How does Amazon CTO Werner Vogels – a man worth millions who, during the COVID-19 pandemic, outright bought the small Airbnb in central Amsterdam he was living in – spend his days? At first glance: Building AI-powered meeting summary apps. Go figure.
In a post published this week on Vogels’ personal blog, he details Distill, an open source application he created with his “OCTO” (Office of the CTO) team to transcribe and summarize their conference calls. Distill takes an audio recording of a meeting (in formats like MP3, FLAC, and WAV), analyzes it, and generates a summary and to-do list. It can optionally push this summary and list to platforms like Slack via custom integrations.
As you might expect from an Amazon CTO app, Distill clearly relies on Amazon’s paid products and services to do the heavy lifting. AWS Transcribe performs Distill transcription; Amazon S3 provides storage for meeting audio files; and Bedrock, Amazon’s generative AI development suite, handles synthesis.
But why create a meeting summary when there are countless tools that could serve this purpose? Well, I have to imagine Vogels thought, why not? He has tons of resources and seems to have plenty of free time for amateur programming projects. According to the blog, he is already trying his hand at porting the Distill codebase from Python to Rust. (Being the CTO is a good job if you can get it.)
A special feature of Distill is that it allows you to select the AI model that summarizes the meeting. By default, it is the Sonnet, a mid-range model in Anthropic’s Claude 3 family. (Amazon’s large stake in Anthropic may have had something to do with this design decision.) But any model hosted in Bedrock will work, like Meta’s Llama 3 and models from AI startups Mistral, AI21 Labs and Cohere.
Vogels doesn’t promise that Distill won’t make mistakes.
“Remember that AI is not perfect,” he writes. “Some of the summaries we receive… have errors that require manual adjustment. But that’s okay, because it still speeds up our processes. It’s simply a reminder that we still need to be discerning and involved in the process. Critical thinking is more important today than ever.
I would argue that having to be “involved” in summarizing defeats the point of an automatic summarizer. Might as well hire a stenographer. But you’ll never see Vogels disparaging the technology his employer sells. And that, I would bet, is why he is still CTO.
techcrunch
