I'm Caroline Heinde a Bloomberg's WORLDEAD quarters in.
New York and Imed Ludlow in San Francisco. This is a special edition of Bloomberg Technology coming to you live from the Bloomberg Technology Summit in Caroline.
What a way to start.
Man of the moment, really, Sam Altman open AI CEO, so much to recap, but at a top level, saying we need global regulation with a capability threshold. Things will go wrong in AI, but the future is bright from a technology.
Perspective, ultimately seemingly optimistic. Also some clarity really around his own motivating forces, wanting to make impact, wanting to further technology for good, and really sort of seemingly at odds with why humanity, why most people really want to know why he has not much skin in the game financially. He seems to be saying like he's going to make
money in the future, don't you worry about it? Also, I thought the interesting perspective on China and Russia and the fact that ultimately he doesn't have great insight there at the moment either.
Me too that the theme of the Bloomberg Technology Summit is the turning point in Sam Outman talks about how little we know about what's going on in China in the field of artificial intelligence. But he also framed this is the biggest step for mankind in terms of technology, and I really think that's going to be a discussion here all day long.
Yeah, we've got more AI discussion coming right up. Bluing Bog Technology Summit is still going on. Emily chang Am Bradstone And now sitting down, we've read Hoffmann of Graylock and co founder of DeepMind, now CEO of Inflection AI stuff ustlument In brands for digital influencers.
Our belief is that everyone is also going to have a personal AI, one that is aligned to your interests, on your team, in your corner, gets to know you and really forms a trusted relationship with you over time. It'll be like a confidant, a conciliary there for you when you need to make tough decisions, but also a
chief of staff, you know, scheduling, organizing, prioritizing, booking. Your AI is really going to be your digital representation, you know, negotiating on your behalf, interacting with other sales AIS that are trying to, you know, encourage you to buy something and helping you to you know, get a great deal, and like for example, it's the whole set of things.
So, like example, one of the things I just found out yesterday is one of our team members at Greylock actually in Factor is using Pie for parenting advice. Oh cool, right, which is really awesome. And that's the kind of thing where you're like, great, but.
Read why is this an opportunity for a startup?
Isn't a Microsoft or a Google Bar just a little closer to the customer and in a better position to offer that.
Personal digital assistant? Well, part of what's I mean?
You know, obviously I am on the board of Microsoft and you know it is on the board of open Ai. And part of the thing is what I love about startups is that you have a unique vision where you're unfettered by the other aspects of your business and you're building it. So part of the idea that Mistafa the entire Inflection team, uh you know, kind of came up with, and you know, I, you know, have a little bit of fingerpas here too, is that IQ is not the only thing that matters here.
EQ matters as.
Well, And so how do you have this personal intelligence PI? Be helpful to you.
Obviously very high.
End you know, IQ, but also EQ And that was one of the reasons I use the parenting example because obviously there's a question of how you do it, but it's also how you connect with people what you do in order to amblify that, and I think that's one of the things that you know, the inflection folks are doing better than everyone else.
So can we talk about the EQ thing?
Because I was asking, I asked PI what we should ask you? It's questions, We're fine, And then I was like, are you going to tell them that we had this conversation? And it responded, ha ha, I'm just a computer program. I can't tell anyone anything. But I assure you our conversations are confidential. I do think it's pretty cool that we're having this meta conversation about your interview with my creators. Amazing point, And it was actually the personality that shocked me.
Can you explain how you design that?
I mean, we've deliberately designed it to be patient, curious kind. One of the things that first struck us like a year and a half ago when we started working on this is like, what makes for great conversation when you feel that sense of flow and that sense of energy and connection with another person. And I think most of the time it's when you feel heard and understood. You've
received a little bit of affirmation. But you know, it's not completely sycophantic, right, It doesn't just agree with you at every moment.
It can be a little bit challenging.
It has boundaries, so you can push it on certain topics and it'll take a position, and that's really healthy.
But also it's just curious, you know.
I mean, I think many people are excited by the idea, especially the users that we have of someone asking them lots of questions about the topic that they're interested in. You know, we don't always have someone in our lives who is as knowledgeable and as passionate about all favorite topics as.
We might like.
And so that's where pie comes in because it's super knowledgeable and engaging.
So it sounds like a competitor to chat gept.
Is it a competitor to chat chept?
And how does that make sense if you're also an investor in open ai?
Well, so I think there's going to be a number of agents. I don't think there's going to be one agent to rule them all. You know, a ring and mortar.
But is chatchipt going to rule most of us?
I mean no, I don't think so. I think that. I mean it's partially.
