How does Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, a man worth untold millions who during the COVID-19 pandemic bought the small Central Amsterdam Airbnb he was living in, spend his days? At a glance: building AI-powered meeting summary apps. Go figure.
In a Position This week on Vogels’ personal blog, he details Distill, an open source app he built with his “OCTO” (Office of the CTO) team to transcribe and summarize their conference calls. Distill takes a recording of a meeting (in formats like MP3, FLAC, and WAV), analyzes it, and creates a summary along with a to-do list. It can optionally spit out this summary and quote to platforms like Slack via custom integrations.
As you’d expect from an app from Amazon’s CTO, Distill clearly relies on paid Amazon products and services to do the computational heavy lifting. AWS Transcribe is transcribing Distill. Amazon S3 provides storage for the meeting audio files. and Bedrock, Amazon’s productive AI development suite, handles summarization.
But why create a meeting summary when there are countless tools out there that would serve the purpose? Well, I have to imagine Vogels thought, why not? It has a lot of resources at its disposal and seemingly enough free time for programming hobbyists. According to the blog, it is already trying to migrate Distill’s code base from Python to Rust. (Being the CTO is a nice job if you can get it.)
One unique thing about Distill is that it allows you to choose which AI model will run the meeting summarizing. By default, it’s the Sonnet, a mid-range model in Anthropic’s Claude 3 family. (Amazon’s large stake in Anthropic may have had something to do with this design decision.) But any model hosted on Bedrock will work, including Meta’s Llama 3 and models from AI startups Mistral, AI21 Labs, and Cohere.
Vogels doesn’t promise that Distill won’t make mistakes.
“Remember, AI is not perfect,” he writes. “Some of the summaries we receive … have errors that need manual adjustment. But that’s okay, because it still speeds up our processes. It’s just a reminder that we still need to be discerning and engaged in the process. Critical thinking is as important now as it has ever been.’
I would argue that the need to be “involved” in summarizing somehow defeats the point of an automatic summarizer. You can also hire a stenographer. But you’ll never catch Vogels badmouthing the technology his employer sells. And that, I’d venture to say, is why he’s still CTO.
