Dean Lian, the president of the African Development Bank, Dr. Akinumi Adeshina, distinguished governors, madams and gentlemen. I'm very honored to deliver this speech on behalf of the Brazilian government and the regional non-borrowing member countries at this first in-presence annual meeting after the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak almost two and a half years ago. By that time, none of us could really picture the overwhelming challenges that would stand before us, our economies and our nations. We must not forget, though, that at the center of all this, there were people, individuals who lost their jobs, their sources of income and their lives for the disease. The pandemic has taught us many lessons. We have learned to cope with it and to care for ourselves and for others. We have experienced the power of nature to recover once human activities have stalled and understood how damaging they can be to the environment. We have learned to trust in science and how small and interconnected the world is. We have been taught that in this planet, political borders cannot fully protect populations from being affected. And most important, we have learned that trustful information, knowledge sharing and cooperation are key to overcome both man-made crises and natural disasters, and thus in achieving anticipated results. This notwithstanding, we can neither neglect nor underestimate the negative effects of the Russia-Ukraine crisis, particularly over inflation, food security and the interest rates. This year's theme for the annual meeting summarizes in many aspects my previous affirmation. By improving its measurement and evaluation systems, the CDB, as well as other multilateral development institutions, will profit from more qualified information and thus will be more prepared to support its borrowing member states with tailored financial solutions and innovative instruments that consider particularities of the beneficiaries and are in line with national development priorities. The recovery duration adjuster is a good example of how indicators can be improved to better reflect the reality and thus provide policy builders with more accurate data that will boost the efficacy and effectiveness of the bank's actions and scale up the impact of its operations. In addition, we value the efforts of the CDB to put in place its knowledge hub, an organic cloud and navigational digital ecosystem aimed at consolidating data and generating useful information and for creating and disseminating knowledge. We stress, however, that besides being trustful, information must be also timely enough to avoid opportunity losses and enable decision makers to promote a course correction even while operations are still ongoing. Strong and inclusive digital foundations are the best way to ensure it and to contribute to development goals in a sustainable manner. The rapid and comprehensive response given by the Brazilian government was decisive to prevent more profound social impacts stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic. The Brazilian emergency aid program benefited 68 million informal and poll workers and enabled the injection of almost 8.5% of the GDP into the economy in the first year of the pandemic. This was made possible by digitally processing the operation of the benefit as well as leveraging digital assets in the selection and onboarding of beneficiaries and online payment methods for the grants. Another crucial breakthrough was the creation of the PIX system by the Brazilian Monetary Authority. The PIX, as we call it, is a payment platform that allows instant money transfers between individuals, companies and the government using a smartphone. It may sound as a simple solution, but that has revolutionized business transactions and reduced bureaucracy in my country. I trust that CDB could profit from its regional non-borrowing member countries, development solutions and further leverage the knowledge capital that we have been accumulating over the years while tackling issues similar to those experienced locally in the Caribbean region. Therefore, I seized the opportunity to reaffirm our engagement with the bank and with the twin objectives of reducing poverty and boost prosperity. Lastly, I would like to convey my most sincere appreciation to the government and the people of Turks and Caicos for their warm welcome in this beautiful island and efficient preparation in hosting the annual meetings. We extend our thanks to the bank for its long-standing support and wish to all of you a joyful and profitable annual meeting. Thank you very much. Thanks, Brazil, for that intervention on behalf of regional non-borrowing member countries. And now I'll call on the Governor for China. No, I'm told that we're not going there. I believe there's a recording somewhere, but okay, stuff happens. At this time, I'm going to ask us to be upstanding for the presentation, the keynote address by the CDB president, Dr. hygienist, Jane Leone, Dr. Jane, welcome to the podium. Good morning. Please be seated. This is the first in person, but I didn't expect a standing welcome. Your Excellency Nigel Dakin, Governor of the Turks and Caicos Islands, Premier of the Turks and Caicos Islands and Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Caribbean Development Bank, the Honorable Charles Washington Misick, and First Lady, Mrs. Delphia Russell Misick. Your Excellency, Anya Williams, Deputy Governor, members of the Cabinet, our special guest, President of the African Development Bank Group, Dr. Akinoumi E. Adashina, members of