It's it's it's like the same reason we talk to different people for different aspects of our lives. Right, So you know, this person we talked to about our passion about snowboarding, this person we talked to about what's going on in the country, this person we talk to, like we have a pantheon, same thing, We'll have a pantheon of different kinds of AI. One will go You know, you ask chat GPT, you know, how do you know comfort a friend who's lost the treasured pet?
And is us here are five possible ways you might do that?
You ask pie, Oh, that sounds like it's really hard for you and your friend. You know your friend, Well, what would count as being present there for your friend? And it still it has the IQ, it has the five reasons, but it goes through that style of going through it. And I think these are different interaction experiences And the question is which one do you want this minute? Which one do you want more in your life? You know that kind of thing and part of the design
of pies. How do we help you be the best you right like? And that doesn't mean by being sycophantic, for example, that's the question of you know, like, ask you questions about what do you think about this, and how do you go through it and help you navigate your life by being helpful in that way.
So Sam Allman was just on stage talking as.
He sometimes does, about the theoretical dangers of AGI and chat GPT nine and I'm just curious if you guys think generally that's a discussion worth having and where you each are on this spectrum of existential data from AI.
Well, let's start with the fact that one of the things that I think is is dangerous about the existential discussion is that it blinds us from some of the nearer things, which is AI's amplification intelligence as for the impromptu book, and so it amplifies human beings, and so we see a bunch of good things in human beings. AI tutor is AI doctor is a bunch of other things. There's also bad human beings, and so what to do
about bad human beings? Doing you know with AI is also part of the portfolio mix of how you shape this technology. That's one of the reasons why Mustafa's a book, The Coming Wave, I highly recommend, and I will hand the next part of the answer.
Over to you and wait, let me frame it them with that. Sam probably left the building right now.
Frank, like, where do you kind of disagree with some of the alarmism notes that he has sounded.
Look, I think it's easy to speculate around what a GPT nine might look like in you know, six more orders of magnitude of compute would be eyewatering. And I'm absolutely with those concerns around existential risk. But if you play that out, that is many, many years, and it is, you know, unclear what actually happens at that scale.
What's much more clear and what you know.
A lot of the themes I explore in the new book is that in the near term, we're about to empower many many people, if not ultimately everybody, with access to the ability to amplify their existing power. Right, this is not just a knowledge engine, but in time it'll allow you to take actions. Right, You'll be able to make recommendations, buy things, book things, and that's going to get smaller and cheaper and therefore proliferate far and wide.
That is going to cause a dramatic instability and potentially a threat to the nation state because anyone who has an agenda or is trying to sort of push a political outcome is suddenly going to see the barrier to entry to that kind of scaled impact lowered. And so there's going to be a real question around how states
kind of manage that distribution of power. And I think there'll be a tendency to lunge towards, you know, slightly more authoritarian, more surveillance based mechanisms to prevent that proliferation, which would both be bad for innovation and obviously dystopian.
From a political governance perspective.
Well, hang on, because Sam and I were talking backstage as well, and he's much more confident that AI will lead us to a more equal world than an unequal world. Are you saying that there's a better chance of economic dislocation and social dislocation as a result of this technology?
So both are likely to be true actually, which is a little bit surprising. But if you look back over the last fifty years, the transistor, the last wave which enabled the personal computer, has clearly made us in many ways more equal whether you're a billionaire or you earn twenty thousand dollars a year, we all get access to the same cutting edge hardware. The smart phone and the laptop is broadly at the cutting edge, and everyone else will catch up over the next five to ten years.
We're on the same trajectory with respect to access to intelligence, and that is an unbelievable idea. Over the next decade, hundreds of millions of people and then billions of people will get access to the same expert doctor, the same expert educator, the same tool for scheduling, prioritizing, organizing your life. That is going to be the most meritocratic moment in the history of our species.
For sure.
It is a question around how individuals and groups and organizations use that power right, because clearly we all have conflicting agendas and priorities and goals. And that's basically where I think that we end up with significant disruption.
Okay, read, but that's the class have.
Full I mean, what is the potential thread to the millions of coders, of customer service representatives, the job dislocation, the people who are serving jobs whose functions can be replaced by AI.
Your LinkedIn hat on.
So the closest metaphor that I've come to use to describe this moment is it's a steam engine of the mind. If you look at this, the former steam engine, you know, current steam engine, although obviously majorly amplified. Industrial evolution give us superpower of muscles, super of transport, superpower of construction, all these ends.
Now we're going to have superpowers of the mind.
Now there's a whole bunch of very positive things that come out of that.
I mean, all of the things we have of.
The increase in wealth that allows medicine, general education, everything else comes out of the industrial evolution. I think the same thing will be coming out of the steam engine of the mind now. But the transition is going to
be difficult. The transition is going to be okay, well, customer service jobs are going to change a whole lot now, engineers, I think, you know, look, if you roughly kind of go through a company and you go we ten x each function, you say you ten x salespeople, great, so I want to hire more salespeople want our sales ten XT marketing people. It's like, okay, maybe the marketing functions will change some so less order entry, more thinking about it.
