Amazon adds Artificial Intelligence Visionary Andrew Ng To the board of directors, what is happening against the backdrop of intense competition in the field of AI among startups and large technology companies.
The Seattle-based company said Thursday that Ng, managing director of the Artificial Intelligence Foundation in Palo Alto, California, will fill the seat vacated by Judy McGrath, the former MTV CEO who told Amazon she will not run for re-election.
Nga’s AI Fund, which he founded in 2017, invests in entrepreneurs building artificial intelligence companies. He previously led artificial intelligence teams at Chinese technology companies Baidu and Google, where the team he oversaw taught a computer system to recognize cats in YouTube videos without even knowing what a cat was.
Ng’s addition to the board comes as Amazon, like other tech companies, is making huge investments in generative artificial intelligence.
In his annual letter to shareholders released Thursday, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy suggested the technology could be the next big thing in Amazon’s business, joining the company’s renowned online marketplace, Prime subscription program, and its cloud computing unit AWS. Jassy wrote that generative artificial intelligence could be the biggest technological transformation since cloud computing and “perhaps since the Internet.”