“We have been working on our own LLMs for a while now, believe it will transform and improve virtually every customer experience, and will continue to invest substantially in these models across all of our consumer, seller, brand, and creator experiences.”
This was Jassy’s second annual letter to shareholders as CEO, and his comments hint at the pressure many IT firms are under to explain how they might get into the fast-developing industry for AI goods.
Companies like Google (GOOG), Facebook (FB), and Microsoft (MSFT) have all talked about their increasing focus on generative AI technologies like ChatGPT, which can generate engaging essays, tales, and graphics in response to user inputs, since its initial release in late November.
Jassy claims that Amazon wants to make machine learning chips more affordable so that “small and large companies can afford to train and run their LLMs in production.” In order to respond to queries from users, large language models are trained on massive datasets.
“Most companies want to use these large language models, but the really good ones take billions of dollars to train and many years, most companies don’t want to go through that.”
Jassy told CNBC-
“What they want to do is they want to work off of a foundational model that’s big and great already, and then have the ability to customize it for their own purposes.”
In his letter to shareholders, Jassy also touted AWS’s CodeWhisperer, another AI-powered tool that he said-
“revolutionizes developer productivity by generating code suggestions in real-time.”
Jassy wrote-
“I could write an entire letter on LLMs and Generative AI as I think they will be that transformative, but I’ll leave that for a future letter. Let’s just say that LLMs and Generative AI are going to be a big deal for customers, our shareholders, and Amazon.”
In the letter, Jassy reminisced on leading Amazon through “one of the harder macroeconomic years in recent memory,” during which the e-commerce giant laid off roughly 27,000 workers in an effort to rein in costs.
According to Jassy’s letter, “there were an unusual number of simultaneous challenges this past year,” prompting Amazon to reevaluate some of its free shipping options, scrap some of its physical store designs, and make major cuts to its workforce.
Amazon revealed Jassy’s compensation package last year was worth about $1.3 million in a securities filing on Thursday. The CEO did not earn any additional stock awards in 2022. (After Jassy assumed the role of CEO in 2021, he received a compensation package of about $212 million, the bulk of which was in the form of stock awards.)
Despite the challenges at Amazon, however, Jassy said in his letter that he finds himself “optimistic and energized by what lies ahead.I strongly believe that our best days are in front of us.”
