Andy Jassy is looking for a few good techies.
The Amazon (AMZN) CEO has made not secret of his faith in technology, noting during the internet giant's April 27 first quarter earnings call that machine learning is "deeply ingrained in virtually everything we do."
"It fuels our personalized e-commerce recommendations," he said, according to a transcript of the call. "It drives the Pick Pass in our fulfillment centers. We have it in our Go stores. We have it in our Prime Air, our drones. It’s obviously in Alexa."
As far as Amazon Web Services, the company's cloud computing platform, Jassy said "we have 25-plus machine learning services where we have the broadest machine learning functionality and customer base by a fair bit."
"And so, it is deeply ingrained in our heritage," he said.
It's going to take people to build on that heritage and Amazon recently posted job listings related to generative AI, according to Bloomberg.
One of the listings is looking for a senior software development engineer says the company is “reimagining Amazon Search with an interactive conversational experience” designed to help users find answers to questions, compare products and receive personalized suggestions.
“We’re looking for the best and brightest across Amazon to help us realize and deliver this vision to our customers right away,” the company said in the listing, which was posted on its jobs board last month. “This will be a once in a generation transformation for Search.”
Transforming Every Customer Experience
Another posted job would be part of “a new AI-first initiative to re-architect and reinvent the way we do search through the use of extremely large scale next-generation deep learning techniques.”
An Amazon spokesperson told Bloomberg that the company is "significantly investing in generative AI across all of our businesses."
During the earnings call, Jassy said that large language models and generative AI capabilities have been around for a while, "but frankly, the models were not that compelling before about 6, 9 months ago."
"And they have gotten so much bigger and so much better, much more quickly that it really presents a remarkable opportunity to transform virtually every customer experience that exists and many that don’t exist that weren’t really that easily made possible before," he said.
Artificial intelligence is having a huge impact on the labor scene--along with everything else in society.
A study by the World Economic Forum found that artificial intelligence is expected to be adopted by nearly 75% of surveyed companies.
AI is also expected to lead to high churn – with 50% of organizations expecting it to create job growth and 25% expecting it to create job losses.
The survey respondents predicted 26 million fewer jobs by 2027 in record-keeping and administrative roles, including cashiers and ticket clerks; data entry, accounting, bookkeeping and payroll clerks; and administrative and executive secretaries-- driven mainly by digitalization and automation.
Labor Market Could Face 'Significant Disruption'
Earlier this year, a report by Goldman Sachs said as many as 300 million jobs could be affected by generative AI.
"If generative AI delivers on its promised capabilities, the labor market could face significant disruption," the Goldman Sachs report said.
"Using data on occupational tasks in both the US and Europe, we find that roughly two-thirds of current jobs are exposed to some degree of AI automation, and that generative AI could substitute up to one-fourth of current work," the report said.
Goldman Sachs did find a silver lining in the looming AI cloud, pointing out that "worker displacement from automation has historically been offset by creation of new jobs, and the emergence of new occupations following technological innovations accounts for the vast majority of long-run employment growth."
"The combination of significant labor cost savings, new job creation, and higher productivity for non-displaced workers raises the possibility of a productivity boom that raises economic growth substantially, although the timing of such a boom is hard to predict," the report said.
Amid all this, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, the head of the artificial intelligence company that makes ChatGPT, appeared at a Senate hearing on May 17 and expressed the myriad threats that generative AI poses, and the exponential threat it could pose in the future.
"We think that regulatory intervention by governments will be critical to mitigate the risks of increasingly powerful models," Altman said.
