Adam Selipsky, CEO of Amazon Web Services, talked about the development of generative artificial intelligence during the 2023 edition of Collision
The CEO of the biggest cloud platform in the world, Adam Selipsky, sat down with Steven Levy, Editor-at-large at Wired, on day one of Collision 2023, at the Enercare Centre in Toronto. The 40-minute conversation started with what Selipsky jokingly called a “performance review” – a look back into his history with AWS and what he and the company have achieved so far. However, sooner than later, it switched to the topic that apparently is imperative when talking tech: artificial intelligence.
Adam Selipsky says AWS is developing its own LLM
When big technological breakthroughs happen, AWS is typically among the disruptors. But not this time. So, Levy asked, was AWS not prepared for the generative AI revolution? Selipsky responded with another question: “Who was the biggest internet search provider in 1997?” AltaVista was. Today, only a small group of people remembers that. Therefore, for him, any company right now might turn out to be a huge winner or not, just like AltaVista. And if they turn out to be a huge winner, they are not going to be the only one. “We’re about three steps into a 10K race,” he said. The question is where the runners are going, not exactly the positions at the beginning of a long, long race.
Adam Selipsky at Collision, 2023. Photo by Vaughn Ridley/Collision via Sportsfile
What do customers want?
AWS has large language models in production today, which will be released later this year, and has pivoted much of its expertise in generative AI. “We’re taking a very unique approach,” he affirms, saying that there is, in fact, urgency by the company in tackling LLMs and gen AI but with a different approach because, according to him, they think they understand where customers want them to go.
With a “customer-obsessed” approach, AWS has heard from customers from all around the world that they need two things. The first one is choice. “So we are trying to democratize gen AI.” The second thing is security. He told the public that “everything AWS does has to have bulletproof security.” These aspects are the foundation of their own generative AI product, called Bedrock.
AI in the cloud
As we have said before, AWS is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud. And, as the company’s CEO mentioned, the cloud is going to be necessary for generative AI. “In general, AI will happen for the most part in the cloud and as part of your broader data strategy. So many companies already have their data in AWS, and you’re going to need data to feed into LLMs. It really all becomes part of a single data strategy, and it’s incumbent upon us — our customers need us to have great generative AI. But if we do our jobs well, then it’ll really be an enabler of the next wave of things that our customers want to do in the cloud,” Selipsky stated.
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