Technology

In 2002, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos issued a memo that has entered tech industry canon. The memo, known as the “API Mandate”, is generally perceived as being a statement about technology at Amazon, and is therefore widely admired by technologists and wholly ignored by executives. This is unfortunate, because it’s no exaggeration to say that the API Mandate completely transformed Amazon as a business and laid the foundation for its success. Better still, unlike many things that global technology titans do, it is something that can be replicated and put to use by almost any business.

In this post, we’ll talk about the memo, and how it created the systems and incentives for radical organisational transformation.

Recently, Deep Learning has revolutionised a multitude of technical fields, most notably Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing. The implications for business are enormous, with the ramifications of these change still filtering through the mostly technology-shy world of business. There are signs that Combinatorial Optimisation might be the next technical field to undergo Revolution-By-Neural-Network. If this comes to fruition, then the impact on business will be seismic.

The hard truth of AI is that methods that exploit deep, hard-won human knowledge about a particular domain are outperformed by methods that cleverly exploit the increasing power of computation.

I have a modest proposal to distill this fundamental truth into a set of conditions which, when met, will revolutionise a given field.

Lineage

I do not claim this insight about the fundamental mechanism of progress in AI as original; I have been heavily influenced by Richard Sutton’s powerful essay The Bitter Lesson.