AWS AI VP: Developers drive all innovation in technology

In a wide-ranging discussion today at VentureBeat's AI Transform 2019 conference in San Francisco, AWS AI VP Swami Sivasubramanian declared "Every innovation in technology is going to be driven by developers." Sivasubramanian made the statement while talking about growing demand for machine learning engineers and internal efforts at Amazon to train more employees to use machine learning. Facebook VP Jérôme Pesenti also stressed plans to make machine learning part of each employee's job at the company. And earlier today, Amazon committed $700 million to upskilling its U.S. workers. "Amazon developed what we call Machine Learning University. This is what we use to train our own engineers on machine learning even if they didn't take it as part of their own university [course work]," Sivasubramanian said.