AWS CHIEF ADAM SELIPSKY TALKS GENERATIVE AI, AMAZON'S INVESTMENT IN ANTHROPIC AND CLOUD COST CUTTING

Adam Selipsky is shepherding Amazon's cloud unit at one of the most important moments in tech history.

Selipsky, the CEO of the company's cloud computing unit AWS, has been behind the various generative AI offerings Amazon has rolled out over the past few months as it aims to compete with Microsoft and others in the growing AI arms race.

AWS is a leader in the cloud market and a deeply profitable business for Amazon. However, some of its growth has been slowing down the past few quarters, a problem attributed to customers cutting back on their spending due to challenges with the wider economy.

Simultaneously, the business has been at the forefront of Amazon's push into generative Al, which flooded the public consciousness last year with the release of OpenAl's popular chatbot ChatGPT. During a speech held late November at an AWS conference in Las Vegas, Selipsky unveiled the company's response (kind of) to ChatGPT - an AI assistant for businesses called Q.

Selipsky spoke about how companies are spending on cloud services, Amazon's investment in the artificial intelligence startup Anthropic and the future of generative Al. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: COMPANIES HAVE BEEN CUTTING CLOUD SPENDING THIS YEAR. IS THAT STILL HAPPENING?

A: A lot of our customers over the past several quarters have been pursuing cost optimization. Since day one, we've said that AWS and the cloud are the place to do that. We've seen that a lot of customers have gotten far through that cost optimization. And we have other customers who are still in the middle of it. We're further through it, but it's not over yet.

We're also still seeing a lot of customers investing. The companies who are going to win are the ones who are investing now - in uncertain economic times - when some others are hesitating in their overall investments. And we're working with a lot of customers who are doing just that. We're also seeing tremendous interest in our generative AI offerings.