But you're still in a business competitive ecosystem. You don't want to stop marketing or not be doing it. When you get to customer service, you get more replacement. But here's part of the thing that I part of the reason why I did the book impromptu and are trying to orient people, is like, okay, so customer service people.
There's going to be a transition. Well, AI can help with that.
You can build AIS that help figure out other kinds of work and jobs, that can help you find them, that can help you learn them, that can help you do them. And so that's the thing that we as a society need to be doing. So it's like less like how do we slow down AI? How do we shape it to help the broad swath of humanity in this transition. That's where I'm trying to get the dialogue and discussion to Moustafa.
We were just talking to Sam about Google and whether or not it's still scary, and he's like, yeah, they're still formidable. You quit Mind and Google AI and obviously a lot of people have have have left Google. Is there something wrong at Google or some sort of innovator's dilemma there that will prevent it from truly succeeding on generative AI because it underminds its own business model.
Look, fundamentally, AI stands intention with Google's existing business model. It's very hard to eat yourself from within and adapt and respond to the coming wave. So for a while Google was just idling. You know, I was there on Lambda. We had chat GBT before chat gibt. It was just like a remarkable feeling internally playing with this incredible tool and not really being able to get it out into products. It took, you know, the launch of chat CBT to
kind of threaten Google and really shake everything up. And you know, Google's are very formidable and you know, you know, organization full of super smart people. So I'm sure they'll be just fine. But I can understand why they're stuck because nobody wants a personal AI in your pocket that is actually funded by ads. Right, you don't want a salesman in your pocket that is trying to persuade you to go and buy more or do xyz.
You need fiduciary alignment.
Right, Your AI has to be on your team, and that means ultimately you have to pay for it. And if somebody else is paying for it, you have to ask yourself what are they trying to persuade you of? Are they trying to influence you in some way? And I think people are alive to that now and that's a real challenge for Google because it's very unclear how they're going to manage this transition.
So we asked Sam if Google scares him, does OpenAI scare you?
Wastaf a first many.
So no, No, it definitely doesn't. I mean, actually, this morning we've announced our new large language model called Inflection one, and we set out to build a model that was fast enough and more capable than every other model on the market for our compute class. So we're very proud that, you know, a year on from our launch, we're now better than lama Chat, GPT, Palm five forty, Chinchilla, all
of the other models of our size. And that's super important because it powers PI and ultimately it will be available as a conversational API, so you can obviously play with it at pie dot ai now. And you know, I think that demonstrates that with a team of thirty five people, you know, in a pretty short order, we're able to exceed the cutting edge and now build an
absolute best in class AI, which is very exciting. And obviously we've also managed to do that because we've been able to gather a huge amount of capital and some great investors and train. In fact, what we now have is the largest operational cluster in the world of h one hundreds in Vidia's latest chip and that's a huge advantage.
Okay.
And one of the things, because I was listening to your conversation with Sam, and you know, it's obviously an awkward question when you ask him, is like, well, should we trust you? Because it's like, yes, trust me. It's like, well, that's weird because if.
Someone says no, you shouldn't.
Someone says yes, trust me, You're like, well wait a minute, but look, I uh, the Open Eye people are really great people. I think it's it's governed by a five to one C three. There's frequently a bunch of fud social media stuff that that that that that that kind of obscures that I you know, spent a number of years on the board and in the team. I still work with them and help them. They are fully paying attention to every serious question. I mean, like, for example,
there Sam went and spent a month. It's crazy, You're doing a startup. It spent a month doing a world tour.
Talking to people.
Say look, I'm here, you can talk to me about your concerns. I want to make sure it's good for humanity. I don't just care about this kind of US San Francisco text scene.
I care about what it's impact on humanity is.
And so I have come here to talk to you, So that kind of like.
I'm engaging conversation.
I care about this is the kind of reason in addition to a five ones three emission structure and everything else.
And so no, I'm I'm delighted with Hope.
I don't see how he's getting any work done with all this, But I want to change gears quickly. We're going to throw some Twitter polls up on the screen today and we asked Twitter users where the greatest advancements in AI would come from.
We'll see the results, But I want to ask.
About maybe retarting with you are the US China policy of divestment is, can we reasonably hope that you know, doing that will maybe prolong America's advantage in AI?
Is it a smart strategy? I don't think divestment is a smart strategy. I think staying connected is better for both the US and China and the world. I think competition is very good.
I think the fact that there's various ways that we in the.