the Board of Governors of the Caribbean Development Bank, senior government officials of the Turks and Caicos Islands government, members of the Caribbean Development Bank's senior management team and members of the staff of the bank, other specially invited guests, members of the media, ladies and gentlemen. Let me add my own personal welcome to the 52nd annual meeting of the Board of Governors and observed that after two years of disruptions due to the pandemic, what better way to restart face-to-face engagement than here in the very beautiful Turks and Caicos Islands. Premier, I wish to thank you, your government and the people of Turks and Caicos Islands, for the exceptional hospitality afforded to us thus far, and our governors and Board of Directors for the continued support and strong encouragement as we take forward the development business for the people of this region. Governors, last year I said we must move with deliberate haste. I also said that there can be no sustained development without resilience. And because development has to be holistic, meaning leaving no aspect behind, resilience must therefore be multifaceted. And so we need a resilience ecosystem capable of absorbing the exogenous shocks we are exposed to. This year's meeting takes place against the backdrop of the enduring aftermath of COVID-19 and now the impact of the Russia-Ukraine War. This conflict has already affected commodity and financial markets, raised energy prices, increased inflation, heightened food insecurity, and slowed global growth. The sharp increase in energy prices is further straining fragile fiscal positions in our borrowing member countries and threatening to derail the nascent economic recovery. Even as growth in the Caribbean region is expected to rebound to around 6 percent in 2022, that's on the strength of the rebound in tourism and the performance of Guyana, and a rebound from an average decline of around 8 percent in 2020, roughly half of our internationally rated BMCs have suffered credit downgrades since the onset of the pandemic. Consequently, many of our governments are now challenged to work on economic tightrope while at the same time trying to drive the development agenda. Essentially, Governors, sustainable recovery now hangs in the balance, and the imperative to aggressively pursue resilience is even more urgent. With this in mind, I take as my starting point today the words of my dear friend and brother President Adishina, we must be prepared to sprint fast, like Shelley and Fraser Price of Jamaica, and run long like Elliot Kipchoge of Kenya. That is to say we must accelerate our development trajectory, and we must be able to stay the course over the long haul. That is, development once started must be sustained. The 2030 targets are not just boxes to be checked off. The path we embark on must take us beyond 2030. As I share my thoughts on how we accelerate and sustain development, I will spend a few moments reflecting on the road traveled over the last 12 months of our pursuit of holistic development. And then I will elaborate on a few major initiatives for 2022 and beyond. When I assumed office just over a year ago, my presentation to the Board outlined an agenda that focused on the transformative and sustainable development of our BMCs with the ultimate goal of improving the welfare of our people. This approach, which I have been consistently promoting regionally, speaks to development that is both holistic and inclusive, with resilience and innovation as cornerstones. The fundamental themes around which much of my efforts have been centered are sustainable livelihoods, resilient economies, connectivity, and innovation hub. These are fully aligned with the 2030 sustainable development goals that we need to pursue expeditiously if we are to fundamentally alter the development path of the region and place our societies on a higher and more resilient sustainable welfare path in the future. The challenge before us is how best to navigate a safe path from legacy structural weaknesses to transformative development while maintaining that sustainability, enhancing macroeconomic and financial stability, and building resilience against a myriad of shocks, surely not an easy mix to actually get together. Among shocks I would like to highlight climate change, which if unchecked can pose an existential threat to the region. Governors with the best of intentions and with access to adequate and affordable finance, our efforts will labor in producing results without a significant jolt to our implementation capacity. To achieve this, our first order of business at the bank was to revise our strategic plan to reflect the changed context and circumstances of the Caribbean development trajectory. Reflecting our new vision, we anchored the revised plan on five dimensions of resilience, social resilience, productive capacity resilience, environmental resilience, institutional resilience, and financial resilience. Secondly, and in alignment with a key theme over the past year of measuring better to target better, we recognized that the Caribbean Development Bank itself needed to become a knowledge-enabled learning organization with a virtual knowledge hub, a network of networks as it were, capable of accessing global information, calling experiences of and factors contributing to success, and at the same time creating value for strategies that when implemented can yield transformative development. To be clear, the philosophy of embracing knowledge creation from accumulation to discovery to strategic transformation