If corporate boards signal anything about where a company wants to focus, Amazon has made an interesting move to change its direction. The company just was announced that Andrew Ng – a prominent figure in the world of artificial intelligence, specifically the creation of artificial intelligence in large tech companies – is joining its board of directors. The company also announced, with slightly less fanfare, that Judy McGrath – who is best known for her work as a longtime TV executive, running MTV and helping Viacom become a media powerhouse – will step down as director .
Taken together, the two moves paint an interesting picture for the tech giant.
After many costly years of wanting to continue building an entertainment empire — Amazon spent nearly $19 billion for its video and music business in 2023 — interestingly, someone who would have been a major supporter and advisor to that strategy isn’t up for re-election.
To be clear, that’s for sure not a sign that Amazon isn’t going to continue to be a huge force in streaming entertainment, whether it’s video or music, games or anything else. It now folds in ads on Prime Video, a big reason to keep the audience going. But it will be interesting to see how investments in this segment will play out in 2024 overall. Layoffs in studio and video divisions, as well as layoffs in some areas, are two signs it could be smaller. And given the AI blow every major tech company is feeling right now, it seems like a timely detail that McGrath is now stepping down from the board.
At this point, looking ahead, to stay at the forefront of the tech industry, Amazon will be looking for better overall leadership in how it takes its next steps in its AI strategy.
It is worth remembering that Amazon is and has been a leading player in artificial intelligence for a long time. The Alexa assistant and Echo devices arguably put voice recognition and connected assistants on the map, spawning many copycat products from competitors. works in autonomous air and ground delivery services and in-store shopping. uses machine learning to improve how products are targeted. AWS is a big player in AI computing. more recently it has been spilled billions in investing in big AI startups; and so on.
However, for at least a year, following the GPT advances made by OpenAI and Microsoft’s giant investment in this startup (and the huge fight from a host of other tech companies that followed), Amazon has been grappling with the impression internally and externally that it is “lagging behind” in technology.
Is true? Is it just visual? Regardless of what the real answer is, Ng’s appointment can only be helpful in furthering his AI profile by giving him more thought leadership in real innovation, not just making subsequent moves in the space.
Ng is potentially a triple-threat-style appointment, with experience in academia, investment and practice building, usually holding roles in all three at the same time. His current roles include an adjunct professor at Stanford. role as general partner at AI Fund, a venture studio that builds and supports artificial intelligence startups. the head of edtech company DeepLearning.AI and the founder of Landing AI, a computer vision startup; Oh, and he’s still president of Coursera, another edtech startup he founded and led.
He was also previously the chief scientist and vice president of Baidu, the Chinese search giant. and founded and led Google Brain, which was that The search giant’s first major foray into building and applying AI technology to its products.
Amazon did not provide any statement from Ng himself in its announcement. We reached out to him directly to see if he could tell us a little more about what he sees as Amazon’s big opportunity, and we’ll update when and if we hear back. Right now, it absolutely feels like a new wave of companies and thinkers are setting the pace in AI, but the Amazons of the world are certainly not sitting idle.
