Amazon is increasingly betting on artificial intelligence as the key to its future growth. The company plans to spend $100 billion on data centers over the next decade — significantly more than it will spend on e-commerce and warehouse infrastructure. This is largely due to market forces. Thirty-year-old Amazon rode the e-retail wave to maturity, and the company’s AWS cloud service is now the new growth engine, driving the firm past $2 trillion in market value last week. The fifth U.S. company to hit that milestone is said to be building a new chatbot it hopes will surpass ChatGPT. Amazon also announced it has hired David Luan, co-founder of AI firm Adept.

The recruitment comes with a technology licensing deal with Adept that encompasses AI models and datasets. Luan will report to Rohit Prasad, the SVP and lead scientist overseeing Amazon’s AI general intelligence unit. Prasad told his staff the company is bringing Luan and “a few other deeply talented team members to our AGI team,” CNBC reports.

AWS net sales increased $10 billion from 2021 to 2023, when it generated $90 billion, according to Statista. The dynamic prompted a deep dive by The Wall Street Journal, which writes that “Amazon’s cloud business has long been the company’s profit engine, and AI is expected to catapult demand for cloud computing to new heights.”

The company is prepping for the ascent, which is necessary, given it “is seen by some experts as trailing in AI behind its Big Tech peers,” WSJ writes, noting that this is “despite having the world’s leading cloud-computing business and years of experimenting with AI.”

Company CEO Andy Jassy is confident enough in the sector’s performance that he told shareholders a few months back that the company is expecting to generate “tens of billions of dollars in revenue from AI in the next several years,” reported WSJ in April, which quoted him saying “this GenAI revolution will be built from the start on top of the cloud.”

TechRadar writes that Amazon’s in-development chatbot, codenamed Metis, will “operate in a similar vein to ChatGPT” and “will be accessible through a web browser.”

CNBC reports describes Adept as “a player in the burgeoning field of AI agents,” which would come in handy in building advanced chatbots. The company “was founded in 2022 by a group of former OpenAI and Google engineers” that has backing from Microsoft and Nvidia and, as of early 2023, a market valuation of more than $1 billion.

In a blog post timed to Luan’s exit, Adept says along with agent technology, it is licensing Amazon a “family of state-of-the-art multimodal models and a few datasets.”

Related:
This Is Big Tech’s Playbook for Swallowing the AI Industry, The Verge, 7/1/24
Highlights from the 2024 AWS Summit Washington, DC Keynote, AWS, 6/26/24
AWS Announces $50 Million Generative AI Impact Initiative for Public Sector Organizations, AWS, 6/26/24
Build Safe and Responsible Generative AI Applications with Guardrails, AWS, 6/25/24
Amazon Upgrades AI Assistant Q to Make Call Centers Way More Efficient, VentureBeat, 6/28/24