AWS chief Adam Selipsky talks generative AI, Amazon's investment in Anthropic and cloud cost cutting

abcnews.go.com:

Adam Selipsky is shepherding Amazon’s cloud unit at one of the most important moments in tech history

Adam Selipsky is shepherding Amazon’s cloud unit at one of the most important moments in tech history.

Selipsky, the CEO of the company’s cloud computing unit AWS, has been behind the various generative AI offerings Amazon has rolled out over the past few months as it aims to compete with Microsoft and others in the growing AI arms race.

AWS is a leader in the cloud market and a deeply profitable business for Amazon. However, some of its growth has been slowing down the past few quarters, a problem attributed to customers cutting back on their spending due to challenges with the wider economy.

Simultaneously, the business has been at the forefront of Amazon’s push into generative AI, which flooded the public consciousness last year with the release of OpenAI’s popular chatbot ChatGPT. During a speech held late November at an AWS conference in Las Vegas, Selipsky unveiled the company’s response (kind of) to ChatGPT — an AI assistant for businesses called Q.

The Associated Press recently spoke with Selipsky about how companies are spending on cloud services, Amazon’s investment in the artificial intelligence startup Anthropic and the future of generative AI. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

A: A lot of our customers over the past several quarters have been pursuing cost optimization. Since day one, we’ve said that AWS and the cloud are the place to do that. We’ve seen that a lot of customers have gotten far through that cost optimization. And we have other customers who are still in the middle of it. We’re further through it, but it’s not over yet.

We’re also still seeing a lot of customers