After stepping down as CEO three years ago, Jeff Bezos has re-emerged at Amazon, focusing 95% of his time working on the company's AI initiatives.
Speaking at the DealBook Summit on Wednesday, Bezos said, “My heart is in Amazon, my curiosity is in Amazon, and my fears are there, and my love is there.”
One of the cornerstone projects under Bezos’s watch involves building a cutting-edge supercomputer in partnership with Anthropic, which is expected to power a multimodal AI model capable of analyzing images, video, and text, further enhancing Amazon’s AI capabilities.
Amazon aims to make itself a de facto element of AI, much like it has done with e-commerce, and believes that offering a selection of AI models through a single API to business customers will be one of the keys to succeeding at that mission.
Last year the company introduced a service called Amazon Bedrock that lets business customers choose from a selection of AI models to train for their own needs and to serve as a foundation for their own gen AI applications, and last week, the company double downed on that strategy by announcing Bedrock Marketplace, which offers a total of 100 AI models.
Amazon wrote in a blog post, “Finding and evaluating these models can be challenging and costly. You need to discover them across different services, build abstractions to use them in your applications, and create complex security and governance layers. Amazon Bedrock Marketplace addresses these challenges by providing a single interface to access both specialized and general-purpose [foundation models].”
Bezos, who has continued to serve as Amazon’s executive chairman since stepping down as CEO, said, “I’ll always be there to help, and right now, I’m putting a lot of time into it. It’s super interesting, so why not?”
Bezos also told the Dealbook Summit audience that he's not worried about Donald Trump's second term, saying he's “actually very optimistic this time around.”