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AWS CEO Matt Garman on generative AI, open source, and shutdown services

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It was quite a surprise when Adam Selipsky stepped down as CEO of Amazon’s AWS cloud computing unit. Perhaps an equally big surprise was that he was replaced by Matt Garman. Garman joined Amazon as an intern in 2005 and became a full-time worker in 2006, working on early AWS products. Few people know the corporate higher than Garman, whose last position before becoming CEO was as senior vp of sales, marketing and global services for AWS.

Garman told me in an interview last week that he hasn’t made any significant changes to the organization yet. “Not much has changed in the organization. “The business is doing quite well, so there is no need to make huge changes to anything we are focusing on,” he said. However, he identified several areas where he believes the corporate must focus and where he sees opportunities for AWS.

Emphasize start-ups and rapid innovation

One of them, somewhat surprisingly, is startups. “I think we have evolved as an organization. … In the early days of AWS, our main focus was on how to really attract developers and startups, and we got a lot of traction there from the beginning,” he explained. “And then we started thinking about how do we appeal to larger businesses, how do we appeal to governments, how do we appeal to regulated sectors around the world? And I think one of the things that I just emphasized again – it’s not really a change – but I just emphasized that we can’t lose focus on startups and developers. We have to do all these things.”

The second area he wants the team to focus on is maintaining with the whirlwind of change within the industry.

“I even have really emphasized with the team how essential it’s for us to proceed to remain on the forefront that we’ve by way of the set of services, capabilities and features and functions that we’ve today – and proceed to lean forward and construct the plan motion involving real innovation,” he said. “I think the reason customers use AWS today is because we have the best and broadest set of services. The reason people turn to us today is because we continue to deliver industry-leading security and operational efficiency by far, and help them innovate and move faster. We must continue to implement the action plan. “It’s not likely a change in itself, but that is probably what I highlighted essentially the most: how essential it’s for us to take care of the extent of innovation and the speed at which we deliver products.”

When I asked him if he thought possibly the corporate hadn’t innovated fast enough up to now, he said no. “I think the pace of innovation is only going to accelerate, so it’s just important to emphasize that we also need to accelerate the pace of innovation. It’s not that we’re losing it; it is simply an emphasis on how much we need to accelerate given the pace of technology.”

Generative Artificial Intelligence in AWS

With the emergence of generative AI and technology changing rapidly, AWS must be “on the cutting edge of all of them,” he said.

Shortly after ChatGPT’s launch, many experts questioned whether AWS was too slow to launch generative AI tools on its own and left the door open to competitors like Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. However, Garman believes that this was more imagination than reality. He noted that AWS has long offered successful machine learning services like SageMaker, even before generative AI became a buzzword. He also noted that the corporate has taken a more thoughtful approach to generative AI than perhaps a few of its competitors.

“We were looking at generative AI before it became a widely accepted thing, but I will say that when ChatGPT came out, it was kind of a discovery of a new area and how to apply this technology. I think everyone was excited and energized by it, right? … I think a group of people – our competitors – were kind of racing to put chatbots at the top and show that they are leading the way in generative AI,” he said.

I feel a bunch of individuals – our competitors – were sort of racing to place chatbots on top of every part and show that they were the leader in generative AI.

Instead, Garman said, the AWS team desired to take a step back and take a look at how its customers, whether startups or enterprises, could best integrate the technology into their applications and leverage own, differentiated data. “They will need a platform that they will construct on freely and consider it as a platform to construct on relatively than an application that they will customize. That’s why we took the time to construct this platform,” he said.

In the case of AWS, that platform is Bedrock, where it offers access to a big selection of open and proprietary models. Just doing this – and allowing users to attach different models together – was a bit controversial on the time, he said. “But for us, we thought that was probably where the world was going, and now it was certain that that was where the world was going,” he said. He said he thinks everyone will want custom models and provide their very own data for them.

Garman said the bedrock is “growing like a weed right now.”

One problem with generative AI that it still wants to resolve is price. “A lot of this is doubling down on our custom silicon and making some other changes to the models to draw the conclusion that you’re going to be building (something) much cheaper into your applications.”

Garman said the following generation of AWS’s custom Trainium chips, which the corporate debuted on the re:Invent conference in late 2023, will likely be launched later this 12 months. “I’m really excited that we can really turn this cost curve around and start delivering real value to customers.”

