Amazon Nova, the future of AI, and more from the AWS re:Invent show floor

Todd Bishop (0:02)

Essentially, Jeff Bezos sees AI as the new electricity. AI is going to become sort of that fundamental utility, in some ways, that is just integral to everything at some point. That was his contention.

John Cook (0:17)

Well, it's going to take a lot of electricity. I don't know if we talk about that.

Todd Bishop (0:29)

Hi, and welcome to GeekWire. I'm GeekWire co-founder Todd Bishop.

John Cook (0:32)

And I'm GeekWire co-founder John Cook.

Todd Bishop (0:34)

We are coming to you from Las Vegas. Woo woo! Where Amazon is holding its annual Amazon Web Services Reinvent Conference. It's kind of like the Super Bowl of the Cloud, or Disneyland of distributed computing. I've been thinking of it. And we are here on the expo floor at the GeekWire Studios booth. John and I have been here all week. I've been covering all of the announcements. John, you've been handling things on the business side, having meetings. What has it been like for you to attend your first Amazon reinvent?

John Cook (1:07)

First thing I'd say is dry. As you know, I am so dried out here in the desert. I need to get back to the misty and rainy Pacific Northwest.

Todd Bishop (1:16)

So you've been sitting in on the keynotes with me and getting a sense for what Amazon has announced. I've been covering all of the news that I can, meeting with Amazon executives. For me, one of the most interesting parts this year, apart from having you as a pair of fresh eyes alongside me, which has been a lot of fun, by the way, I've really enjoyed having you here.

John Cook (1:36)

Well, thank you.

Todd Bishop (1:36)

It has been Andy Jassy, the Amazon CEO returning to this event. We're going to talk about that a little later on. Plus some highlights from Jeff Bezos and his conversation on the other side of the country at the Dealbook Summit, which relates to some of the things that have been happening here. But it was also the first Amazon Web Services re-invent for Matt Garman, the new AWS CEO. So a lot of firsts this week.

John Cook (2:00)

Yeah, and of course we heard a lot about generative AI, as we knew we would. But the thing that surprised me the most was the amount of focus on Amazon's silicon and their chips. A good chunk of the keynote from Matt Garman really dealt with their chip strategy and how they're going to take on NVIDIA.

Todd Bishop (2:20)

And by the way, we are going to be talking later on about Amazon Nova, the new foundation frontier models from Amazon. But if you think about it, the underlying silicon, the chips are the fundamental infrastructure that's required to power this new era and Amazon.

John Cook (2:39)

Yeah, largely has been powered by NVIDIA. And NVIDIA has a big presence here in Vegas at AWS reInvent, but I was struck by how much Amazon really was doubling down on that. And you had the story on Apple Computer came out on stage. That's largely what they talked about. You talked about that as a unique component. To have Apple here talking about their use of Amazon chips and a number of their services. So that was the most surprising thing to me. And I think it goes back to, was Annapurna Labs, who Amazon purchased several years ago, which really formed the basis for this expansion by Amazon into the semiconductor field.

Todd Bishop (3:16)

That's right. And Amazon, in addition to Tranium, which is primarily the chip for training artificial intelligence, also has Inferentia, which is its chip for running artificial intelligence workloads. And the key thing here that I heard from Matt Garman and Andy Jassy on stage is that, historically, Amazon has had three building blocks for its Amazon Web Services cloud unit. That is compute, storage, and database. And what they're attempting to do with the release of these new chips, with the new Nova model that they're coming out with, is add a fourth, which is inference. And the whole notion that every app, every service in the future, they believe, will have some component of artificial intelligence inference. The idea of running an AI model, incorporating it into the basics of every service.

John Cook (4:11)

Yeah. And Todd, I know we were talking about this at some of the numerous dinners and happy hours that we've been to, but another trend that really, it wasn't really a trend, it's more of a talking point. That's one of the interesting things about being at a conference like this, is you pick up on the themes that they're emphasizing. It's not so much the individual announcements, it's the repetitive words they're using over and over again to hit on certain things. And one really stood out to me. Do you know what it is?