touches everything we do and manifests in every development challenge that we face, from achieving food security to compiling the genome structure of herbs and plants in agriculture, for creating medicines to designing resilient roofs capable of generating and withstanding the fury, generating electricity and withstanding the fury of hurricanes, while providing an adequate supply of clean, renewable energy. In other words, we need to embrace what I am calling the industrialization of knowledge. This will require improvements in current processes, organizational culture, technology, and a fearless growth-oriented mindset to underpin our knowledge management and evidence-based decision creation. To illustrate, the knowledge hub could encompass a tracker for the region's development process and progress. It can be a platform for policy options and the design of SDGs. It can be used to promote warehouse information on feasible and development-driven investment opportunities, the regulatory environment, and doing business conditions that could promote cross-border investments. It could be used to be a database with comparable economic, social, and environmental statistics and partial-screened project ideas that could help advance sustainable development. Further, it could also be used as a fertile ground for spawning innovative ideas and products. All those fall within the philosophy of a knowledge hub. Third, in recognition of the fact that the internal resilience capacity of our BMCs must be accounted for in determining their ability to recover from exogenous shocks, we made steady progress with the development of the recovery duration adjuster, which builds on the United Nations' multidimensional vulnerability index by integrating vulnerability and resilience in a dynamic and forward-looking manner to better reflect the economic, social, and environmental realities of small island developing states. This framework focuses on measuring the internal resilience capacity of seeds, which, because of their peculiar vulnerabilities and state of development, face the reality of a much longer recovery time from a shock compared with developed nations. It proposes to replace gross national income, GNI, which is widely recognized as an inadequate metric to determine access to concessional finance by an internal resilience capacity metric for gauging a country's eligibility to access adequate and affordable finance. We launched this framework at the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference COP26 in November of 2021 in the United Kingdom, and have since held discussions and made presentations to several stakeholder groups, including the Commonwealth Secretariat, the Alliance of Small Island States, and the United Nations High-Level Panel on the Multidimensional Vulnerability Index. With that background of what we have engaged in over the last year, I'd like to fast forward a little and talk about big initiatives we are looking at for 2022. So as we look towards 2022 and 2023 and beyond that, no one could have anticipated the continuation of the COVID-19 pandemic or the protracted nature of the Ukraine-Russia conflict. We are also yet to see the full ramifications of this conflict for our region. This prolonged uncertainty necessitates, I want to underline, necessitates that we proceed with even more haste to create the sustainable future that we envisage for the region. And as such, we need to focus our attention on what this future should look like and how we could best create it, not how we could best let it happen, how we could best create it. Now that we have laid the contours for sustainable development in our region, our focus for 2022 to 2023 will be on advancing food and nutrition security, energy security, and water security. I think you will all agree these are three key securities that the region cannot afford not to address over the near and long term. So let me begin first with food and nutrition security. For decades, the Caribbean has been over reliant on food imports. The World Bank estimates that between 80 and 90 percent of all food consumed in the region comes from abroad and only three countries in the region, Guyana, Belize, and Haiti, produce more than 50 percent of their own food. The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated existing inequalities across the board, including in employment, housing, healthcare, and food security. It is estimated that there are now 2.7 million food insecure people in the English-speaking Caribbean. And according to the third round of the CARICOM COVID-19 food security and livelihood impact survey, 71 percent of respondents observe higher than usual food prices. While a breakdown of responses by gender wasn't presented by that survey, we know historically in this region women are disproportionately affected by food and nutrition security. As a region, we must therefore focus on building a modern, competitive, inclusive, and resilient agricultural sector in which food and nutrition security have primacy of place and the potential for wealth creation as an attraction to young agripreneurs. And again, I'm going to use the word of my brother president here. At the recent agri-investment and food forum in Guyana, as mentioned by our governor, Minister Singh, CARICOM heads of government expressed grave concern about food shortages, the high prices of imported food, fertilizers, and other agricultural inputs, and the limited options for transportation of agricultural products within the region. They have stressed the need for urgent action to take