Late November Changelog published an interview with Werner Vogels. Until that point I was unaware that he is the CTO of Amazon, and I ended up really liking his take on things. One thing that stood out to me specifically was his level-headed stance on the current AI hype. Around the 1:22:20 mark he says:
[…] there isn’t almost a CIO that I meet today when I’m travelling that asks me, […] what should I be doing with AI? And I go like, well, my excuses is [it is] very inappropriate to answer a question with a question “but why are you asking me this?” and just yeah but those guys next door you know they will be ahead of us or and I say are you really certain of that and then maybe because you’re a little bit older you know you start to drive down into what is actually the problem they’re trying to solve with this technology and is this the right technology for this every week we see five new models or 10 new models suddenly we went from regular LLMs to reasoning LLMs. I think as a business there is no shame in […] hitting the pause button for a moment and say, why don’t we get ourselves educated about all of this? […] and not just us as technologists, but also the business. […]
It is quite refreshing to hear the technological leader of one of the largest tech companies in the world say that it is OK to be cautious on new technology. This is in stark contrast to the constant firehose of AI will replace us all and AI will go up in flames any minute now hype and gloom that is currently dominating technology news. He further elaborates:
Because at this moment, quite a few of our architectures are being determined by the media, not by us. […] That shouldn’t be the case. […] we, together with our business, should determine how our architectures should look like, not because the newest thing. And of course, and that’s the task of the media. And the task of the media is also to write negative headlines, even [if] things are looking up. That company is massively behind that company. Yeah, you know what? AWS was never a consumer company. So we don’t build consumer products. We build tools such that you can build your chatbots. Right. If Amazon, if AWS doesn’t have a chatbot, means that we’re out of business in AI. It just means it’s not our business. And I think sort of that’s really crucial in all of this, that we take time to learn the technologies, the capabilities of the technology and where it can help us in our businesses.
This was such a nice way of framing the fear driven narrative that is gripping technology and its adjacent industries. Being part of one such business in legal tech, there’s a lot of pressure from non-technical stake holders, constantly asking the development team on doing more with AI. Being cautious is seen as trying to keep the status quo, when in reality we all know how yesterday’s hype became today’s legacy.
Experimenting and trying out new things is great. That doesn’t mean you’re going to miss the boat if you don’t immediately stop everything and somehow try to cram AI into your business, regardless if you even have a fitting business case. Seeing how AI is shoehorned into everything, having countless chatbots greeting you in every corner of our digital world, wading through endless amounts of AI slop makes me think that perhaps not going in that direction might even be a competitive advantage.
