AWS Director of Product Management Mike Miller

EPISODE NOTES

Mike Miller is the Director of Project Management at AWS, and he joins us today to share about the inspirational AI-powered products and services that are making waves at Amazon, particularly those with generative prompt engineering capabilities. We discuss how Mike and his team choose which products to bring to market, the ins and outs of PartyRock including the challenges of developing it, AWS’s strategy for generative AI, and how the company aims to serve everyone, even those with very little technical knowledge. Mike also explains how customers are using his products and what he’s learned from their behaviors, and we discuss what may lie ahead in the future of generative prompt engineering.

Key Points From This Episode:

• Mike Miller’s professional background, and how he got into AI and AWS.
• How Mike and his team decide on the products to bring to market for developers.
• Where PartyRock came from and how it fits into AWS’s strategy.
• How AWS decided on the timing to make PartyRock accessible to all.  
• What AWS’s products mean for those with zero coding experience.
• The level of oversight that is required to service clients who have no technical background.
• Taking a closer look at AWS’s strategy for generative AI.
• How customers are using PartyRock, and what Mike has learned from these observations.
• The challenges that the team faced whilst developing PartyRock, and how they persevered.
• Trying to understand the future of generative prompt engineering.
• A reminder that PartyRock is free, so go try it out!

Quotes:

“We were working on AI and ML [at Amazon] and discovered that developers learned best when they found relevant, interesting, [and] hands-on projects that they could work on. So, we built DeepLens as a way to provide a fun opportunity to get hands-on with some of these new technologies.” — Mike Miller [0:02:20]

“When we look at AIML and generative AI, these things are transformative technologies that really require almost a new set of intuition for developers who want to build on these things.” — Mike Miller [0:05:19]

“In the long run, innovations are going to come from everywhere; from all walks of life, from all skill levels, [and] from different backgrounds. The more of those people that we can provide the tools and the intuition and the power to create innovations, the better off we all are.” — Mike Miller [0:13:58]

“Given a paintbrush and a blank canvas, most people don’t wind up with The Sistine Chapel. [But] I think it’s important to give people an idea of what is possible.” — Mike Miller [0:25:34]

Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:

Mike Miller on LinkedIn

Amazon Web Services

AWS DeepLens

AWS DeepRacer

AWS DeepComposer

PartyRock

Amazon Bedrock

How AI Happens