US and the West Coast have a AI lead, I think that's a great thing for kind of the values, the ecosystem and the kind of the great world order that the US should be very proud of in the last seventy years. Like, there's lots of things to be critical of two, of course, but as a really peaceful time, trying to make it business and interconnection is a really good thing. And I'm a very strong believer and proponent of that. But I think investments not the.
Ends half of You write in the book that China has an explicit national strategy to be the AI leader by twenty thirty.
So do you agree with read that withdrawal divestment as a smart strategy.
I mean, China is already ahead of its own schedule. I mean it's publishing significantly more papers on AI than we are collectively in the rest of the world. So you know, I do think that our export controls were effectively a declaration of economic war on China. They were very firm and very aggressive and I think it sets us out on a hyper adversarial footing. They have a huge number of leavers too, and we should expect them to use them against us pretty soon, unfortunately.
So we talked a lot about regulation with Sam, and obviously President Biden was just in town here this week talking about AI. He met with you know, the President and Sindar and Satya in DC. What is the prospect for real government oversight that protects users, protects the economy and our political process.
So, look, I think the good news is that the administration is taking a very Let's learn how to be smart about this. Let's assemble a set of thoughtful people from industry yesterday, assembling a thoughtful people from outside of industry, academia, other kinds of places.
We're doing it, and let's learn about it.
I think they have a number of good people tasked with this, and so I'm optimistic in that. But on the other hand, of course, a little bit like your interview with Say, I'm you know, regulatory things is something that's very easy to get wrong. So you need to be cautious about how you do it. You want it to be having that positive impact, not for example, regulatory capture and not a bunch of other things, and so I think you have to be careful about how you do.
I think it's adding that this time last year, almost no world leaders were talking about AI. I mean, I don't think there has ever been a technology trajectory in history that has gone from zero recognition to almost universal recognition.
And that's a good thing.
And I think it's in part because sort of we collectively in industry have been trying to advocate and say, like, this is really serious, we should pay attention and invite the conversation wherever it ends up with respect to regulating existential risk or more near term threats.
Okay, I think we have to leave it there and Shaper really thank you guys for joining us.
Great to see you guys, Thanks a lot, great to see.
Greylock Partners, Reid Hoffman, the STAFFA Sillyman, the co founder and CEO of Inflection AI. They're here at the Bloomberg Technology Something in San Francisco, Caroline so much to recap. What they kind of had in common was the idea that AIS a technology amplifies or reflects the user, and in society there are good people and they are a bad people, but they you know, they weren't tempted to give kind of the doomsday scenario that perhaps Outman gave us earlier.
And also the EQ versus IQ. This is obviously the differentiating factor for PIE what they're currently working on and inflection, but notable that they don't feel that there's just one chatbot to rule us all that chatchipt isn't going to be the steadfast and only use case. And already we're discussing that it feels like chatchapbet is sort of sucktible the oxygen.
But we know there's barred.
We know that there's obviously all these other more focused, specific AI chatbots being developed, and some with perhaps more emotion than others.
In Yeah, and Masafa Silliman describing AI development as a meritocracy was interesting. Let's get back to the Bloomberg Technology Summit where Bloomberg's Bradstone is on stage with the Amazon Web Services AWS CEO Adam Selipsky.
Well, I mean, as you implied, today, we are by far the most broadly adopted cloud in the world, with the broadest set of capabilities, and I think that generative AI is both incredibly explosive and transformative set of technologies in of itself, and it's fully dependent on the.
Cloud to be successful.
So if you look at the massive amount of compute that's required, never mind any other IT related stuff, but just the massive amount of compute required that's going to happen really predominantly in the cloud, and companies are going to want to view gener AI as part of an entire data strategy and data platform. And you're going to want to do your generative AI you know where you've
got your data. And you're also going to want the same bulletproof enterprise security privacy that you expect from any other cloud service. And because so many customers it's certainly more than on any other cloud, have that data on AWS, use aabus for security and operational excellence. I think that they are going to justifiably demand that AWS have a full, powerful, a suite of generative AI services.
Okay, but do you need a popular LM or an exclusive partner running on AWS as it does seem like microsoftening Google have. I mean, I guess I'm asking who's your horse in the race right now?
Right Well, I think, with all due respect, I think that's the wrong question. It'd be like in nineteen ninety seven, when the Internet's happening and everything's kind of going nuts around us. You and I sitting around saying who's the internet company going to be? It kind of seems like a silly question, right, And by the way, the leading search company then was Alta Vista, and I guarantee you my kids in their great I.
Love it of Alta Vista.
