This morning I started work a little earlier than usual as I attended a summary of Amazon's recent announcements from the AWS re:Invent conference held recently in Las Vegas. When I first started my career, I loved traveling and going to conferences in other cities. Then I spent a lot of time in planes to the point I now prefer to stay home, if possible. So any time I can have the host company of a conference summarize all of the important points in a 90-minute video conference, I am extremely happy.
AWS made quite a few announcements and they distilled them down into 3 different topics for the call this morning. I won't run through everything I learned as there are 2 announcements that really stood out. The first topic dealt with artificial intelligence. About a year ago, ChatGPT started getting a lot of attention. Naturally AWS is incorporating this technology in their product offerings. They also addressed how they are keeping the data used to train their large-language model (LLM) called Q, separate from your company's proprietary data. That is very important as you don't want someone outside your company asking Q for sensitive information that he/she shouldn't be able to access.
The second announcement I found interesting is using Q to generate database queries. I learned structured-query language (SQL) back in 1986 and thought it to be very natural-language like. As databases have grown in size and contain data in a variety of different tables, those queries have become less and less like natural language. You can now ask Q questions about your own data and as long as it has access to it, will show what you are looking for without knowing how to write the correct SQL. I will be interested to see how Q works in actual practice. I don't worry about it taking my job creating complex queries. Instead I see myself being able to do much more with its help.
My call this morning condensed a week-long conference into 90 minutes. I then pulled out 2 announcements that are important to me. Now I can go back to our AWS sales representative and get the in-depth information I need. To me, that is a step forward towards greater efficiency. For those that don't get to travel often, you may prefer the week in Las Vegas.
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