The generative artificial intelligence wave is not only revolutionizing the technology landscape; it’s also changing the nature of the resources under the covers that power apps. That poses the question — are we looking at a generative AI platform shift?

Generative AI represents a set of technologies with unique capabilities. With that comes different benefits and limitations, according to Matt Wood, vice president of artificial intelligence products at Amazon Web Services Inc.

Matt Wood of AWS talks with theCUBE about a possible gen AI platform shift.

“The way I think about it is that this ability to be able to take large amounts of information, to be able to build a mathematical formula based on the examples that you see inside that information, inside the math is this emergent property that resembles intelligence, that resembles reasoning,” Wood said. “It’s not an invention; it’s a discovery.”

Wood spoke with theCUBE Research’s John Furrier at AWS Summit New York, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the ongoing enthusiasm around a possible generative AI platform shift, the integration of structured and unstructured data, and the vision AWS has for the technology.

Industry considers where to go next amid possible generative AI platform shift

Over the past 18 months, the technology industry has been collectively determining what can be done with this discovery. That means determining what’s good about it, what’s bad about it and where it works and where it doesn’t, according to Wood.

“Nothing like this has really existed before, because it is this brand new discovery,” he said. “As a result, we’re seeing just a remarkable amount of energy and enthusiasm and investment from customers.”

Every organization is investing very deliberately right now, according to Wood. That also involves a great deal of experimentation.

“There are some customers that are going all in, they’re building out and retasking all of their development engineers overnight to focus on generative AI,” he said. “Then there are pockets of areas that are moving much more quickly, like the regulated industries.”

These days, there’s also lots of conversation around the dynamics between structured and unstructured data. While unstructured is receiving much of the attention right now, there’s lots of value locked away in structured data in transactional systems and in accounting systems, according to Wood.

“A lot of what we’ve been doing at AWS is finding ways to be able to leverage that context where it exists inside unstructured data,” Wood said. “Imagine a table of numbers inside a PDF. If you just let the LLM do its thing, it’ll just break it down and create tokens out of it. What we do is we say, ‘Hey, look, this is a table.’”

From there, whenever a user needs information from it, they will be provided with that information and the context above and below it, as well as things such as table headers, according to Wood. That additional context flows in.

“Now, in addition to that, the other one thing that we announced today was the ability to be able to build agentic systems,” he said. “These are systems where you can set an objective and have the AI track towards that objective plan and execute towards that objective. Systems who operate autonomously and can take action on behalf of the user.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE Research’s coverage of AWS Summit New York:

Photo: SiliconANGLE