So it's not okay you're in a We're who's ahead, which runners ahead in the race after three steps because it's a ten k race. You know, what everybody needs now is is experimentation. They need choice, They need democratization of generative AI. And just like AWS was founded to democratize it, we aim to democratize generative AI. So we're
operating at all layers of stack we have. We've had our own custom chip program for a decade now, way longer than anybody else, and we have not one, but two families of chips custom designed for machine learning training for training and inferential for running inference and then and so those are for people who are going.
To build models, train models.
Then most of our customers will interact with Amazon Bedrock, which is a managed service for accessing deploying managing models, and here's where the choice comes in. So we are going to have our own models, our own lllms. So Amazon models lms have been running introduction inside of Amazon for a long time now. Parts of our retail search are powered by llms. A lot of Alexa's voice responses are lll em powered, and we're taking right now, we're
in the process of taking those lllms. We're making them bigger, we're externalizing them, and later this year those will be exposed for everybody to use.
A Titan broke exactly.
Well, let me ask you so, mate, But that's just one model, one set of models.
I should say.
We're also exposing anthropic inside of Bedrock Stability AI AI twenty one, and I think a lot of others over time, because nobody knows. Anybody who knows which model is going to be the winner is asking the wrong question. People need to experiment, and we want to provide that choice.
Okay, so pretend you're talking to a customer.
Now make the argument, why should they use Titan or one of these other lfs you're exposing rather than GPT four, which now does seem to have a significant.
Leadership position well, I don't know which model they should depends who they are, and it depends what their application is. And some of them probably will want to use GPT, and some of them will want to use Titan, and some of them will want to use Anthropic. And I think it's preposterous to me to think that one model or one company is going to be the solution for every application and every company up there. So we're already seeing this heterogeneity. So we're seeing an explosion of interest
in Bedrock and Amazon's genitive AI capabilities. Just this morning, Omnicom, one of the largest advertising communications firms in the world, announced they're working with the AWS using Bedrock as well as our custom chips inside of our compute capacity to do generative AI going forward. Earlier this week, BBVA, one of the largest financial services firms in the world, announced they're working with Amazon on jenera of AI, you know,
with Bedrock. And it's that choice combined with the enterprise security and privacy, which I think are so fundamental.
I can humbly admit, as a journalists covering tech for way too long that in the fall I was surprised by not only the quality of check GBT but the customer response to this new wave of technology, were you surprised?
Well, I think that.
I mean, folks working in the area and AI have known about large language models for a long time, and very few companies have more experience with AI than Amazon. I mean, nineteen ninety eight personalization on the Amazon website that was AI.
Okay, still hold AI.
Sage Maker twenty seventeen not used by over one hundred thousand AWS customers. Most machine learning in the cloud, any cloud, happens on stage Maker, so we have a lot of experience with a lot of people working on llms. I think the whole world was surprised that when three point five came out, it was such a dramatic improvement and responses. Not perfect by any means, but a dramatic improvement and responses over three point zero. So I think that was the surprise, but not the overall arc.
But the.
Good news for our customers is that you know, we have deep, deep expertise and Ai've been working on different forms of it for a long time and are now pouring enormous resources into the generative part of it.
Okay, I'll give this up after this, I promise, But would you can see that Amazon's playing a little bit from behind right now.
No, I really don't think so. I mean again, it's the race analogy. If like, are we really going to have a conversation about three steps into a ten k raise? You know who's in what position. It's about the long term. Amazon has always taken a much more long term view of the world than almost any other company we're I think the key is we're building in multiple layers of the stack because we understand that's what customers need. We're
also building applications on top of these models. So we've released code Whisperer, which is a coding companion on top of the Amazon LLLMS, and that's a you know, you type in words, it gives you back code in internal tests kind of coding challenges. Developers finish their task on average fifty seven percent faster than those not.
Using code Whisperer.
Plus, it's very secure, private tells you what open source you're using and what licensing restrictions there might be on it, which not every other solution out there does. So I think we're very confident. If you look at the thing which the only thing which ought to give us confidence,
This customer response. I mentioned Omnicom, I mentioned BBVA. This week, Old Mutual, which is one of the largest financial services companies in Africa, is going all in on AWS and using US for generative AI and really exciting developments to come. We're talking to one company who has millions of lines of mainframe code and they're talking to us about, you know, moving over these really gnarly mainframe applications and millions of lines of code using generative AI from from from from AWS.
So I think, you know it's it's the this this consumer application, this chat application, which is so easy for folks to understand because they can say, give me a hikup about you know, farm machinery and does it.
That's keol hai cod.
It's cool.
But uh, you know what I think folks in this room and watching online understand is that there is a full suite of enterprise and company and organizational applications and there's going to be huge needs there. And so you know, we're going to be focused on customer service and on coding, and on drug discovery and on wealth management, providing better solutions for customers and a full suite of applications across every industry. And I think we're very well positioned there and.