forward the vision for agricultural development, championed by President Irfan Ali of Guyana, that targets a reduction in the food import bill by 25 percent by 2025, what we call the 25 by 2025 agenda. And if I may add, 25 by 2025 is not enough. Why don't we double it? 50 percent no later than 2030. Minister, please take this to President Ali. We need to, we need to up the game. Efforts to reduce the food import bill must be underpinned by investments in climate smart and resilient agricultural technologies by research and development and knowledge systems that connect farmers, industry, and research to sustain the long-term development of the sector. And I'd like to, at that point, welcome the gracious offer from, again, President Adesina as of last night in terms of tech transfer and training potential and the collaboration across MDBs that can actually help spur and drive that very agricultural sector push that we are talking about. It must also include new opportunities for women-owned agribusinesses. As in many of our BMCs, women provide the link between the farm and the traditional marketplace, yet remain at the bottom of the value chain. In endorsing this shared vision for food security, facilitated by our current agricultural policy and strategy and integrated logistics, we have already commenced discussions with partners on mobilizing flexible and innovative financing to support this initiative. We also believe that our appraisal of the establishment of a CDB-led regional hub for the International Trade Center Global Initiative, She-Trades, will be able to integrate more women in the regional and global agritrade business, providing value added for women-owned agri-enterprises. Our onto energy security. Energy is an essential input to all economic activity and has critical ramifications in the social and environmental context. Our high dependence on imported fossil fuels and the associated high cost of electricity has been stifling the pace of growth and development in the region, including poverty reduction efforts and is a continued threat to the attainment of the sustainable development goals. As such, there is a dire and urgent need to accelerate the transition to increase renewable energy generation, utilizing our abundant solar, wind, hydro and geothermal resources. While doing so, we need to ensure, and this is important, that the transition is managed to minimize the potential negative effects of disruption and to ensure that it is just. It is not a zero one fossil fuels today, 100 percent renewables tomorrow. The cost of disruption cannot be ignored and therefore the pace at which we make that transition has to be an essential element of that development agenda that we are talking about. And I want to underline this because it is important for some of our BMCs such as Guyana, Suriname and Trinidad and Tobago whose economies are largely reliant today on fossil fuels. Fortunately, we are not starting from scratch. Over the last decade, the region has been pursuing a shift towards sustainable energy through the increased use of renewable energy sources and improvements in energy efficiency. The target agreed by our energy ministers is for a 47 percent contribution from renewable energy by 2027, which translates into a 55 percent contribution by 2030. However, progress towards that target, admittedly, has been slow. On an annual basis, our renewable energy penetration rate will need to increase 13-fold if we are to achieve the target of 55 percent by 2030. So, therefore, there is a tremendous amount of work that needs to go forward. However, the current estimate of doing that, the transition we talk of, will cost over 20 billion US dollars, 20 billion US dollars. At the bank, we are updating our energy sector policy and strategy and have proposed to embed within it a framework called the Accelerated Sustainable Energy and Resilience Transition 2030. And that's a lot to keep in mind, so you can just keep the acronym ASERT, A-S-E-R-T, ASERT 2030 framework. And so you'll be hearing from CDB when we talk about ASERT Initiative 1, ASERT Initiative 2. But that's all about accelerating, accelerating the sustainable energy framework. And that is intended to support our BMCs as they urgently ramp up the energy sector transitions. Third, water security. Water security, which is already being threatened by the impact of climate change, is especially critical to the region's development, especially in key sectors such as health, agriculture and tourism. Since 2018, CDB has supported with partners the development, refinement and promotion of the regional strategic action plan for climate resilience in the water sector in the Caribbean. We are currently revising our water policy, strategy and operational guidelines with the support of Agence Francaise, the development, with a completion date of December 2022, end of this year. At the country level, we are supporting approximately US$131 million in projects in Barbados, the Bahamas, Belize, the Commonwealth of Dominica, Grenada, Jamaica, St. Louis and Nevis and Suriname, which are delivering on all elements of the water chain and infrastructure in institutional strengthening and capacity building to enhance water security through works, systems and people. We are also collaborating with the IDB and the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility on the formation of a Caribbean Water Utility Insurance Company with an initial product launch planned for sometime in 2022. So what would be the target we would need to be able to look forward to? So going