been heavily investing in Artificial Intelligence (AI) across its businesses. In a letter to the company's shareholders, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy detailed how the company is leveraging generative AI. “Generative AI may be the largest technology transformation since the cloud (which itself, is still in the early stages), and perhaps since the Internet,” Jassy told shareholders.

He also said that cloud will continue to play and important role as the GenAI “GenAI revolution” will be built from the start on top of the cloud. “The amount of societal and business benefit from the solutions that will be possible will astound us all,” he enthused over generative AI.

Jassy also said that while Amazon is building a substantial number of GenAI applications, the vast majority will ultimately be built by other companies. “Customers don’t want only one model. They want access to various models and model sizes for different types of applications,” Jassy explained.

Amazon has heavily incorporated AI in AWS, Cloud and some user-facing applications as well. There’s Rufus, Amazon’s new, AI-powered shopping assistant. Alexa is getting getting more intelligent and capable, thanks to generative AI models. Amazon is also simplifying advertising capabilities with natural language prompts to generate, customise, and edit high-quality images, advertising copy, and videos).

The company also recently launched Amazon Q, an expert on AWS that writes, debugs, tests, and implements code, while also doing transformations like moving from an old version of Java to a new one, and querying customers’ various data repositories. “Q is the most capable work assistant available today and evolving fast,” Jassy added.