Amazon‘s top artificial intelligence executive told CNBC on Wednesday that he hopes the company will be able to compete with OpenAI and Anthropic in a frontier model “next year” after falling behind the two big labs.
“I think it’s fair to say that our model hasn’t reached the forefront of the very largest, most demanding workloads,” Peter DeSantis, senior vice president who leads Amazon’s semiconductor, AI and quantum efforts, told CNBC.
“Frontier” refers to the most advanced AI models.
“We’re taking a very deliberate approach to getting the foundations, the data, the architecture, the infrastructure right. And you know, we’re on the path we want to be on,” he said.
This desire underscores Amazon’s focus on model development in an effort to reassure investors that it is a central player in the AI boom.
Amazon’s approach to AI models is two-pronged. On the one hand, we have a product called Bedrock. This is a kind of marketplace of different company models that cloud computing customers can access. Meanwhile, Amazon released its latest AI model, Nova2, in December to compete with the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic.
“Nova2 has about 50,000 customers, and we’re really excited about it,” DeSantis said.
“Our goal is to create a model that people think of as one of the most capable intelligent models out there,” he said. “We don’t know if Nova2 is there yet, but that’s our aspiration.”
Amazon’s chip strategy
Amazon’s AI strategy also revolves around its Trainium and Graviton branded semiconductors.
The tech giant has been designing its own custom chips for years, a strategy that ensures the best performance of its AI models.
DeSantis drew similarities with Nvidia in chip development.
“We’re one of the very few companies that has the ability to design a chip, design the physical properties of that chip, and do the manufacturing of that chip. So I think when you think about us, you should think about us compared to them (Nvidia),” DeSantis said.
Currently, Amazon effectively rents computing power through its cloud division Amazon Web Services, and its largest customers include Anthropic.
But CEO Andy Jassy said in April that the company might consider selling racks of Trainium chips to third parties.
DeSantis said there is no timeline for this, but explained the thinking behind it.
“I think there’s going to be an explosion of innovation in how people deploy AI infrastructure, and we want to be a part of that,” DeSantis said.
He also left the door open for Amazon to sell its Graviton chips to third parties.
“Graviton is central to our chip strategy and will continue to be so, so we’re not looking at deploying it outside of AWS at this time, but you never know,” DeSantis said.