forward in the water sector, our target is to reduce non-revenue water from an average of 60% today to no more than 30% by 2030, and to significantly strengthen data collection, sharing an analysis to support integrated water resources management. Governors, the development needs of the region and the attainment of the SDGs require significant collective effort and financial resources. I have highlighted food, energy and water, but there are additional SDGs that would need to be equally addressed. But building on this year's theme of Measure Better to Target Better, I propose for next year that we hone in on the theme of access to adequate and affordable finance, and we will state it today its hashtag AAAF, access to adequate and affordable finance. Why is this? Because we cannot do any of the securities we talked about in food, in energy and in water without access to finance. We cannot do any of the development that we are talking about without access to finance. But it is not just finance, it has to be quality finance, and quality finance now becomes adequate, has to be sufficient and affordable, such that we can get out of the debt trap that would ensue if we are not able to mobilize finance at an affordable rate. This access will shape a future where our citizens can live quality lives in societies that have embraced digitalization and possess robust private sector partnership with the requisite governance arrangements to safeguard food and energy security. So let me put this in context for you in terms of the numbers we are talking about. Initial estimates we have done at the CDB suggest that providing financing for projects on the scale and visage in building resilience, encouraging transformation, and achieving sustainable development would require upwards of $100 billion over the next decade, $100 billion over the next decade. That is the entirety of the GDP of all of our countries put together in terms of one yet. Across our BMCs, during 2023 to 2030, we estimate that sustainable energy will require at least $40 billion. Water and sanitation $22 billion. Transportation an additional $11.5 billion. Agriculture and food security, possibly $13 billion. Digital transformation another $12 billion. And these are mostly infrastructure and associated elements to generate the three goals we are talking about. But in addition, we have also said that we need to move to halving poverty by 2030. And for that to happen, BMCs would require an investment approximately of another $10 billion annually. So if we take another decade, that's another $100 billion that we would need to put onto that tab. And that $10 billion, I need not tell you, far exceeds the current investment levels in the region. So obviously our needs are humongous. How we are going to get there is the quintessential problem that we need to solve. And hence why next year we want to dedicate the entire year to access to adequate and affordable financing. So cognizant of the current capacity of CDB, I posit that meeting this target will be a function of creating partnerships to facilitate access to adequate and affordable financing for development. In other words, we do not have the means to do it on our own. And the only way we can get there is if we can crowd in, if we can bring various players together, various stakeholders together to allow us to make a dent in the element of development that we propose. We are equally aware that our regional governments have been playing a significant role in driving development at the national and regional levels, but recognize at the same time that they cannot do it alone, especially given current high debt levels and the limited fiscal space that they are all struggling with. And therefore, we need to embrace the private sector as the other side to crowd in to allow us to make a dent in development. So the private sector will need to play an equally important role in delivering development outcomes and in financing sustainable transformation and development in the region. Hence the clarion call to create a partnership for development, a partnership for development, not a public-private partnership, a partnership for development between the public and private sectors, where national anchor goals like food and nutrition security, energy security, and water security drive individual and joint efforts at achieving milestones to the ultimate anchors. This has to be underpinned by national dialogue and the fostering of an absence of policy uncertainty. So how do we mobilize the finance for development? First, we need to ensure that we have or can facilitate the mobilization of the quantum of funds needed. In other words, the adequate aspect of adequate and affordable. And for us to do this, we think it must be multi-sauce, meaning we need to crowd in from many places. It must be multi-instrument. And the framework must be such that it has a properly developed financial market infrastructure and a strong regulatory environment, because if we don't have that, there is no way you can generate the necessary confidence in the investors to allow them to want to continue to provide you with the necessary finance, which as we said is not a sprint, but a long marathon. And so we will need to be able to get funds, not for one year or for two years, but for many, many years going forward. Therefore, it will be important to distinguish, in my mind, various uses of finance. All finance is not created equally, and all finance is not used in the same way. And consequently, we believe in the multi-sauce, multi-instrument environment that