The barrier to cashing in on the AI revolution has never been lower, says Amazon’s SVP and Head Scientist of Artificial General Intelligence.
“The bar to build with AI has suddenly reduced,” Rohit Prasad said at Fortune’s Brainstorm AI conference this week in San Francisco.
“You don’t need a PhD in machine learning or mathematics to build with AI,” Prasad explained. The ecommerce giant’s AGI expert himself holds an M.S. in electrical engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology and an MBA from M.I.T.
Prasad was responding to a question about how Amazon is competing for top engineering talent as every major technology firm races to beef up their AI-focused workforce. Amazon has come under criticism as an employer over the years for issues ranging from the working conditions for warehouse employees to its recent return-to-office mandate.
But Prasad focused on what he described as the current “great times for AI scientists and AI practitioners,” adding that it’s now easier than ever for everyone to get in on the AI action.
With the LLMs available today, the everyday user can experience and experiment with the technology by tweaking and developing their prompts to chatbots. As the technology improves and workplaces adapt, Prasad sees the work of the typical Amazon employee as coming up with prompts, rather than writing the code.
“Frankly, I believe that more and more work will be at the application layer,” he said.
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