You feel like you have or are close to having a GPT four quality.
Model running on AWS.
All of the tests that we've done, as well as more and more customers who are in who are in the existing current preview of Bedrock, have been very impressed with the quality of our models. And of course, again it's not just about our models. We're going to be proud of our models, I predict, but Anthropic does an amazing job and they're you know, right up there in quality with any.
Model in the world.
Stability AI big leader for generating for models, generating images, so collectively, I think these models will provide absolutely the best destination, all with a consistent aid PI set, consistent AWS security, consistent identity system, all in a private, isolated, virtual private cloud, none of this. Hey, here's an application, and now you have to have a bunch of fortune five hundred CIOs a ban from their companies, which is
what's happened. You know, from day one it's always going to be AWS class security.
Okay, I want to put a slide up showing a Bloomberg Intelligence estimate on projected generative AI revenues over.
The next, I think it's maybe.
Ten, yeah, five years, I'm not saying, and who knows what you know about the numbers that far out, but it's up into the right and I just I can imagine a lot of financial types who are out there, you know, looking at Amazon's numbers and wondering how much of a sales tailwind this will be for AWS. So what can you tell us about you know, you mentioned it's so computationally intensive, what you see the impact being for AWS?
Well, it's it's really early, so you know, I prognostication is fun and probably important at the end of the day, but I think it's also important to be humble and to be nimble anything ending in ill and to understand that we're going to have to all adjust rapidly. But that being said, I think that well, look, I don't think any of the fundamentals about cloud computing have change, and probably who knows, call a ten percent of it
has moved to the cloud. So we're still very very early, and whether you're talking about any application, there's still you know, massive runway for things to move to the cloud, and we firmly believe that they will. On top of that, I think that generative AI is going to be, you know, the next massive increase in workloads you know, moving to the cloud or in many cases happening for the first time and happening in the cloud. And so I do think that it should be a significant tailwind for cloud
providers and particularly for AWS, given our leadership position. Obviously we need to come out with the capability the services that you know, justify people using us for the purpose. But I think if we you know, if we do a good job of listening to customers, it should provide significant demand for years to come. I mean, the computational
requirements are so intense. And one thing which also I think works in favor of AWS is that a lot of people asking about, hey, what about the energy consumption? You know, what about sustainability?
You run those efforts inside Amazon.
Yeah, I mean I also run sustainability. It's kind of the other thing I do inside of Amazon, and we as a company, and I personally care a lot about sustainability. And people say, well, you know, is this generative AI massive compute.
Is that incompatible?
Yeah, we're going back for sustainable Well no, we're not, because number one of these workloads, you know, there's no putting the genie back in the bottle. So generative AI is going to happen, So let's make it happen in a highly energy efficient and sustainable way. So if you look at our custom chips that we design, if you take Graviton for example, which is our oldest chip family, Graviton is sixty percent more energy efficient than equivalent X
eighty six based compute capacity. And if you look at an enterprise just in general, nevermind generative AI, just moving from their own data centers to the cloud to AWS. There was a study done showing that AWS is three point six times more energy efficient than the average enterprise data center in the United States. So you know, we are the sustainable place. We're doing it through a whole series of technological improvements plus a commitment which were eighty
five percent of the way. They're already to be one hundred percent renewable energy by twenty twenty five, which is just around the corner, right.
You guys had another commitment called Shipman zero, which was a net carbon zero commitment by twenty thirty, which you guys, I guess maybe scrapped or you took off the website. Yeah, has a long time Amazon watcher, My heart just kind of sank because you guys have been so prominent about these goals. I guess the question is, like, have these commitments become harder to meet than they were to make?
Well, I think your heart should be sinking at the state of global warming state good line is, and we should all be concerned about that, But I think your heart should be singing at the leadership position that Amazon is trying to establish, and at the improvements we're trying to make, at the very public goals we've set.
Why don't you remove that particular commitment.
So well, because it's subsumed really in a much broader Boulder commitment. We made a very public pledge to be net zero carbon across all of Amazon, not just State WS, all of Amazon by twenty forty, which is ten years ahead of the Paris Accords. Now, for a technology company like AWS, I won't say it's easy, but it's it's doable,
so you'll hear that from other tech companies. For a big retailer with air freight and inbound transportation and stores and packaging, it is actually really, really hard, and we will be the first to say we don't know how we're going to get there in all dimensions. I can tell you how we're going to get their renewable energy. I can't tell you how we're going to get there in all elements of transportation and packaging and buildings. But
we're an innovative company. We take bold, long term bets, and we made this pledge publicly, not privately, in order to number one, you know, have a forcing function for ourselves because it's not easy, and also because we want to inspire other organizations, governments, companies to join us. We have over four hundred signatories now of the Climate Pledge that's growing every month. And it's not a competition against
other organizations. It's competition against the thermometer. And frankly, I want other people to out innov us and out innovate us. I want to be beaten, if you will, in the race to become sustainable, and hopefully we can be inspired by things that other people are doing. So of course we adjust our goals over time, but the thing I would focus on is just audacious goal to be nets or a carbon by twenty.
