Amidst the shortness of breath reach and relentless buzz around artificial intelligence in recent years, one of the largest technology companies in the world – Amazon – has been notably absent.
Matt Garman, CEO of Amazon Web Services, wants to change that. At the recent AWS re:Invent conference, Garman announced a number of pioneering AI models, as well as a tool designed to enable AWS customers to create their own models. This tool, Nova Forge, allows companies to perform so-called custom pre-training – adding data during the process of building a base model – which should allow for much more personalized models to suit a given company’s needs. Sure, it doesn’t have the sexy nature of the Sora 2 announcement, but that’s not Garman’s goal: it’s less interested in mass consumer adoption of AI and more interested in enterprise solutions that integrate AI into all AWS offerings and have a material impact on corporate P&L.
This week’s episode Great interviewI caught up with Garman after AWS re:Invent to talk about what the company announced, whether he feels left behind in the AI race, how he feels about managing huge teams (and managing internal dissent), and why he’s not convinced that AI is (or should be) the biggest job stealer of our time. Here is our conversation.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
KATIE DRUMMOND: Matt Garman, welcome to the great interview.
MATT GARMAN: Thank you. Thank you for having me.
We always start these conversations with a few very quick questions, like a warm-up. Are you ready?
Start doing. Fire up.
If AWS had a mascot, what would it be?
Sometimes we have a substantial S3 bucket, so we’ll call it that.
Excuse me, what is an S3 bucket?
The S3 bucket looks like the thing you utilize to store your S3 items, but we actually have a huge foam bucket that walks around and looks like a paint bucket.
So you have a mascot.
Well, S3 has a bucket, it has a mascot. This is probably the closest we are to each other and I like it.
What is the most exorbitant mistake you have ever made?
Personally or professionally? That’s a good question. Personally, the most exorbitant mistake I ever made was playing too much basketball and tearing my Achilles. It cost me about nine months of being unable to walk. I probably should have known that by the time I was in my 30s, I was well past the legal age to play basketball. I lost some time there.