On April 12th local time, Amazon announced the appointment of globally renowned artificial intelligence scholar Ng En da as a member of the board of directors, and the appointment took effect on April 9th. This is another measure taken by Amazon to increase its investment in AI, following the completion of a full $4 billion investment in AI company Aerospace at the end of March.
Renowned AI experts entering "big factories" again
Before joining Amazon, Wu Enla served as the managing partner of AI Fund, an artificial intelligence venture capital firm. He served as the Chief Scientist of Baidu from 2014 to 2017 and was also a co-founder and DeepLearning of the online education platform Coursera Founder of AI and works in the field of AI at multiple companies and institutions such as Google and Stanford University.
Amazon stated in its announcement that Ng En da is a global leader in artificial intelligence and education, having worked in various positions such as universities and enterprises related to AI. These experiences will help Amazon's board of directors form a view on the opportunities, challenges, and transformative social and business potential brought by AI. Wu Nda has also participated in writing over 200 papers on machine learning, robotics, and other related fields, and has profound insights into a range of emerging technologies.
Previously, Wu Nda had posted his views on "opportunities for artificial intelligence" on his personal social media account. He stated that the wave of generative artificial intelligence has spawned tools from companies such as Amazon AWS, Google Cloud, Hugging Face, Langchain, Microsoft, OpenAI, and more. And it is believed that some companies will become big winners in this field.
"For Amazon, which is eager to make achievements in the field of AI, the joining of Wu Nda is a very good choice." Wang Wenguang, Vice President of Daguan Data, believes that the entire technology and investment circles regard AI as the most popular field at present. Almost all foreign technology companies are actively competing for talent in the AI field, and finding a leader to form a team is particularly important.
"Compared to other giants, Amazon has relatively less accumulation in AI and a stronger sense of crisis. It is worth paying attention to whether Wu Enlai can help Amazon establish a team with his own reputation." Wang Wenguang said.
Make two moves within a month to strengthen the layout and avoid falling behind
Currently, many technology companies, including Amazon, have increased their investment in generative AI and large models, accumulating technological advantages while seeking new growth opportunities.
On March 28th, Amazon announced that it had added $2.75 billion in investment to the parent company of Claude's large model, Antitopic. After the investment was completed, Amazon's total investment in Antitopic reached $4 billion. The Claude model launched by the company is considered the biggest competitor of another AI company, OpenAI.
On the day before announcing this appointment, Amazon CEO Andy Jesse released Amazon's 2023 shareholder letter, mentioning significant investments in AWS and AI in 2023, with AWS cloud services revenue increasing from $80 billion to $91 billion, a year-on-year increase of 13%. At the same time, Graviton 4 general-purpose CPU chip and AWS Training 2 AI chip have also been launched successively. In terms of generative AI, the new features launched by the company have also been recognized by customers, showing optimistic expectations for the company's future.
Wang Wenguang stated that artificial intelligence is entering a "golden decade" of development. Silicon Valley giants, including Microsoft, Meta, and Apple, are actively laying out and investing in the research and development of AI big models, but industry development is still in its early stages. At present, enterprises are more concerned about "not being left behind", so large-scale investment will continue.
"If we compare the investment in AI to climbing Mount Everest, the current investment of all enterprises is only at an altitude of 3000 meters, which is still a long way from the peak," he said.