No part of Amazon is ‘unaffected’ by AI, says its head of AGI

“There’s scarcely a part of the company that is unaffected by AI,” said Vishal Sharma, Amazon’s VP of Artificial General Intelligence, on Monday at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. He also dismissed the idea that open-source models might reduce compute needs and demurred over the question of whether European companies would change their GenAI strategies in light of geopolitical tensions with the US. Sharma said onstage at the 4YFN startup conference that Amazon was now deploying AI in the form of its own foundational models across Amazon Web Services — Amazon’s cloud computing division — the robotics in its warehouses, and the Alexa consumer product, among many other incarnations. “We have something like three-quarters of a million robots now, and they are doing everything from picking things to running themselves within the warehouse. The Alexa product is probably the most widely deployed home AI product in existence … There’s no part of Amazon that’s untouched by generative AI.” ... Read full article.