Reacting to the AWS re:Invent Keynote

The 2024 AWS re:Invent happened, with a new CEO, and an appearance by a previous CEO. What were the big announcements, trends and stories coming out of the keynote?

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SHOW NOTES:

• AWS re:Invent 2024 - CEO Keynote with Matt Garman
• Top Announcements of 2024 AWS re:Invent
• What hath AWS wrought? (Forrest Brazzeal newsletter)
• Prince guitar solo during George Harrison tribute

Overall Takeaways:

• The new CEO
• The overall themes
• Andy Jassy’s appearance

Brian’s Top 5 Takeaways:

• The focus is now all ARM and GPUs/AI Accelerators (goodbye Intel)
• AWS is getting back to basics on Cloud - a focus on primitives
• AWS is trying to get ahead of startup and enterprise usage of GenAI with a focus on Inferencing costs (trying to make it a game of compute costs vs. model capabilities)
• What are the 1000 GenAI apps that Amazon has built? (Rufus, Robot package loading? NFL Blitz predictor?

Brandon’s Top 5 Takeaways:

• Amazon is the “Everything Store,” AWS is the “Every Service Store”
• Garmon is the legacy AWS CEO, Jassy is the AWS AI CEO
• AWS wants everyone to build a chatbot and/or call center app using AWS Bedrock 
• The NOVA foundation models are the AWS answer to OpenAI and Anthroptic. 
• AWS is attempting to build both the models and the AI Chips to run them. Tenuous partnerships with Nvidia and Anthropic. Neither was on stage. 
• AWS will never stop telling us about “Working Backwards”
• AWS marketing still wants talk about the how rather than the benefit. A long lecture on Nitro and Amazon Aurora DSQL with a lot of discussion about synchronizing clocks.

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