Jeff Bezos stepped down as CEO of Amazon over three years ago, but he’s still putting in the hours at the company to help it in the AI race.
Speaking at The New York Times’s DealBook conference on Wednesday, the billionaire said he’s still deeply involved and hasn’t fully left the company he founded 30 years ago.
“My heart is in Amazon, my curiosity is in Amazon, and my fears are there and my love is there,” Bezos said. “I’m never going to forget about Amazon. I’ll always be there to help, and right now, I’m putting a lot of time into it. I can help, and it’s super interesting, so why not?”
Bezos said that 95% of his time at Amazon is spent focusing on AI within the company, which he said is building 1,000 AI applications internally. One such application is a multimodal model that can process images, video, and text, The Information recently reported.
The company requires a significant amount of computing power to scale its AI ambitions, so it’s building a supercomputer using its own chips alongside Anthropic, the AI startup that it has invested $8 billion in, to give it an edge against its Big Tech rivals.
Bezos, who remains at Amazon as its executive chairman, also said one of his jobs is to ensure the success of its CEO, Andy Jassy, and the leadership team.
The world’s second-richest man said on an episode of the “Lex Fridman Podcast” last year that the main reason he left his role as the CEO of Amazon in 2021 was so he could focus his time on his rocket company, Blue Origin. At the DealBook Summit, Bezos said it was “not a very good business yet” but predicted it would eventually surpass Amazon and become “the best business” he’s been involved in.
Bezos also told the Dealbook Summit audience that he’s not worried about Donald Trump’s second term, saying he’s “actually very optimistic this time around.”
Bezos is not the only tech founder to return to a company after taking a step back. Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin both got back in the mix to work on AI initiatives after leaving their executive roles in 2019.
Their return to Google appeared to be sparked by the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in 2022, which led to Google’s management issuing a “code red,” The New York Times reported at the time. ChatGPT’s successful rollout caught Google off guard and triggered concerns about the future of its search engine, so its CEO, Sundar Pichai, turned to Page and Brin for help, according to The Times.
Amazon didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider, made outside normal working hours.