One area where AWS hasn’t necessarily tried to compete with a few of the other tech giants is in constructing its own large language models. When I asked Garman about this, he noted that these are still issues the corporate is “very focused on.” He thinks it is vital for AWS to have its own models while still using third-party models. But he also desires to ensure AWS’s own models can bring unique value and differentiation, either through leveraging its own data or “through other areas where we see opportunities.”

Among these areas of opportunity are costs, but in addition agents, which everyone within the industry seems optimistic about for the time being. “Having models that are reliable, at a very high level of correctness, and can call other APIs and do things. “I think there is some innovation that can be done in this area,” Garman said. He says agents will gain way more utility from generative AI, automating processes on behalf of their users.

Q, a chatbot powered by artificial intelligence

At the recent re:Invent conference, AWS also unveiled Q, its AI-powered generative assistant. Currently, there are mainly two versions of this solution: Q Developer and Q Business.

Q Developer integrates with a lot of the most well-liked development environments and, amongst other things, offers code completion and tools for modernizing legacy Java applications.

“We really think of Q Developer as a broader sense of really helping throughout the developer lifecycle,” Garman said. “I think a lot of early developer tools focused on coding, and we’re thinking more about how do we help with everything that’s painful and labor-intensive for developers?”

At Amazon, teams used Q Developer to update 30,000 Java applications, saving $260 million and 4,500 years of developer labor, Garman said.

Q Business uses similar technologies under the hood, but focuses on aggregating internal company data from many various sources and making it searchable using a ChatGPT-like Q&A service. The company “sees a real driving force there,” Garman said.

Shutting down services

While Garman noted that not much has modified under his leadership, one thing that has happened recently at AWS is that the corporate announced plans to shut down a few of its services. Traditionally, AWS hasn’t done this fairly often, but this summer it announced plans to shut down services just like the Cloud9 web IDE, CodeCommit competitor GitHub, CloudSearch and others.

“It’s sort of a clean-up where we looked at a number of services and either, frankly, introduced a better service that people should move to, or we launched one that we just didn’t get better,” he explained. “And by the way, some of them we just don’t do well, and their traction has been quite poor. We looked at it and said, “You know what? The partner ecosystem actually has a better solution and we intend to build on it.” You cannot put money into every part. You cannot construct every part. We do not like to do that. We take this seriously if firms wish to rely on us to support their activities in the long run. That’s why we’re very careful.”

AWS and the open source ecosystem

One relationship that has long been difficult for AWS – or no less than has been perceived as difficult – is its relationship with the open source ecosystem. This is changing, and just just a few weeks ago AWS contributed its code to the OpenSearch Linux Foundation and the newly formed OpenSearch Foundation.

We love open source. We rely on open source code. I feel we’re attempting to leverage the open source community, making an enormous contribution to the open source community.

“I think our view is pretty simple,” Garman said after I asked him what he thought in regards to the future relationship between AWS and open source software. “We love open source. We rely on open source code. I feel we’re attempting to leverage the open source community, making an enormous contribution to the open source community. I feel that is what open source is all about – benefiting from the community – and that is why we take it seriously.”

He noted that AWS has made key investments in open source software and a lot of its own open source projects.

“Most of the friction has come from firms that originally began open source projects and then decided to sort of decommission them from open source, and I feel they’ve the appropriate to do this. But you recognize, that is not the true spirit of open source. Whenever we see people doing this, take Elastic for instance, and OpenSearch (AWS’ ElasticSearch fork) is sort of popular. … If there’s a Linux (Foundation) project, or an Apache project, or the rest that we will construct on, we would like to construct on that; we contribute to them. I feel we’ve evolved and learned as a company learn how to be good stewards of this community, and I hope that has been noticed by others.

This article was originally published on : techcrunch.com
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Crypto CEO kidnapped in Toronto, released after paying $1 million ransom

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The word Bitcoin can be seen on the display of a Ledger Nano S hardware wallet next to a symbolic

According to him, the CEO of Canadian cryptocurrency company WonderFi was kidnapped and held for ransom on Wednesday CBC. Dean Skurka was reportedly forced right into a vehicle in downtown Toronto during rush hour and escaped unhurt after electronically sending $1 million (possibly CAD) to his kidnappers.

The CEO of WonderFi is the most recent cryptocurrency star to fall victim to a brutal attack. This is the 171st case of physical violence geared toward stealing cryptocurrency, a security company tells CBC.

Skurek’s company reported results for the third quarter the day before the incident, generating C$41 million in revenue over the past nine months. Meanwhile, Bitcoin’s price rose above $76,000 this week, reaching a brand new record high for the digital currency.

