As is tradition, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels closes the AWS re:Invent conference with his keynote on the final day. A more recent tradition is that he also uses that day to publish his predictions for next year. This time, I sat down with Vogels for a wide-ranging interview ahead of his keynote to dig a little deeper into the trends he sees and expects to accelerate in the coming year.
This year in 2023, many of our discussions have focused on genetic artificial intelligence, of course. But Dutch-born and based Vogels has an interesting perspective here—and one that’s still often missing from many discussions surrounding genetic AI. His first prediction is that genetic AI will become culturally aware, meaning the models will gain a better understanding of different cultural traditions.
“You start to realize that most of these machines are trained Shared detection, which is English, very American and Western European,” he said. “And it’s not just a matter of language – although language often incorporates cultural kinds of things – but it’s much more the data they’ve been trained on.”
He noted that if companies want to deploy these genAI tools around the world, they need to start thinking about how to make their models more culturally aware. “If we don’t solve it, it’s going to be a huge barrier to the development of this technology worldwide because it’s not just about language, it’s about all the cultural aspects that are meaningful to us as humans,” he said.
He noted that he believes there are technologies available today that can solve this, including having multiple agents talk to and test each other, for example.
Being at a developer event, we also touched on what this new world of large language models (LLM) means for developers. Vogels, like many in our industry, believes that genetic AI will greatly enhance developer productivity. The tools available a few years ago, he noted, were useful for a certain kind of developer, but today’s code integration and production services take on a very different quality.
AWS logo. Image Credits: TechCrunch
“I think the tools at the time were at the level where they really supported the ‘copy and paste’ kind of developer, the person who would normally go to Stack Overflow, post the question, wait for a hundred upvotes and think: this must be the right answer Vogels said.
That work back then, he believes, focused mostly on efficiency. “I think what’s changed is that the tools now can take a broader view of things,” he said. He likened this new generation of development tools to pair programming, where the AI model is more like a very senior developer next to you who knows everything about a given code base.
Like many of his peers, Vogels also strongly believes that genetic AI will relieve developers of a lot of the work of writing tests, refactoring code, and writing boilerplate. And while some technologists worry that using these tools will actually prevent junior developers from honing their craft, Vogels doesn’t think that’s the case. “There is a ton of learning on the job. This has always happened. I expect with the newer tools that training will go faster, but there’s always a lot of training on the job.”
He also noted that the ever-increasing pace of technological development means it is now more important than ever for colleges and universities not only to teach students raw skills but also how to learn. “There is great value in what universities teach you: they teach you how to learn. They teach you how to see the bigger picture. They teach you how to analyze. They teach all these brain things that you’re going to need on the job,” Vogels said — though he didn’t want to get into a discussion about the current state of humanities programs in the United States.
However, Vogel’s predictions don’t just focus on artificial intelligence. She also believes that women’s health technology will finally take off, in part because there is less stigma now surrounding the discussion of women’s health. “It’s a social change. The stigma is changing. Men are talking about menopause these days because their wives or girlfriends or girlfriends or daughters are going through it and seeing it. If you go back 20 years, women wouldn’t even discuss it with each other,” she said. And with that, venture capital is also starting to flow into this market.
Vogels believes that because the medical establishment has often dismissed women’s health concerns or privileged men’s health, we may be reaching an interesting moment now with the advent of personalized precision medicine, where women’s health care will jump right into these most modern techniques.
“I see this in femtech, where the change is immediate: let’s take it a step further—let’s make sure we can actually do precision healthcare,” he said.
In many ways, Vogels is optimistic about technology and its potential to do good. “I have solved so many problems in my life. I am optimistic; Yes, I do – because we want to make this work,” he said. He also added that while the US startup scene may be consumed with the idea of creating unicorns, in the rest of the world, people often just want to build a sustainable business.
However, he noted that one issue facing the tech industry is that it’s moving at such a fast clip right now that it’s hard for people to keep up. “The challenge we have, I think, today is that our technology adoption cycles have been compressed so much that it’s hard to train people up front — before the technology is out there. I think that’s one of the challenges. Maybe not even for business, but if you release consumer technology out in the open without any training, people will be confused. You get a knee-jerk reaction. I think with good will we will fix these things. But we also have to make sure that we don’t underestimate that we have to continue to educate people about the new technologies that we offer.”
However, there is one thing that makes him happy about this fast cycle. “The good thing is: I don’t have to talk to my clients about blockchain anymore,” he said with a smile.
