Amazon adds Andrew Ng, a leading voice in artificial intelligence, to its board of directors

Amazon adds Andrew Ng, a leading voice in artificial intelligence, to its board of directors

Amazon is adding artificial intelligence visionary Andrew Ng to its board, a move that comes amid fierce AI competition among startups and big tech companies.

The Seattle company said Thursday that Ng, managing director of the Palo Alto, California-based AI Fund, will fill the seat vacated by Judy McGrath, the former MTV CEO who told Amazon she would not run for re-election.

Ng’s AI Fund, which he founded in 2017, invests in entrepreneurs building artificial intelligence companies. Previously, he led AI teams at Chinese tech companies Baidu and Google, where the team he supervised taught computer systems to recognize cats in YouTube videos without ever being taught what a cat was.

Ng’s addition to the board comes as Amazon, like other tech companies, is making massive investments in generative artificial intelligence. The company has invested $4 billion in San Francisco-based startup Anthropic, which is partnering with Amazon to develop so-called foundational models underpinning generative AI technology. Last year, Amazon also launched a chatbot for businesses called Q and a generative AI-powered shopping assistant called Rufus.

In his annual shareholder letter released Thursday, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy suggested generative AI could be the next big pillar of Amazon’s business, joining the company’s leading online marketplace, its Prime subscription program and its cloud computing unit, AWS. Jassy writes that generative AI may be the biggest technological transformation since cloud computing, and “maybe since the internet.”