The CEO of AWS on why Amazon is hiring 11,000 interns and junior employees

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This is an interview about AI. My fiancé works at Anthropic. See my full ethics disclosure here.<br>Few people have a better vantage point on the AI economy than Matt Garman. He joined Amazon as an MBA intern in 2005, before Amazon Web Services even launched, and went on to become one of the first product managers for EC2 — the service that kicked off the cloud computing era. In June 2024 he became CEO of AWS, now a roughly $150 billion-a-year business that sits underneath much of the AI boom. It is the primary training partner for Anthropic, has signed compute deals with OpenAI worth up to $100 billion, and this year plans to spend some $200 billion on capital expenditures, the bulk of it on AI infrastructure.<br>Amazon is also increasingly in the business of selling software that does white-collar work: a developer agent, a security agent, an "agentic teammate" suite called Quick, and an AI recruiter, Amazon Connect Talent, that schedules and conducts voice interviews with no human in the loop.<br>Which makes it something of a surprise that Garman doesn't worry about AI destroying huge numbers of jobs. In fact, though, he is among the louder voices arguing that jobs might change, but they're not going away.<br>Last year Garman called replacing junior employees with AI "one of the dumbest things I've ever heard," and told Wired that never hiring junior people is a "non-starter for anyone trying to build a long-term company." When I pressed him on Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's prediction that AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within five years, he was unmoved. "Wipe out" and "change" are different things, he told me. Excel may have eliminated the jobs of people who calculated by hand, but those people learned to use computers — and the labor force expanded overall.<br>Amazon, he noted, is hiring 11,000 interns and new grads this year.<br>But what struck me most during our conversation was the tension Garman embodies. Where our previous guest, Replika and Wabi founder Eugenia Kuyda, told us the fear of job loss is "super justified," Garman might be the most full-throated optimist we've featured in the whole series.<br>It's an optimism that doesn't always seem to square with Amazon's own moves. The company has cut roughly 30,000 corporate jobs since last October. Its CEO, Andy Jassy, has written that AI will "reduce our total corporate workforce" in the years ahead. Among other strategies, the company plans to replace half a million jobs with robots. Garman is talking up the value of labor even as he sells the technology that may displace them.<br>In our conversation, he attempted to square that circle with a familiar argument: that technology destroys individual jobs but creates new and better ones, and that the most durable skill is a simple willingness to learn. "If you look at what your job was two years ago, and what your job is going to be in two years, it's going to be vastly different," he told me.<br>This marks the end of our first miniseries for the Platformer podcast. Thanks to everyone who read, listened, or watched, and wrote in with your thoughts. After a short break, we'll be back with a second series that attempts to take some of the questions raised here in new directions. And then you can expect Platformer to get back to more text-based news and analysis, as I shift my podcasting energy from Hard Fork to a new show with Kevin Roose.<br>In the meantime, though, I can't think of a better concluding episode than this one.<br>Highlights of our conversation are below, edited for clarity and length. Listen to the entire conversation wherever you get your podcasts — just search for Platformer — or watch it on YouTube at youtube.com/caseynewton.<br>And let us know what you think — we're new to podcast production, and welcome your feedback at casey@platformer.news.<br>Casey Newton: You joined Amazon as an MBA intern in 2005, before AWS even launched, when maybe some saw it as a strange side project for a bookstore. Twenty years later, it's a $130 billion business. So it strikes me that you've already lived through a cycle of people initially underestimating something that turned out to be really big, but also maybe people at various times during that transition overestimating how quickly it would happen. As you're looking at the AI landscape, does any of that history rhyme for you, or does this just feel like a totally different moment?<br>Matt Garman: It's a really good analogy, and it's exactly that. If you roll back 20 years ago, when we were first starting AWS, we had to explain to people what the cloud was and why Amazon was a part of that. We had to explain this new way of thinking about building applications, where you did it differently. You didn't think about how you have one big SAN and a couple of servers that you took really good care of and then slowly scaled. Rather, you had this disposable infrastructure...