Amid the breathless coverage and relentless AI hype of recent years, one of the world’s biggest tech companies—Amazon—has been notably absent.
Matt Garman, the CEO of Amazon Web Services, is looking to change that. At the recent AWS re:Invent conference, Garman announced a bunch of frontier AI models, as well as a tool designed to let AWS customers build models of their own. That tool, Nova Forge, allows companies to engage in what’s known as custom pretraining—adding their data in the process of building a base model—which should allow for vastly more customized models that suit a given company’s needs. Sure, it doesn’t quite have the sexiness of a Sora 2 announcement, but that’s not Garman’s goal: He’s less interested in mass consumer use of AI and more interested in enterprise solutions that’ll integrate AI into all of AWS’s offerings—and have a material impact on a corporate P&L.
For this week’s episode of The Big Interview, I caught up with Garman after AWS re:Invent to talk about what the company announced, whether he feels behind in the AI race, how he thinks about managing huge teams (and managing internal dissent), and why he’s not convinced that AI is (or should be) the great job thief of our era. Here’s our conversation.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
KATIE DRUMMOND: Matt Garman, welcome to the Big Interview.
MATT GARMAN: Thank you. Thanks for having me.
We always start these conversations with some very quick questions, like a warmup. Are you ready?
Go ahead. Fire away.
If AWS had a mascot, what would it be?
We have a big S3 bucket sometimes that goes around, so we’ll call it that.
Sorry, what is an S3 bucket?
An S3 bucket is like a thing that you store your S3 objects in, but we actually have a large foam big bucket that walks around and actually looks like a paint bucket.
So you do have a mascot.
Well, S3 has a bucket, it has a mascot. It’s probably the closest we have, and I like it.
What’s the most expensive mistake you’ve ever made?
Personally or professionally? That’s a good question. Personally, the most expensive mistake I ever made was playing basketball too long and I tore my Achilles. So that cost me about nine months of being able to walk. I probably should have known that into my thirties I was well past basketball-playing age. I lost a little bit of time there.
