Amazon AI Executive Leaves Company Amid Competition for AI Talent

A leader in artificial intelligence (AI) product strategy at Amazon’s AWS reportedly left the company to join another, unspecified firm.

Vasi Philomin, who was vice president and general manager, machine learning and AI at Amazon, told Reuters about his move, without sharing further details, Reuters reported Thursday (June 26).

An Amazon spokesperson confirmed Philomin’s departure and added that some of his former responsibilities have been taken over by Rajesh Sheth, a vice president who previously oversaw Amazon Elastic Block Store, according to the report.

While at the company for eight years, Philomin built Amazon Bedrock and pioneered AI services in the categories of language, computer vision, contact center, industrial and developer tools, according to his LinkedIn profile.

This news comes at a time when competition for skilled AI talent has reached a fever pitch, PYMNTS reported Tuesday (June 24). Companies like Meta, OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Microsoft and Anthropic are among the companies engaged in this competition.

It was reported Wednesday (June 25) that Meta convinced three of OpenAI’s researchers to jump ship and join the social media giant’s AI efforts. The report noted that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been personally campaigning to hire new AI expertise.

On June 18, it was reported that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Meta was making “giant offers” of $100 million signing bonuses in an attempt to poach OpenAI’s workers.

Work marketplace Upwork said in February that AI has been the fastest growing category on its platform for several quarters, with clients seeking talent in prompt engineering, AI integration, generative AI modeling, and data labeling and annotation.

Upwork said the during the previous year, the gross services volume (GSV) from AI-related work grew 60%, the number of clients engaging in AI-related projects grew 42%, and the hourly earnings of freelancers engaged in AI-related work reached a level 44% higher than those of other freelancers.

It was reported Wednesday that the demand for AI infrastructure components from companies like Microsoft, Meta, Alphabet and Amazon helped drive Nvidia shares to an all-time high. The rise took Nvidia’s market cap to about $3.75 trillion, making it the world’s most valuable company.