we are talking about, we need to be able to distinguish financing for rescue operations, financing for recovery operations, and financing for long-term repositioning. Because while we are at the game of reacting and fixing and getting ourselves back from crises, we have to, at the same time, run a parallel track of ensuring that we have access to finance for the longer-term development that we seek to obtain. So therefore, this is a sprint and a long-distance run at the same time, but using our finance in a very discriminatory way. We will need a suite of financing instruments with specific terms that can be combined coherently to manage different needs. I've already talked about the three different types. While providing adequate governance safeguards, which is important for both the public and the private sectors. As an example, the suite of instruments that I talk about that we can use to mix, to generate the goals that we are looking to achieve, need to, by necessity, include almost all of the instruments that exist now in the financial space. So one, debt instruments, and there I can think of SDG-themed bonds, for example, green bonds, sponsored blue bonds to finance projects for ocean conservation, and marine biodiversity. We can have orange bonds for growing our cultural and creative industries, for example, our music and sports and creative design. In addition to the debt, we need to be able to crowd in private equity for funding specific development-related objectives with auxiliary governance and taxonomies to monitor, evaluate, and ensure achievement of goals. We will at the same time need contingent debt instruments. We've spoke of the insurance types like your creeps, the catastrophe bonds like we had in Jamaica, GDP bonds, or GDP index bonds that can be tailored to activity as it occurs. And what we can equally look at as policy reform or policy intervention, incentivizing bonds, that will repay dividends of refinancing at lower rates as long as you deliver on the interventions that were in the contract. And this can be done in terms of successive trenches, such that as soon as your grace period is done, you should have completed sufficient interventions to reprice your bond in a way that can reduce your debt and make your debt sustainability a lot more attractive than it would have been in the absence of that. We also need derivative-based instruments like the debt swap of Belize, and that's a whole class of instrument that we can actually begin to tailor and provide advice to our countries as to how they can manage the debts that they have now. And let's not forget concessional funding. We have the development partners, the international financial institution specialty-themed funding, such like your global climate fund and the adaptation fund or the Jeff. And all of those together, when I talk about it being multi-sourced, means that we need to be able to tap into not just what we can generate on our own, but equally what we can crowd in from the private sector, what we can get from the public sectors, domestic and external. And the key will be how do we deploy this through the multiplicity of instruments that we talk about in a way that is internally coherent and at the same time temporarily consistent in overtime. The second aspect I spoke of adequacy, the second aspect of affordability can be underpinned, we believe by greater access to concessional funds through the initiative of our recovery duration adjuster. As I indicated, this is a tool that is meant to provide more equitable access to finance through the incorporation of resilience with vulnerability that addresses better the needs of our countries rather than the current gross national income. Another way we can crowd in additional funds in a concessional way is the channeling of special drawing rights from our non-borrowing member countries and other non-members that have SDRs that they can actually mobilize through the bank. And we are seeing multilateral development banks in general, but clearly CDB in particular. And that mobilization of funds need to be such that we can focus the deployment of those funds specifically to development purposes. It is not mobilization of SDRs for mobilization sake, but mobilization with a purpose. And those purposes can very well be anchored on achieving the sustainable development goals. That would be one way of attracting new concessional resources from sovereigns and other institutions while we can equally mobilize better and deploy better the existing pool of resources that already exist. In addition to all of those, we need to promote policies to improve risk profiles and therefore lower market premiere on funds that we seek to access. I say this because we typically think that resources ought to always be just a lower price. But the truth of the matter is return and risk go hand in hand. And the only reason why markets insist on higher returns is because there is a perception that your risk is high. And therefore we can assist that process by undertaking reforms that change our risk profile. And if your risk profile changes by automatic extension, the required premiere that markets will require to access funds will automatically go down. In other words, you would be buying concessionality through investment in risk reduction. And so when I say policies for risk reduction, I think this is an area that is a self-help tool that we can engage on and help to reduce and change our risk profiles in a way that would allow us to therefore earn the right to lower premiere in market financing. So let me