WonderFi is endorsed by Shark Tank co-host Kevin O’Leary and is some of the well-known publicly traded crypto corporations in Canada, in response to Cointelegraph.

This article was originally published on : techcrunch.com
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Canoo’s latest defeat, stories from Waymo players and what Trump’s victory means for Elon (and his corporations)

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Welcome back TechCrunch Mobility – Your central hub for news and insights on the long run of transport. Register here for free – just click TechCrunch Mobility!

The election has only been two days and there may be already numerous speculation concerning the next election Trump’s presidency will mean for transport and technology, in addition to related sectors akin to energy and climate. Many of those questions will take months to reply. We will observe and report on what impact this may increasingly have on the long run of transport.

Early on, we produced several articles that examined who might win, who might lose, and how specific sectors might deal with changes in governance in the chief and legislative branches. TC reporter Tim De Chant provided evaluation on why President-elect Trump may find it difficult to lighten the mood Act on reducing inflationand reporter Rebecca Bellan examined what this victory could mean Elon Musk and his corporations including Tesla, SpaceX and X.

Little bird

Image credits:Bryce Durbin

A little bit bird told us that Tesla has definitely given up on its $25,000 electric vehicle and replaced it with a robotaxi. The breakthrough that got here in April, when Musk announced that Tesla would unveil its robotaxi this 12 months, got here as a surprise to many Tesla employees who were enthusiastic about the opportunity of constructing a less expensive electric vehicle that their children could sooner or later afford. This change in strategy, combined with mass layoffs earlier this 12 months, led to low morale amongst employees and even some departures. But our little bird says morale is slowly improving.

In other baby bird news…

Just a few little birds told us concerning the launch of electrical vehicles Canoo struggled with executive departures and more furloughs. Just a few days later, before the newsletter was able to ship, our information was verified in a regulatory document: the CFO and general counsel had left, which, amongst other things, resulted within the furloughing of 30 employees.

You can even see these instructions to learn the best way to contact us via the encrypted messaging app or SecureDrop.

Offers!

money for the station
Image credits:Bryce Durbin

Beta technologiesstartup developing electric planes for vertical takeoff and landing had an enormous round of funding — 318 million largeand yes, I mean dollars. The Series C financing round was led by Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund. Fidelity, TPG and United Therapeutics, which can also be a client, joined the round. This brings Beta’s total funding to over $1 billion. Not a word concerning the valuation.

As Rebecca Bellan noted in an article earlier this 12 months, Beta doesn’t wish to run its own urban air taxi network. Beta is positioning itself more as an OEM that may sell aircraft and charging solutions to multiple customers. The company has assured security for customers within the defense, cargo delivery and medical logistics industries – akin to United Therapeutics, UPS, Air New Zealand and the United States Air Force – with plans to launch products in these markets by 2025.

Other offers that caught my attention…

DeepRoute.aiShenzhen-based autonomous driving technology startup raised $100 million from Great Wall Motor. The funding is meant to assist DeepRoute introduce automated driving systems to as many vehicles as possible in China before Tesla launches next 12 months.

Last week we reminded you Waymo closing a $5.6 billion round from parent company Alphabet. Well, Bloomberg spotted the valuation, which their sources say is currently at $45 billion.

Van revised the valuation of Indian passenger transport startup Ola to around $2 billion at the tip of August.

Xavveostart-up coping with autonomous vehicle sensor technology, raised $8.6 million in a seed round co-led by Vsquared Ventures and imec.xpand.

Noteworthy reading and other interesting facts

Image credits:Bryce Durbin

Autonomous vehicles

Lift announced three separate partnerships — with a startup May mobilityautomated vehicle company Mobileyeand the corporate’s smart dash camera Nexar — all aimed toward gaining a foothold within the emerging autonomous vehicle market. All of those Uber and Lyft partnerships take me back to the hype days of AV in 2017 and 2018.

Electric vehicles, charging and batteries

Ferry said it is going to halt production of the F-150 Lightning electric pickup truck starting in mid-November for nearly two months because it grapples with reduced demand, increased competition and losses in the electrical vehicle industry.

Hurry up unveiled by an Electric camper concept which he describes as “the perfect escape pod,” Ars Technica reports.

Technology and software within the automotive

Reporter Sean O’Kane spoke with Rivian’s software chief Wassym Bensaid on the sidelines of TechCrunch Disrupt and learned that it’s working on an ecosystem for third-party developers that may make more apps available on the vehicle’s infotainment system.

