In the midst of the breathless The news coverage and relentless AI hype of recent years has left one of the largest tech companies in the world – Amazon – conspicuously absent.
Matt Garman, the CEO of Amazon Web Services, wants to change that. At the recent AWS re:Invent conference, Garman announced a number of groundbreaking AI models, as well as a tool designed to let AWS customers build their own models. That tool, Nova Forge, allows companies to engage in what's known as custom pretraining — adding their data while building a basic model — which should allow for many more customized models to fit a particular company's needs. Sure, it doesn't quite have the sexy appeal of a Sora 2 announcement, but that's not Garman's goal: he's less interested in mass consumer use of AI and more interested in enterprise solutions that integrate AI into all of AWS's offerings — and have a material impact on a company's P&L.
For this week's episode of The big interviewI spoke with Garman after AWS re:Invent to talk about what the company announced, whether he feels left behind in the AI race, what he thinks about managing large teams (and managing internal dissent), and why he's not convinced AI is (or should be) the great job stealer of our time. Here's our conversation.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
KATIE DRUMMOND: Matt Garman, welcome to the big interview.
MAT GARMAN: Thank you. Thanks for having me.
We always start these conversations with a few very short questions, such as a warm-up. Are you ready?
Go ahead. Fire away.
If AWS had a mascot, what would it be?
We sometimes have a big S3 bucket going around, so we'll call it that.
Sorry, what is an S3 bucket?
An S3 bucket is kind of like a thing that you keep your S3 objects in, but we actually have a big foam bucket that goes around and actually looks like a paint bucket.
So you do have a mascot.
Well, S3 has a bucket and a mascot. It's probably the closest to what we have, and I like it.
What's the most expensive mistake you've ever made?
Personal or professional? That's a good question. Personally, the most expensive mistake I ever made was playing basketball too long and tearing my Achilles tendon. So that took me about nine months to be able to walk. I probably should have known that I was way past basketball age until I was 30. I lost a little time there.
