68-year-old Amazon CTO: Don't let fear make AI decisions for your company

What happened: At an event in Shenzhen, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels said fear is a poor basis for AI decisions and that companies should first define the problem they want AI to solve, noting firms will not collapse simply for not using AI yet. Key numbers: Vogels has served as Amazon CTO Why it matters: Vogels said smaller open-weight models such as DeepSeek, Qwen and Kimi met some customers' needs at lower cost, and he questioned paying for higher benchmark rankings. He also raised "verification debt" from unverified AI-generated code and said developers remain responsible for agent actions.

At an event in Shenzhen, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels said fear is a poor basis for AI decisions and that companies should first define the problem they want AI to solve, noting firms will not collapse simply for not using AI yet.

Vogels said smaller open-weight models such as DeepSeek, Qwen and Kimi met some customers' needs at lower cost, and he questioned paying for higher benchmark rankings. He also raised "verification debt" from unverified AI-generated code and said developers remain responsible for agent actions.