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Artificial intelligence
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Amazon adds AI expert Andrew Ng, Google Brain founder and Baidu alumnus, to its board

  • Ng, founder and managing director at the AI Fund, will replace Judy McGrath, former MTV CEO, on the Amazon board
  • Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says generative AI may be the largest technological transformation since cloud computing or even the internet

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Andrew Ng, leading AI expert who worked at Baidu, has been appointed to Amazon’s board of directors. Photo: AP Photo
Associated Press
Amazon.com is adding artificial intelligence visionary Andrew Ng to its board of directors, a move that comes amid intense AI competition among start-ups and big technology companies.
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The Seattle company said Thursday that Ng, a managing director at the Palo Alto, California-based AI Fund, will replace a seat vacated by Judy McGrath, a former CEO of MTV who told Amazon she will 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 the Chinese tech company Baidu and Google, where the team he oversaw taught a computer system to recognise 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, makes massive investments in generative artificial intelligence.

The company has invested US$4 billion in the San Francisco-based start-up Anthropic, which is partnering with Amazon to develop so-called foundation models that underpin generative AI technologies. In the past year, Amazon also rolled out a chatbot for businesses called Q and a generative-AI powered shopping assistant named Rufus.

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