- AI will get cheaper, especially as chip prices come down, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said.
- Jassy laid out his expectations for AI in his annual letter to Amazon shareholders on Thursday.
- Amazon has been investing in AI infrastructure, from chips to data centers.
AI is going to get a lot cheaper, especially as the price of chips comes down, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said Thursday in his annual shareholder letter.
Jassy pointed to chips as “the biggest culprit” behind the cost of AI. “Most AI to date has been built on one chip provider,” Jassy wrote in an apparent reference to Nvidia.
But inference, or what AI models produce, will become more efficient in the next couple of years, Jassy wrote. Chips will also offer progressively better performance for price over time, he added.
“AI does not have to be as expensive as it is today, and it won’t be in the future,” Jassy wrote.
Jassy’s comments echo others in the tech world who have said they expect AI to get a lot cheaper — and quickly.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in February that the cost of AI will drop by 10 times every year, for instance.
The falling cost of using AI would make it affordable for more companies to adopt, Jassy wrote on Thursday. That's potentially good news for companies like Amazon, which is investing in the infrastructure necessary to run AI, from chips to data centers.
"Reducing the cost per unit in AI will unleash AI being used as expansively as customers desire, and also lead to more overall AI spending," Jassy wrote in his letter.
Jassy compared AI's potential growth to that of Amazon Web Services. Amazon has grown AWS in part by lowering its computing costs, which attracted more customers and grew the business, he wrote.
You can read Jassy's shareholder letter here.