FastForward #1: AWS returns to its roots
ForwardThinking | | AWS returns to its roots, while embracing the AI future | It was a busy week for me personally. I attended AWS re:Invent and also launched the FastForward blog and this newsletter. | If you’re reading this today, thank you for subscribing! | I made a few key observations as I listened to new-ish AWS CEO Matt Garman’s first re:Invent keynote since taking over from Adam Selipsky in May. | For starters, he didn’t jump right into AI like just about every tech executive has done at every tech conference over the last 18 months. Instead, he emphasized the basics, the cloud infrastructure pieces that he so aptly called the “building blocks.” Those include storage, compute, databases and Amazon’s plethora of custom silicon. | The silicon not only is designed to run more efficiently than third party chips on Amazon hardware, they also help lower the cost of…wait for it… processing AI workloads and building AI-fueled applications. | You knew that AI would come up sooner or later. Garman spent the first 75 minutes of the two and a half hour address, talking about those crucial infrastructure elements, then spent the next hour, along with his boss Andy Jassy and assorted guests, putting their competitors on notice that Amazon wasn’t ceding AI to Microsoft, Google or anyone else. | You may recall that last year, Microsoft was riding high. Its partnership with OpenAI seemed like pure strategic genius on the part of the company. Amazon frankly felt like it was running a few steps behind. As Scott Raney, a partner at Redpoint Ventures told me last year, AWS was in the unusual position of playing from behind: | “This might be the first time where people looked and said that Amazon isn’t in the pole position to capitalize on this massive opportunity. What Microsoft’s done around Copilot and the fact Q comes out [this week] means that in reality, they’re absolutely 100% playing catch-up,” Raney said. | But perhaps the biggest announcement, which wasn’t entirely clear at the time, was Amazon Bedrock, a model management platform that Amazon promised would support just about any model (except OpenAI directly). Microsoft was all over OpenAI, but Amazon wanted to let enterprise IT manage every other model under the sun, even future ones that didn’t exist yet. | It remains in many ways a bolder vision than Microsoft’s, which is concentrating mainly on OpenAI in word and deed, while supporting other models through the Azure platform. Yet Microsoft was riding a wave of hype from mainstream media and Wall Street alike. | This year, Amazon went as far as to announce a bunch of new Nova LLMs created in-house giving them a crucial missing piece, yet not forcing customers to even use Nova if they have other preferences. | Let’s be clear, there are still lots of open questions, including whether these in-house models are any good, but one thing did come into focus this week: Garman reminded people that AWS is first and foremost an infrastructure platform with the AI pieces laid on top of it. While Google all but ignored the infrastructure piece at GCN in favor of all AI all the time, Garman reminded us that Amazon has a deep technical set of capabilities, and in a world where AI is taking center stage, that could be more important than ever. | | |
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What's new on FastForward | Salesforce CIO talks about dog-fooding his own products | Salesforce CIO Juan Perez told me that he has a unique position when it comes to implementing AI because he not only uses it operationally like his fellow CIOs, but he also works for a company selling AI services. | “If you spoke with a CIO in another company, the response would be very different from mine because I happen to be in an organization that is prioritizing AI in its products,” he said. “We have a direct line of engagement with [the AI team], and we learn from them because my team gets an opportunity to work closely with them as we are building products that we're going to support our customers with.” | | Blackstone CISO on balancing risk and innovation | When you are the head of cybersecurity at a company responsible for over $1.1 trillion in assets, as Adam Fletcher is at Blackstone, security is an even bigger imperative than at most organizations. But you can’t simply stop innovating, in spite of the inherent risk in using newer tech. That means finding ways to bring in innovative solutions while doing it in a careful way. | “There's an opportunity to build controls and capabilities in step with the people who are innovating. It just takes a really agile team, and it takes a team of intelligent, skilled people to take everything that they've learned up to this point and apply that to a net new technology or a net new set of systems” he said. | | Juniper CIO finds practical GenAI solutions | Juniper CIO Sharon Mandell has always had a healthy dose of skepticism when it comes to implementing GenAI solutions, but she has found when used strategically, it can help solve specific problems like documentation for new software releases. | “We can now take that content, make it much more presentable, do all the segmentation, and have a human in the loop only reviewing it, rather than creating it from scratch. That is saving us tremendous time,” she said. | | PayPal’s SVP of consumer engineering looks for end user impact in every tech decision | Martin Brodbeck is in charge of consumer engineering at PayPal, and as such, he tends to look at technology from a consumer perspective. If he’s going to implement a new solution for his team, it has to have a positive impact on end user experience. | “At the end of the day, if it's not driving some kind of value for the consumer, then what's the point of doing it,” he asked. | | |
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Pat Gelsinger era ends at Intel | Earlier this week, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, who returned a few years ago to run the company where he cut his teeth many decades earlier, suddenly decided to “retire.” Given the precipitous drop in Intel’s market position and stock price, it probably wasn’t a choice. He was simply allowed to save face by calling it a retirement. | While Gelsinger did some good things, particularly getting the company back into the manufacturing side of the business, the company fell far behind rivals, particularly Nvidia, and there was a failure to innovate and capitalize on trends, particularly AI. | |
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Google beats OpenAI to market with new video creation tool | While OpenAI has been hinting at video creation tool called Soros for months, Google beat them to the punch this week when it announced Veo, a tool that enables businesses to create videos from a prompt. While it’s not clear how long the video can be, the new tool, which was announced in May and released in preview this week, gives Google bragging rights over its hyped rival, at least for now.
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Salesforce, Okta show SAAs still has plenty of life left | SaaS has been taking a beating recently as earnings reports have been often underwhelming, and Wall Street has been demanding profitability over growth in recent years. But Salesforce and Okta bucked the trend this week with a couple of decent reports, and perhaps even more surprisingly, Wall Street rewarded them by boosting share prices.
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Apple uses Amazon’s custom AI chips for Apple Intelligence | Apple exec Benoit Dupin was a surprise guest on stage at Matt Garmin's AWS re:Invent keynote address on Tuesday. Dupin revealed that his company is using Amazon custom silicon today in its search products, and has plans to use Amazon’s Trainium2 chip in the future to help train Apple Intelligence models. | |
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| The British Museum Reading Room, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons |
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“Salesforce has become, right out of the gate here, the largest supplier of digital labor, and this is just the beginning.”
-Marc Benioff on AI Agents on the company's earning's call this week
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