Amazon adds Andrew Ng, a leading voice in artificial intelligence, to its board of directors

Amazon is adding artificial intelligence visionary Andrew Ng to its board of directors, a move that comes amid intense AI competition among startups and big technology companies.

The Seattle company said Thursday that Ng, a managing director at the Palo Alto, California-based AI Fund, will replace a seat vacated by Judy McGrath, a former CEO of MTV who told Amazon she won’t run for reelection.

Ng’s AI Fund, which he founded in 2017, invests in entrepreneurs building artificial intelligence companies. Previously, he led AI teams at the Chinese tech company Baidu and Google, where the team he oversaw taught a computer system to recognize cats in YouTube videos without ever being taught what a cat was.

Ng’s addition to the board comes as Amazon, like other tech companies, makes massive investments in generative artificial intelligence.

In his annual shareholder letter released on Thursday, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy suggested the technology could be the next big pillar of Amazon’s business, joining the company’s prominent online marketplace, Prime subscription program and its cloud computing unit AWS. Jassy wrote generative AI may be the the largest technological transformation since cloud computing, and “perhaps since the internet.”