AI seems to be pulling billionaire founders out of retirement and back to working at their companies.
After Google co-founder Sergey Brin had said that he was back at Google to work on AI initiatives, Jeff Bezos has also said that he’s back at working at Amazon. He’s said that he’s spending 95 percent of his time working on AI after his return. Jeff Bezos had stepped down as Amazon CEO in 2021 and Andy Jassy had taken his place.
“What is it that you’re doing at Amazon,” Bezos was asked in an interview. “AI,” he promptly replied. “I mean there are a few things, but it’s 95 percent AI. Because we’re literally working on a thousand applications internally. You have to remember, modern AI is a horizontal enabling layer. It can be used to improve everything,” he said.
“AI will be in everything,” Bezos continued. “This is most like electricity. These kind of horizontal layers like electricity and compute, and now artificial intelligence, they go everywhere. There isn’t, I guarantee you, there is not a single application that you can think of that is not going to be made better by AI,” Bezos said.
And the pull of AI seemed to be strong enough to have drawn Bezos back at Amazon. Amazon has been seen to have been lagging in the AI race to competitors like Google, Microsoft and OpenAI. But it has quietly been making some moves of its own, having first invested in Anthropic which makes the Claude series of models, and has now released its own series of AI models named Nova.
Jeff Bezos follows in the footsteps of Google’s Sergey Brin, who along with Larry Page given up the CEO reins in 2015 to Sundar Pichai. But after OpenAI had released ChatGPT in late 2022, Brin had returned to Google, and had even begun submitting code to Google’s codebase. Now Jeff Bezos has returned to Amazon, and is spending 95 percent of his time working on AI. This is another sign of how disruptive the AI revolution is expected to be — in spite of these founders having hundreds of billions of dollars, they’re getting out of retirement on their yachts to help play in their part in how AI changes the world.