Eight and have to line in the sand.
I mean, even as things like generative AI take more and more computational resources. Even if you get more efficient with compute, that's a commitment that you can hold firm on, even if you don't know how you're going.
To get there.
We have made a public pledge we intend on getting there, But there are lots of other areas of progress from making in the interim. So, for example, if you take packaging for the retail business, the average packaging per shipment has decreased by thirty eight percent since twenty fifteen, so which is another example of it can be sustainable and good for our business. You know, it's lower cost for us,
and it's much more sustainable for the planet. And anytime you create a win win like that, it just works for everybody and becomes a really sustainable business proposition.
Let's get back to AI and let me ask.
You about Alexa.
I know it's slightly out of your purview, but Alexa runs in your servers.
Can Alexa be a generitive AI play? Should it be?
Alexa's already, as I mentioned, are ready powered in large part by lllms that Amazon built and been in production for a while now, and I think that she's only going to get smarter and better and more personalized as the lll M technology expands and improved, it.
Feels to me as a long time user, and my wife who's here knows I populated our house with them at one point, but today it feels as the SERI frankly a step behind.
Is that? Would you agree with that? No?
I think that Alex will I use Alex in my house. I mean, you know, I guess we all have different strokes for different folks, and we love Alexa and I like to think she loves us, although if you ask me that, she won't actually tell you yes. And I think Alex has been getting better and better, you know, more skills, better skills, more understanding of you and your
your your likes and dislikes in your habits. And I think that the the rapid improvements that we're making in Generative AI are truly going to continue to transform Alexa into you know, a truly you know, personalized assistant. And we do on Alexa to be you know, an absolutely indispensable invest in the world, you know, personal assistant to you.
And I think that we've got a lot of work to do.
I'll leave it to the Alexa folks to fill in all of those blanks.
Over time.
But we're actually very confident in that plan and very optimistic about Alexa being able to fulfill that role in people's lives that I think they're really going to love.
I want to get to two more in the two minutes we have left. Your Boston predecessor.
Andy Jassey has been kind of cutting some of the big bets at Amazon, but one that he hasn't cut is the satellite plan Kuiper, and I just wonder, you know, what you see as the opportunity considering a rival system stirling from Tesla, it does seem to be, you know, operational, quite far ahead.
Well, we're very optimistic about Kuyper. There's huge interest from governments, from enterprises, from lots of other organizations. Billions of people around the world are underserved for Internet, and Kuyper really aims to democratize that. There's a theme here to democratize that and provide great Internet service to so many billions under serve people. In addition, whether it's automobile companies, telecommunications companies,
lots of other enterprises who are AWS customers, governments. They want, especially from remote locations, be able to backhaul information up to Kuyper back into the AWS cloud, and so I think as we launch our first satellites, which as coming up later this year and then really ramping up in twenty twenty four and twenty twenty five is my understanding. But then being in service in that timeframe initially and being able to deliver that for AWS customers is huge.
Before we go, I just want to remind folks that just today this morning, AWS has launched its one hundred million dollar Generative AI Innovation Center, where we're going to be going out to all those customers around the world, enterprises with expertise free a BOS expertise, solutions, architects, engineers, strategists, uh, and working with them one on one to envision design and then actual that one hundred million AI generative AI capabilities not talk, but actually.
That discounts for new companies or Yeah, we're gonna, we're just gonna, We're just gonna bring our internal a WOS experts, you know, free of charge to a whole bunch of AWS customers, uh, you know, focusing.
On folks with with with a significant AWS presence and go help them turbocharge their efforts to get real with generative AI, get beyond the talk all.
Right last one in negative ten seconds, So I guess it's gotta be a quick one.
You and Andy are both in the same situation.
You're the You're the guy after the guy, the founder whose name was synonymous with the early stage of legendary growth.
So what is what do you want adams aws legacy to be? I don't think.
I don't really think of it in personal terms, to be honest with you, so I don't have a canned answer, but I will say that, you know, I would love it if.
If I could be known to really help.
Drive a business that is, you know, constantly, no matter how big it gets, no matter how far flowing it gets, puts customers at the very center of what we're doing, always puts customers interests, you know, before anybody else's interests. Yet at the same time, an is an empathetic, equitable, fun and innovative place for employees to work.
All right, Adam Flipski, thank you for joining us.
Thank you.
