Amazon AI head: AI has penetrated into various Amazon business areas

At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, ​​Vishal Sharma, vice president of general technology for AI, said that artificial intelligence (AI) has penetrated into various Amazon's business areas, and almost no part of it can escape its impact. He said that Amazon is deploying AI technology in multiple applications such as cloud computing service AWS, warehouse robots, and consumer product Alexa through its basic model.

Sharma mentioned that Amazon currently has about 750,000 robots, which are engaged in multiple tasks such as picking in warehouses. Alexa is currently one of the most widely used home AI products in the world. He stressed that Amazon's various businesses have been closely integrated with generative AI.

In December last year, AWS launched a text generation model called Nova, a series of multimodal generation AI models. Sharma notes that these models perform well in public benchmarks and are suitable for a variety of usage scenarios. He mentioned that different scenarios require different needs, and some require video generation, while products like Alexa require fast response speed, high predictability, and no incorrect instructions can occur.

He also mentioned that the claim that open source models may reduce computing demand is not valid. He said that as it is applied in different scenarios, the level of intelligence required will continue to increase. Meanwhile, Amazon launched a service called "Bedrock", which enables enterprises and startups to flexibly use a variety of basic models, including the DeepSeek model in China.

In addition, Amazon is working with Anthropic to build a large AI computing cluster with its Trainium2 chip, with an investment of $8 billion. Regarding the huge scale of these computing resources, Sharma believes that computing power will become the focus of industry discussion for a long time.

When asked if you think Amazon is under pressure in the emergence of open source models, Sharma said Amazon is not worried about it, but instead welcomes the deployment of various models such as DeepSeek on AWS. He added that Amazon always believes in the choice of customers.

When talking about whether OpenAI launched ChatGPT at the end of 2022 caught Amazon off guard, Salma firmly denied that it believed that Amazon has been working in the AI ​​field for nearly 25 years, and Alexa has used about 20 different AI models.

Asked whether recent tensions in U.S.-European countries will affect European companies’ choices on generative AI resources, Sharma acknowledged that this is a complex issue and future changes are unpredictable. He said that technological innovation is often affected by incentive mechanisms.