Amazon targets artificial intelligence, adds Andrew Ng to board; former MTV executive McGrath resigns

Amazon just made an interesting move to change its direction if the company’s board of directors has made it clear where the company wants to focus. The company just announced that Andrew Ng, a luminary in the field of artificial intelligence, particularly in building artificial intelligence within large tech companies, will join its board of directors. The company also quietly announced that Judy McGrath would step down as a director. Judy McGrath is best known as a longtime television executive who ran MTV and helped turn Viacom into a media giant.

The two combined paint an interesting picture of the tech giant.

For years, Amazon has wanted to go all-in on building an entertainment empire, and it has paid a high price—it spent nearly $19 billion on its video and music businesses in 2023—and it’s interesting to note that Amazon could have become an important advocate of this strategy and This is no longer the case with consultants. Will run for re-election.

To be clear, this is certainly no This suggests Amazon won’t continue to be a huge force in streaming entertainment, whether that’s video, music, games or anything else. It now runs ads on Prime Video, which is a big reason to keep its audience strong. But the overall performance of investments in this space in 2024 will be interesting. Cuts in the studio and video divisions, as well as the end of activity in some regions, are two signs of a possible reduction in size. McGrath’s exit from the board now seems like a timely detail, considering every big tech company is currently feeling the impact of artificial intelligence.

At this point, going forward, Amazon in general will be looking for better thought leadership to shape the next steps in its AI strategy in order to stay at the forefront of the tech industry.

It’s worth remembering that Amazon has long been a leader in artificial intelligence. Its Alexa Assistant and Echo devices arguably brought voice recognition and connected assistants to the forefront, spurring many copycat products from rivals; it has been working on autonomous services for air and ground delivery and in-store purchases; and it uses machine learning to improve how products are positioned; AWS is a major player in AI computing; it has recently poured billions of dollars into large AI startups; and more.

Yet for at least a year, following OpenAI’s GPT advances and Microsoft’s massive investment in the startup (and subsequent massive scrambles by numerous other tech companies), Amazon has been grappling with the impression, both internally and externally, that it’s “technically” “behind”.

is this real? Is it just optics? Whatever the real answer is, Ng’s appointment will only help raise its AI profile, giving it more thought leadership in terms of real innovation rather than just follow-through in the field.

Ng might be a triple-threat board appointment, with extensive experience in academia, the investment community and practice building, often holding roles in all three areas.His current positions include adjunct professor at Stanford University; serving as general partner at the AI ​​Fund, a venture capital studio that builds and supports AI startups; and principal at education technology company DeepLearning.AI and Founder of computer vision startup Landing AI. Oh, and he’s still chairman of Coursera, another edtech startup he founded and once led.

Previously, he served as chief scientist and vice president of Chinese search giant Baidu; he founded and led Google Brain That The search giant is making its first major attempt to build and apply artificial intelligence technology into its products.

Amazon did not provide any statement from Ng himself in the announcement. We’ve reached out to him directly to see if he can tell us more about what he sees as the massive opportunity for Amazon, and we’ll update when we hear back. It definitely feels like a new wave of companies and thinkers are leading the way in artificial intelligence right now, but the Amazons of the world certainly aren’t sitting idly by.