Amazon Has The Largest AI Platform In The World, Says Boss

By Editorial Team on August 15, 2017

The company’s head of AI for its AWS cloud computing arm boasts that Amazon has the largest artificial intelligence platform in the world, and is now on a quest to rapidly popularize machine learning.

Matt Wood believes that the technology is headed for primetime in the coming years.

Amazon kicked off its AWS Summit conference in New York earlier this week, on August 14, where it showcased how the company has quietly moved ahead of its competitors in the AI race — competitors like Google and Apple that generate the most headlines for their advances in the technology.

Wood, the general manger for deep learning and AI at Amazon Web Services, talked about this in an interview with Barron’s where he claimed that his company has more machine learning running on its platform than any other firm on the planet.

As the largest ecommerce player in the world, Amazon already has massive amounts of data about the habits and preferences of its customers. In addition to that, its cloud division also hosts data for clients from multiple industries on its platform.

Wood explained:

“We are much more interested in enabling others; we are unusually customer-focused.”

And while Apple uses its machine learning technologies on its datacenters for internal purposes, Google has started to make foray into artificial intelligence by open sourcing the Tensor Flow AI library.

This, while Amazon unveiled Amazon AI last November at its cloud conference.

Wood says that Amazon offer multiple tiers of machine learning, ranging for deep learning for highly sophisticated technical applications to APIs that act as black boxes for its cloud users to build their own AI powered apps like chat bots that can be used to service online customers.

Some estimates forecast (PDF file) artificial intelligence products and services to touch almost $60 billion worldwide by as early as 2025. While AI as a whole will add $15.7 trillion to the global economy.

No wonder then that a company like AWS is at the forefront of this.