Amazon CEO flags AI costs as barrier to wider adoption

Dive Brief:

• The high cost of using artificial intelligence models could limit broader enterprise adoption of the technology, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said Thursday.
• Jassy specifically cited costs related to AI inference computing, the process by which a trained model generates responses, analyzes information or performs tasks.
• “If we all want enterprises to be able to use inference the way we all believe they will, we have to keep working on taking the cost of inference down,” Jassy said during Amazon’s third-quarter earnings call. He identified a shortage of employees with the expertise to operate AI systems and fine-tune models, along with inference costs, as obstacles to broader adoption.

Dive Insight:

The comments come as inference becomes an increasingly large part of AI infrastructure spending. Gartner forecasts that inference will account for 55% of global AI-optimized infrastructure-as-a-service spending in…