Amazon Web Services CEO Adam Slipsky there in conversation with Rimberg's at Bradstone and highlighting some of the news that has just come out. Of course, the fact that Amazon is spending one hundred million dollars to teach cloud clients about AI's saying to get real. Basically, some of the early stage clients are going to be high Spot Twilio.
They're going to be really using some of these customized applications and understanding how to get this expertise to ensure that they are adopting generator of AI at the rapid rate. But we heard there from Adam Slipsky also about the focus on being carbon new, focused on of course climate and how you twin that with the enormous compute power
that is necessary. As we dive into the whole world of lage language models of more general to AI, the chips necessary, the compute power and ultimately what that affects the climate. Conversation just keeps coming.
We're going to talk chips.
Next Technology summit is with our very own ed Lavelow some exam Qualcom Presidentcy Crisciano.
Our answers the question is crowcommon AI company?
Look, this is a this is a great question to ask, and you know it's it's incredible to see all of the development you see right now on on AI. Here's here's how I answered that question. Actually, it's very simple, Uh, if you think about the AI, when you think about semiconductor, it's really accelerating computing. You do a lot of computation, and what we see what you can do with those large language models, large models for him is in videos.
So if you think about the history of computing, computing starts in the cloud and he gets scale at the edge. I think that's that's what happens with CPUs, That's that's what happens with all other form of computing. And I think the smartphone is a great example of that. If you look, the largest computing platform ever developed is the smartphone right now. It's the largest development platform for mankind.
And and what is good about the smartphone, it's, uh, it's a device that I'm with you all the time. So if AI becomes pervasive, which we believe it will become pervasive, especially when you look about how those large models, they are very natural, how you you can converse with them, they have contextual information and all of those things that's going to happen at the edge.
So that's how you think about qualcomm.
If AI is going to get scale, you're going to see it running on wall come, snapdrag and devices. Whether it's in your phone, in your car, in your PC, and into other machines. And I think, well, it's a great opportunity.
For the future is to democracize access to artificial intelligence tools, generative AI tools, and cloudcom is going.
To make that happen.
Why are you not getting like Jensen one level love?
Look, I think the I think what's happening right now.
And by the way, it's great for the semiconductor industry. For anybody that has been on the forefront of computing. You know, Qualcom probably used to be well known as a communication company, but actually if you look at what we do right now, it's more of a connected processor company than communication.
And as those models started.
To become very popular, they're going to be running at the edge. And I expect that AI becomes an option on Qualcomm right now. Look, and I'll give you an example. It's it's I saw something they add them. I think in the prior conversation when he said something about in nineteen ninety seven, if you try to guess who are the winners and losers on the Internet, it will be probably a very wild guest. I think what we see
today is this janitor of AI opportunity is huge. We don't know yet all of the different applications that are going to come up. We're seeing that just within the past six months is a revolution the number of companies come on with use cases and those use cases are going to happen on devices, and I think that's going to be a great opportunity for.
Hold that thought. What we're going to do.
Now, I'm going to show you something to the audience here and those with us virtually, but during that think about questions for Cristiano based on what you see. And so with that, let's bring up the video, and Christiano, when it comes up and plays, explain to us a little bit what it is that we're seeing, because here at the Bloomberg Technology Summit, we're going to nail the technology. Any second, just wait, the video is going to come and when it does, it will have been worth the way.
Here we go.
Yes, So what you basically see is a countro net demo. You have an input image on your phone. You tell in your input prompt what do you want the image to be. You wanted to make it a masterpiece, look like Venice Canals four K, and it just runs and give you this very unique image image to image that's never been created before, created to AI running on your phone.
So it's a good I think.
Time to talk a little bit about how we think about AI at the edge outside of the data center, because, like we have seen everywhere, there's going to be this huge opportunity for the cloud, but it's going to be this huge opportunity for devices because what you do own the device is very different. So there's a number of reasons why this is going to be very popular on
the device. First, the device has contextual information about you and has real time information like a picture you just took and you want it right now at that moment, change that picture and share with somebody else with your messaging platform.
For context that video. That device was run in aeroplane mode without any external connection, right, It ran them model locally on.
Device absolutely, So that's one of the reasons you have real time context information.
There's another reasons processing on.
The phone is virtually free when you think about you're running those models in the cloud and think about a large language model for every token, like a word as the sentence. If you do that, if you have an experiment that you see the words coming.
Up, the president and CEO of Qualcom, Christiana I'm on talking about our very own ed Ludlow, of course, discussing how Qualcom's going to be playing a role in the enormous scope of generative AI edge computing. Of course, the chips that are known to be in your iPhones and your phones and your automobiles. One, of course, Qualcom wants to ensure that you're accessing generative AI in local ways and means