Among the breathless From the media coverage and incessant hype about AI in recent years, one of the world’s largest technology companies, Amazon, has been noticeably absent.
Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman is looking to change that. At the recent AWS re:Invent conference, Garman announced a set of cutting-edge AI models, as well as a tool designed to allow AWS customers to create their own models. This tool, Nova Forge, allows companies to engage in what’s called custom pre-training (adding their data into the process of creating a base model), which should make it possible to create much more personalized models that meet the needs of a given company. Sure, that doesn’t quite have the sexiness of a Sora 2 announcement, but that’s not Garman’s focus: He’s less interested in mass consumer use of AI and more interested in enterprise solutions that will integrate AI into all of AWS’s offerings and have a material impact on the company’s bottom line.
For this week’s episode of The big interviewI caught up with Garman after AWS re:Invent to talk about what the company announced, whether he feels behind in the AI race, how he views managing huge teams (and dealing with internal dissent), and why he’s not convinced AI is (or should be) the great work stealer of our time. Here is our conversation.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
KATIE DRUMMOND: Matt Garman, welcome to the big interview.
MAT GARMAN: THANKS. Thank you for inviting me.
We always start these conversations with a few very quick questions, as a warm-up. Are you ready?
Pursue. PULL.
If AWS had a mascot, who would it be?
We sometimes have a big S3 bucket going around, so we’ll call it that.
Sorry, what is an S3 bucket?
An S3 bucket is like something that you store your S3 items in, but we actually have a large foam bucket that walks around and actually looks like a paint bucket.
So you have a mascot.
Well, S3 has a bucket, it has a mascot. It’s probably the closest we’ve got, and I like it.
What is the costliest mistake you have ever made?
Personally or professionally? That’s a good question. Personally, the costliest mistake I ever made was playing basketball too long and I tore my Achilles tendon. So it cost me about nine months to be able to walk. I probably should have known that in my 30s, I was well past the age to play basketball. There, I lost a little time.
