The leader in Amazon's AWS's AI product strategy reportedly has forced the company to join another unspecified company.
Vasi Philomin, vice president and general manager of Amazon's Machine Learning and AI, told Reuters about his move without sharing details, Reuters reported Thursday (June 26th).
An Amazon spokesperson confirmed Philomin's departure, adding that some of his previous responsibilities have been taken over by Rajesh Sheth, the vice president who previously oversaw the Amazon Elastic Block Store.
According to his LinkedIn profile, Philomin has been with the company for eight years, but built Amazon Bedrock and pioneered AI services in categories of language, computer vision, contact centers, industry and developer tools.
The news comes as competition for skilled AI talent reaches a fever pitch, Pymnts reported Tuesday (June 24th). Companies like Meta, Openai, Google Deepmind, Microsoft and Anthropic are among the companies engaged in this competition.
It was reported that Wednesday (June 25) Meta persuaded three Openai researchers to jump over the ship and take part in the social media giant's AI efforts. The report noted that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is personally campaigning to hire new AI expertise.
On June 18, Openai CEO Sam Altman reported that Meta was making a $100 million “huge offer” to poach Openai workers.
Workplace Market Upwork said in February that AI is the fastest growing category on the platform for several quarters, with clients looking for talent for rapid engineering, AI integration, generation AI modeling, data labeling and annotation.
According to Upwork, the previous year saw a 60% increase in total service volume (GSV) from AI-related work, an increase of 42% in the number of clients engaged in AI-related projects, and hourly revenue for freelancers engaged in AI-related work was 44% higher than the levels of other freelancers.
On Wednesday, it was reported that demand for AI infrastructure components from companies such as Microsoft, Meta, Alphabet and Amazon helped Nvidia's shares to an all-time high. The rise has brought Nvidia's market capitalization to around $3.75 trillion, making it the most valuable company in the world.