This week’s wheels

Waymo Jaguar i-Pace fully autonomous robotaxi in San Francisco
Image credits:Waymo

This week, I’m reaching out to a handful of TechCrunch staffers who took their first Waymo rides while in San Francisco for Disrupt 2024. I’ve ridden many autonomous vehicles, including a driverless Waymos, so I assumed it might be fun to share a newbie’s perspective.

Venture reporter Dominic-Madori Davis said: “I thought I would hate Waymo, but I didn’t. He drove like my mother. Quite careful, very slow. I felt as safe as I could in the self-driving car, and honestly, I was glad I didn’t have to talk about the weather.”

AI and enterprise reporter Kyle Wiggers said “it’s nerve-wracking, especially when other cars pass us.” Sitting with a shotgun, the entire experience felt unnerving. I expected the worst.” I asked him if he would take one other Waymo, and his answer was, “Yes, but carefully.”

Venture editor Julie Bort went on three rides. She noted that her first ride was somewhat scary because she “turned a bit wobbly in a narrow lane next to a row of parked cars.” He also did not turn right on a red light, which resulted in frustrated people honking. She also noticed that sometimes the costs were much higher than what Uber would charge, and the drop-off locations were strange and just across the corner.

“All in all, it was a fun experience and if the car price is as affordable as other rideshares, I will do it regularly,” Bort told me. “But while it solved one security problem, it introduced others.”

Reporter Amanda Silberling said: “Waymo is like a roller coaster. It’s funny because it seems a little dangerous, but like a roller coaster, you know it’s been tested ad nauseam so it’s probably okay? If I wasn’t on a business trip with a corporate card, I don’t know if I could see myself using it because in many cases it was more expensive than Uber. Overall, I’m surprised at how safe I felt on Waymo rides, even though when I told my friends I was riding Waymo, they made me promise to text them once I arrived safely at my destination. My friends would react the same way if I was alone on the subway after midnight.”

This article was originally published on : techcrunch.com
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Anthropic partners with Palantir and AWS to sell artificial intelligence to defense customers

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Anthropic Claude 3.5 logo

Anthropic on Thursday announced that it’s working with Palantir, a knowledge mining company, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) to provide U.S. intelligence and defense agencies with access to Anthropic’s Claude family of artificial intelligence models.

The news comes as an increasing variety of AI vendors seek to sign contracts with U.S. defense customers for strategic and fiscal reasons. Meta recently revealed that it’s sharing its llama models with defense industry partners, while OpenAI does searching establishing closer relations with the Department of Defense.

Anthropic’s head of sales, Kate Earle Jensen, says the corporate’s partnership with Palantir and AWS will “operationalize the use of Claude” on the Palantir platform, leveraging AWS hosting. Claude, which became available on the Palantir platform earlier this month, can now be utilized in Palantir’s defense-accredited Impact Level 6 (IL6) environment, hosted on AWS infrastructure.

The Department of Defense’s IL6 is reserved for systems containing data considered critical to national security and requiring “maximum protection” against unauthorized access and manipulation. Information in IL6 systems can reach the “secret” level – one step less top secret.

“We are proud to be a leader in bringing responsible AI solutions to classified environments in the U.S., increasing analytical capabilities and operational efficiency in key government operations,” Jensen said. “Access to Claude on Palantir on AWS will equip U.S. defense and intelligence organizations with powerful artificial intelligence tools that can quickly process and analyze massive amounts of complex data. This will dramatically improve intelligence analysis and decision-making for officials, streamline resource-intensive tasks and increase operational efficiency across all departments.”

This summer, Anthropic introduced select Claude models to AWS’s GovCloud service, signaling its ambition to expand its public sector customer base. (GovCloud is an AWS service designed for US government cloud workloads). Anthropic positions itself as a more security-conscious provider than OpenAI. However, the corporate’s terms of service allow it to use AI for tasks reminiscent of “legally authorized foreign intelligence analysis,” “identifying covert influence or sabotage campaigns,” and “providing advance warning of potential military activities.”

There is actually interest in artificial intelligence amongst government agencies. March 2024 Brookings Institute evaluation found 1,200% increase in government procurement related to artificial intelligence. But some branches, reminiscent of the US military, do slow implementation of this technology — and skeptical concerning the return on investment.

Anthropic, which has recently expanded into Europe, is he said conduct talks on obtaining a brand new round of financing value up to USD 40 billion. To date, the corporate has raised about $7.6 billion, including forward commitments. Amazon is by far the most important investor.

This article was originally published on : techcrunch.com
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