Dawn of AI golden age

Even small firms and startups, not just the big boys, are starting to use state-of-the-art deep learning tools and algorithms, notes Swami Sivasubramanian, VP of machine learning at AWS.

Claudia Chong

Published Fri, Aug 28, 2020 · 09:50 PM

Artificial Intelligence

Swami Sivasubramanian, vice-president of Amazon's machine learning arm, sees opportunities everywhere - even one amid the fatigue of jet lag.

While on a month-long family vacation in his hometown of India four years ago, a thought kept bugging him. The world was on the cusp of seeing deep-learning technologies becoming mainstream. But this was not going to happen until someone connected the dots to make it easy for any company to adopt these technologies - up till then mostly only accessible to top companies and research institutions.

So a jet-lagged Mr Sivasubramanian, who was then the general manager of NoSQL (a database) and analytics for Amazon Web Services (AWS), spent his waking hours teaching himself the different facets of deep learning and finding out where the gaps were.