Amazon's chief technology officer explains how the company is using artificial intelligence (AI).
advertisement“If you've been an Amazon customer for the last 25 years, you've been exposed to AI, you just didn't know it,” Werner Vogels, Amazon.com Inc.'s chief technology officer, told Euronews Next.
While the American tech giant doesn't have a large-scale language model (LLM) that can compete with OpenAI or Google, it does have an AI model on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and is leveraging the technology for customer experience.
“I guess I want to clarify the difference between what I call 'working AI' and 'new AI,'” he said. VivaTech Fair in Paris.
“That's not to say that new AI won't work, but I think what we've seen in the last year and a half doesn't necessarily reflect the full form of AI.”
Vogles is excited about the broad range of applications this technology can have, including solving some of the world's biggest problems, like improving breast cancer detection and ending poverty.
“I believe this kind of technology has great potential to create really healthy, good business, but also to solve some of our toughest problems in a sustainable way at the same time,” he said.
AWS isn't in the consumer business and doesn't build chatbots, Vogles said.
“It may seem like we don't get much news in that regard, but that's because our customers are building them,” he said.
His comments come after Amazon founder Jeff Bezos expressed concerns that the company is falling behind in the AI race, as reported by CNBC this month.
Amazon has invested in AI startup Anthropic, whose subsidiary AWS aims to democratize access to AI and its technologies and make them sustainable.
“I believe that with every technology there's a huge opportunity to create great businesses, make money, become billionaires and so on,” he said.
“We believe that with success and scale also comes broader responsibility, which is that we need to develop technologies that can actually be used to build great businesses, but also build great businesses that can do good at the same time.”
Vogels also said that what's most important when it comes to AI is not just access but also inclusivity.
While the chatbot showcases live translation capabilities, its core is still English-language or related to U.S. culture, he said.
If you ask a chatbot in the U.S. to review a book by Chilean author Isabel Allende, you'll get a different review from a woman in South America, he said.
“We need to make sure they can not only access them, but access them in ways that are important to their culture.”
