With generic AI already transforming industries and businesses around the world, the race is on for the next big addition to the technology.
Have played a leading role in helping build and establish the systems behind many enterprise use cases for Generative AI, Amazon Web Services was recently keen to boost its reputation AWS Re:Invent 2024 event, along with a number of upgrades and new releases.
TechRadar Pro had a chance to sit down with one of the company’s leading AI minds to learn more, and how the future of work is likely to be highly AI-centric.
With more options, more powerful
“What Amazon does really well is take technologies like generative AI and apply it at scale to real-world business problems,” Wasi Filomin, VP of Generative AI at AWS, told us in a group briefing at re:Invent. ”
“We’re not just engaging in taking technology and doing technology for technology’s sake – we want to apply it to real problems, and do it at scale.”
Philomin noted how Code Whisperer, which he helped create, and is now known as Amazon Q Developer, was created at a time of high hype around generative AI, and now it has become really helpful and intuitive. Helped start a big push within AWS to build services.
“We could just build another chatbot And put it out there,” he recalls of the launch, “It would have been the easiest thing to do – but we did something else, which is to step back and think about what do companies need? “It’s not just about a chatbot, it’s much more powerful.”
Philomin explains how AWS’s AI customers are typically builders or developers, so they want to build products, and crave new services and tools that will allow them to create something entirely new.
“We want to bring it all together so our customers have choice,” he says, adding that choice is another important factor, with AWS looking to provide access to more models than any other provider.
“Having a model doesn’t help you build applications – you need workflows that work on models that help you build applications,” he says of Guardrails’ role in setting policies at the company. Highlighting what apps built with AWS’s Bedrock platform can or cannot do, for example discuss competitors, or mention politics.
forward looking agent
AI-powered agents are set to play a major role in the next generation of enterprise technology, and Philomin described AWS’s work in multi-agent collaboration as “perhaps the most forward-looking launch” of recent times.
“I think generative AI is generally going to be in the direction where companies are going to choose the abstraction to expose their business logic that is driven by generative AI, they’re going to expose it as agents. Going to do.”
“To me, an agent is a digital worker who is given a lot of resources, and that worker can go to you and solve any problem,” he says, “An agent automates work, not only Chats with you, but there’s something behind what he actually does.”
“It’s mirroring the real world, where humans work together in a certain way to get things done,” he said, adding that it’s like hiring a new employee and then introducing them to your company’s culture, principles, leadership. And is similar to bringing with speed. Teaching them about the tools you use to get the job done – just a digital version.
Philomin also outlines a larger approach, where a general supervisor, or “super-agent” would sit above specialized sub-agents, saying, “The idea is that the supervisor will coordinate between them… and a much bigger problem. , not only by using them independently, but also by cooperating with each other.
“You can imagine now, in the future, where this is going – you can set up different types of organization structures with agents, and then see how they perform as a group.”
So when agents occupy these organizational positions as well, where is the human worker left? Philomin says, “The question that keeps coming up again and again is whether generative AI replaces people? “I strongly don’t believe that.”
“What’s going to happen in my opinion is, you’re going to leave the boring, uninteresting mundane work to AI, and what you’re going to focus on more is the work you actually want to do – all of it.” “True across industries.”
This includes making software developers more productive by leaving menial code (“boring stuff” as Philomin puts it) to AI, as well as highlighting how Kiva robots in Amazon fulfillment centers have taken over heavy lifting like “menial, How “indivisible work” has done is by shedding piles of jobs – but not replacing human workers who moved to other jobs, actually resulting in an increase in overall human hiring.
“It’s just a great starting point,” says Philomin, “Humans are not going to compete against AI – they’re going to compete against other humans using AI… You’ll be harmed if you don’t want to.” will be. Using a tool is like saying I don’t want to use a smartphone – you’ll be less productive than anyone else.
As generative AI becomes more and more incorporated into our everyday tasks, what are the concerns? Like any new technology, widespread adoption will likely follow an initial hype cycle, which will require regulation and scrutiny.
“We have to strike a balance between not stifling innovation and at the same time addressing the challenges,” says Philomin.
“Responsible AI is a challenge we are working on a lot – AI regulation must be done correctly, it is absolutely essential, but if every country does its own regulation, and there is nothing in common, then you cannot do that. “Going to stifle innovation.”
“We’re working with the regulators to make sure they at least talk to each other, and make sure there’s a consensus.”
“It’s not that the challenges are difficult to overcome – it’s just that we need time to overcome them… This is a very new technology, and it’s evolving – there’s a lot of research behind the scenes Used to be”
So AWS has firmly taken its place at the forefront of the enterprise AI era, and Philomin concluded by noting that the company is well-positioned to maintain this position going forward.
“Everything has a reason why we launched it,” he says, “Amazon thinks about the whole stack – we think from beginning to end, that’s why it takes us time… And that’s how we differ from everyone else, which is to think about one thing, not the whole thing.”
“When a technology of this magnitude, it’s a once in a lifetime thing – I think it could be as big, if not bigger, than the Internet…I think the potential is there, now we just have to execute it.”
