If company boards of administrators sign one thing about the place an organization needs to be focusing, Amazon’s simply made an attention-grabbing transfer to vary up its course. The corporate has simply introduced that Andrew Ng — a outstanding determine on the planet of AI, and particularly constructing AI inside giant tech firms — is becoming a member of its board of administrators. The corporate additionally introduced, with rather less fanfare, that Judy McGrath — who’s greatest identified for her work as a longtime TV government, working MTV and serving to Viacom develop into a media powerhouse — might be stepping down as a director.
Taken collectively, the 2 strikes sketch out an attention-grabbing image concerning the tech large.
After many expensive years of eager to go all-on on constructing out an leisure empire — Amazon spent virtually $19 billion on its video and music enterprise in 2023 — it’s attention-grabbing that somebody who would have been an vital advocate and advisor on that technique will not be going to face for reelection.
To be clear, that is actually not an indication that Amazon will not be going to proceed to be an enormous pressure in streaming leisure, be it video or music, gaming or the rest. It’s now folding in promoting throughout Prime Video, one massive motive to maintain audiences sturdy. However it will likely be attention-grabbing to see how funding performs out in that phase in 2024 general. Layoffs within the studio and video divisions, plus winding down actions in some areas, are two alerts it might be smaller. And given the AI whiplash that each massive tech firm feels at the moment, it seems like a well timed element that now McGrath is stepping away from the board.
On that notice, trying forward, to remain on the entrance of the tech trade, Amazon will general be in search of higher thought management on the way it takes its subsequent steps in its synthetic intelligence technique.
It’s price remembering that Amazon is and has been a number one participant in AI for a very long time. Its Alexa assistant and Echo gadgets arguably put voice recognition and related assistants on the map, spurring many copycat merchandise from rivals; it has been engaged on autonomous providers in airborne and ground-level supply and in-store buying; it makes use of machine studying to enhance how merchandise are focused; AWS is an enormous participant in AI compute; extra lately it has poured billions into investments in massive AI startups; and so forth.
But for a minimum of a yr, within the wake of the GPT developments made by OpenAI and Microsoft’s large funding in that startup (and the large scramble from a plethora of different tech firms following that), Amazon has grappled with the impression internally and externally that it’s “falling behind” on the know-how.
Is it true? Is it simply optics? No matter what the true reply is, Ng’s appointment can solely be useful in advancing its AI profile, giving it extra thought management on actual innovation, not simply making follow-on strikes, within the area.
Ng is probably a triple-threat fashion board appointment, with expertise throughout academia, investing, and hands-on constructing, normally holding roles throughout all three concurrently. His present roles embrace an adjunct professorship at Stanford; a job as normal associate on the AI Fund, a enterprise studio constructing and backing AI startups; the top of edtech firm DeepLearning.AI and the founding father of Touchdown AI, a pc imaginative and prescient startup. Oh, and he’s additionally nonetheless chair of Coursera, one other edtech startup he based and used to steer.
He has additionally beforehand been the chief scientist and a VP at Baidu, the Chinese language search large; and he based and led Google Mind, which was that search large’s first massive foray into constructing and making use of AI tech throughout its merchandise.
Amazon doesn’t present any assertion from Ng himself in its announcement. We have now reached out to him on to see if he may inform us a bit extra about what he sees as Amazon’s massive alternative and we’ll replace when and if we hear again. Proper now, it completely seems like a brand new wave of firms and thinkers are setting the tempo in AI, however the Amazons of the world are actually not standing by idly.
