Amazon elevates AWS SVP Peter DeSantis to head the new AI-Focused organization within Amazon. CEO Andy Jassy made the announcement via a message to staff on Wednesday, citing DeSantis’s 27-year career with AWS.
DeSantis will be responsible for Amazon’s AI models, such as Nova, as well as microelectronics and Bracket, AWS’s Quantum Computing arm. The move does seem to have some timing that could warrant scrutiny. The EU announced an investigation into Google’s AI practices, as the search giant announces its desire to put AI data centers in space. Jassy, in his announcement that was quoted in a TechCrunch Article, said that “With our Nova 2 models just launched at re: Invent, our custom silicon growing rapidly, and the advantages of optimizing across models, chips, and cloud software and infrastructure, we wanted to free Peter up to focus his energy, invention cycles, and leadership on these new areas,”
The timing of this move, on the heels of the EU moving into building regulations surrounding AI development, as the United States claws at capturing a single self-regulating plan, alienating and blocking the states from regulating AI standards themselves, speaks volumes as to why the Nova models are being pushed to the forefront and a seasoned SVP is placed at the helm, rather than Bezos, who had said he would be personally heading up the initiative.
This is a race to build an AI out of the control of regulators. Space is not an easy place to build anything. As Amazon invests in OpenAI, Anthropic, America’s One-Rule, all the mediocre models are getting a great deal of attention. As plans to build in space move quickly, even though Google, Amazon, xAI, and NVIDIA have never attempted to place Petabytes of data in orbit. And create a model that can function on-the-ground. Musk might be shaking in anticipation of what he can charge to lift those data center satellites into orbit. First, he would have to figure out how to get enough servers up there, permanently, then how to transmit the trillions of bytes of data back to Earth in order to make the system function, even at the mediocre level of ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and whatever crazy model the United States comes up with.
Scientists are warning in stark terms about what will happen if development takes an irresponsible turn, as deeply as we are seeing now. The FutureofLife website has published an open letter to big tech, laying out in terms everyone can understand that the development of Artificial Intelligence on a giant scale will cause irreversible disaster to society. Mainly because the “scientists” creating the giant-scale AI have no idea why or how AI works. They are literally unleashing the basic results of an experiment they have no idea why the results happened the way they did. They are training it, to no avail; they are unleashing it, with the idea that they can control it. They can’t; it is beyond their understanding.
It is the reason the scientists have walked away.
Hinton, LaCunn, and Bengio all agree that their work is being structured incorrectly. If the inventors are saying the invention is not being used correctly, it is an obligation on our advanced society to pay attention. Ask some hard questions. There is no need for another Manhattan Project; the weaponizing of AI will only turn against us. I would like people, all gentle souls, to imagine the present defense secretary of the United States, with a weapon that could target and eliminate whole parliaments, or eliminate ethnic groups, or races, with all the intelligence of a ChatGPT answer to how are you feeling today?
Listen to science, not big money.
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