The chief of the wildly profitable Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud computing unit will step down next month after a three-year term. Adam Selipsky, 57, who is also a member of Amazon's team advising CEO, will leave the company on 3 June, according to an Amazon statement on Tuesday. He will be replaced by Matt Garman, a senior vice-president who has overseen sales and marketing at AWS. Selipsky has spent 14 years at AWS over two stints. He was the CEO of Tableau Software, a unit of Salesforce, from 2016 to 2021, when he was tapped to take over the division from Jassy, who had been appointed Amazon CEO. Under Selipsky's leadership, AWS saw rapid growth, doubling sales of 45.4bn from the year before his appointment to 90.8bn in 2023 and nearly doubling operating income to 24.6bn over that period.

As CEO of Amazon's dominant cloud computing platform AWS, Adam Selipsky is one of the most powerful people in computing at a time when the industry is racing to adopt generative artificial intelligence. Although a fan of the technology, he also has a warning for anyone trying to make sense of the moment: Some AI companies at the center of the storm are massively overhyped. Selipsky likens the generative AI rush to the early days of the dotcom bubble, when expectations spread that the internet would transform many industries almost overnight. Although in the long term the internet was indeed transformative, in the short term many projects came to nothing, and swathes of Silicon Valley companies went bust. "If you go back to, say, 1997 and you ask, 'Was the internet underhyped or overhyped?' I would argue it was underhyped," says Selipsky, who spoke with WIRED during a conference at Harvard Business School on February 4. "But if you then ask, 'Were the companies who were the leaders then dramatically overhyped?' Yes, they were."

At its re:Invent conference, AWS today announced Amazon DataZone, a new data management service that can help enterprises catalog, discover, share and -- most importantly -- govern their data. The nifty part here is that AWS is using machine learning to help businesses build these data catalogs and generate the metadata to make it searchable. "To unlock the full power, the full value of data, we need to make it easy for the right people and applications to find, access and share the right data when they need it -- and to keep data safe and secure," AWS CEO Adam Selipsky said in today's keynote. The tool will provide users with fine-grained controls to manage and govern this data. That's long been a major problem for enterprises, but it has only gotten harder as the amount of data has increased, ensuring that the right users have access to the right data, without compromising personally identifiable information, for example.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced the launch of the third generation of its AWS Graviton chip-powered instances, the AWS Graviton3, will power all-new Amazon Elastic Compute 2 (EC2) C7g instances, which are currently available in preview, three years after the original version of the processors was released. According to AWS, the new Graviton3-powered instances will give up to 25% faster compute performance and 2x more excellent floating-point performance than the current generation of AWS EC2 C6g Graviton2-powered instances be unveiled at the AWS re:Invent 2021 conference in Las Vegas. According to AWS Graviton2 instances, the new Graviton3 instances are up to 2x quicker when performing cryptographic workloads compared to the business. According to AWS, the new Graviton3-powered instances will give up to 3x more excellent performance for machine learning workloads than Graviton2-powered instances, including support for bfloat16. The AWS Graviton chips are Arm-based 7nm processors custom-built for cloud workloads by Annapurna Labs, an Israeli engineering startup AWS bought roughly six years ago.

With classic rock tunes playing, Adam Selipsky took the stage for his first re:Invent keynote as the new CEO of AWS, the $60-billion cloud juggernaut that was founded just 15 years ago. This was the first re:Invent without Andy Jassy, the charismatic leader who creatively used rock lyrics to tell product stories at past shows. The rock was still there, and product announcements abounded, but it's clear Selipsky is charting his own path forward as the head of AWS. Selipsky was one of Jassy's top lieutenants before he left five years ago to head up another Seattle, Washington-area mainstay in the big data world, Tableau Software, so he's very familiar with the company he's now charged with growing. From his perspective, the growth of cloud computing over the years has been astounding.

Amazon held its 10th re:Invent conference this week. The annual event, held this year in Las Vegas as well as online, reveals new technologies designed to support its Amazon Web Services (AWS) arm, one of the leading platforms for cloud computing. The tech giant's first AWS re:Invent in 2012 was a humble affair with only 6,000 attendees, dominated by startups and emerging technology partners. The in-person event featured keynote speakers, announcements about its latest tech innovations, as well as training and certification opportunities. Amazon revealed the latest it has to offer, but a few announcements took center stage.

At its re:Invent 2021 conference today, Amazon announced Graviton3, the next generation of its custom ARM-based chip for AI inferencing applications. Soon to be available in Amazon Web Services (AWS) C7g instances, the company says that the processors are optimized for workloads including high-performance compute, batch processing, media encoding, scientific modeling, ad serving, and distributed analytics. Alongside Graviton3, Amazon unveiled Trn1, a new instance for training deep learning models in the cloud -- including models for apps like image recognition, natural language processing, fraud detection, and forecasting. It's powered by Trainium, an Amazon-designed chip which the company last year claimed would offer the most teraflops of any machine learning instance in the cloud. As companies face pandemic headwinds including worker shortages and supply chain disruptions, they're increasingly turning to AI for efficiency gains.

Tableau Software added a range of smart capabilities to its products in Tableau 2019, led by natural language processing for its new Ask Data voice recognition tool. Unveiled at the 2018 Tableau Conference, the Tableau new features include the ability to find insights by entering questions in Ask Data in text or verbal speech, more data modeling automation and Tableau Prep Conductor, an add-on product that gives users more centralized administration and scheduling options. Many of the features are available now in the public beta version of Tableau 2019.1, which was also unveiled at the conference. The natural language processing (NLP) capabilities had been among the more anticipated Tableau new features. Many BI and enterprise software vendors have been looking to add NLP to their products, and it's a technology that Tableau itself hinted at earlier this year. Essentially, Tableau users can type questions about their data into a search bar using plain language -- even with some slang -- and receive the answer.