Amazon CEO Andy Jassy reveals leadership shakeup, Pete DeSantis to lead new AI division
Amazon on Wednesday announced a reorganization of its artificial intelligence (AI) team, naming a senior leader from its cloud division to head a new unit.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy made the announcement in a message to employees that was also published on the company’s corporate blog. Jassy told employees that Peter DeSantis would lead the new group.
“I believe we are at this inflection point with many of our new technologies that will power a significant portion of our future customer experiences,” he said.
The announcement comes weeks after the company hosted the Amazon Web Services annual cloud computing conference in Las Vegas, which focuses on AI tools and services.
The new Amazon organization is a combination of the company’s Artificial General Intelligence team, chipmaking unit, and quantum computing research.
I believe we are at this inflection point with many of our new technologies that will power a significant part of our future customer experiences.
The AGI team oversees the company’s Nova-branded AI models and the digital brains of the Alexa voice assistant.
“I asked Peter DeSantis to lead a new organization that drives our most comprehensive AI models (e.g., Nova and the team we call “AGI”), silicon development (e.g., Graviton, Trainium, Nitro), and quantum computing,” Jassy said.
Why is Amazon changing its AI teams?
The main reason why Amazon announced new leadership changes stems from its desire to shake its reputation, which is not doing well compared to rivals such as Google, Microsoft and OpenAI, which are making breakthroughs in artificial intelligence models.
Amazon has invested nearly $8 billion in AI startup Anthropic and uses its technology in many internal and consumer products. Apart from this, according to recent reports, the company is also planning to invest $10 billion in OpenAI.
Who is Peter DeSantis?
Peter DeSantis, the leader of Amazon’s new artificial intelligence unit, has been working at the company for nearly 27 years.
“I can’t think of a better leader for this organization than Peter,” CEO Andy Jassy said in announcing his promotion. “Peter has been with Amazon for more than 27 years and has led some of the most transformative technologies in the history of computing.”
Peter DeSantis was previously senior vice president of utility computing and led most of the AWS engineering team.
In his new role, DeSantis will report to Jassy, who said he has the ability to “solve problems at the edge of what is technically possible.”
Peter was the leader of Amazon EC2, founded in 2006, and built the team over many years.
AWS services such as Block Storage, File Storage, Load Balancing, Networking and Monitoring were also launched under his leadership.