turn now having spoken of the need for access to finance, the multi sources that we need to access that finance, the sort of instruments that we can use to deploy all to get to that development phase. And I want to talk briefly about the concept of implementation that I mentioned at the beginning of my remarks. I want to be clear. Having adequate and affordable finance, creating opportunities for demand of projects, promoting partnerships and doing all the things that we talked about that are needed and necessary will still not yield optimal sustainable outcomes without effective implementation capacity. In other words, without implementation capacity, all the good things that we talk about, all the money that we seek to get will not bring us the results that we need. And so yesterday I joined with the governor from St. Vincent and the Grenadines in making again another clarion call. We need to address the implementation deficit in the region. The implementation deficit, if I can add looms large as possibly the most significant factor at both the institutional, national and regional levels that inhibits the ability of our countries to execute and maximize the benefits from approved policies, projects and programs that seek to deepen regional integration and achieve our sustainable development goals. We need to take decisive steps to address the bottlenecks impacting effective implementation, including reforming the legislative framework to facilitate investment and innovation, improving processes to reduce bureaucracy and lengthy procurement processes, enhancing project and people management and skills for the future of work, encouraging a cultural change in mindset. And here I'm referring to the adoption of a private sector enterprise mindset nationally, embracing failure as the spur for your next success and a strong compliance culture. And moving from a project based approach to a development continuum approach, where monitoring, evaluation, adaptation and nimbleness provide the thread linking projects to ultimate objectives. At the CDB we will be placing emphasis over the next year on the following strategic initiatives. First, developing the Knowledge Hub which I spoke to briefly, and let me give you the rationale. Ready access to updates, information and accurate information is a prerequisite for evidence-based effective knowledge creation and decision-making. However, the region's knowledge and information management processes are still quite fragmented and this has limited our ability to initiate and sustain important policy reforms. Going forward, we need to eliminate this fragmentation by building a common platform to accumulate, analyze, transform and share knowledge in the economic, social and environmental dimensions. The second initiative is we are going to embed or we wish to embed the RDA and the internal resilience capacity concepts in our internal processes. Here our focus will be on developing the vulnerability and resilience tool for adoption in the bank's operational processes. This tool will enable a deeper diagnosis of vulnerability and resilience in countries and provide some assessment of the overall ability to recover from shocks and maintain ongoing economic and social processes. Third initiative is to foster the idea of a single digital space. Digital transformation has the potential to revolutionize economic and social life by lowering information costs, reducing the cost of economic and social transactions for firms, individuals and the public sector and increasing efficiency and access to services. So here our emphasis would be on fostering the development of appropriate, harmonized, regulatory and security frameworks, upgrade of information technology infrastructure and access to broadband services across private and public sectors to achieve the common purpose of a regional secure digital grid free of all digital divides by 2035. Fourth initiative, CDB can be a regional hub for the global sheet trades initiative and thereby power an entire generation of young women into businesses. Inclusive trade is a critical component to achieving gender parity. It creates more job opportunities for women with higher wages and better working conditions. On September 2015, the International Trade Center launched the sheet trades initiative to empower women economically through greater integration in global trade and investment with a goal to connect one million women to markets by 2020 and that they have achieved. CDB is currently appraising the establishment of a CDB-led regional hub for sheet trades joining a global practice with a global partner and would also be in a position to either match or leverage additional resources to improve market access for women owned businesses. Moreover, CDB would be able to anchor its future interventions in a programmatic fashion. CDB continues to help boost women's participation in private sector development in its BMCs and is currently coordinating more support to expand their access to technical finance and investment, training, coaching, and mentoring and other technical assistance. We seek to meet a target of over 2,000 women owned led MSMEs by 2024. This specific support is viewed as critical to increasing the participation of these enterprises in public procurement markets. The bank is also encouraging the governments in its BMCs to ensure that the public procurement frameworks address any systemic barriers to women's participation and that they also promote increased participation by and opportunities for women owned businesses, indigenous people, and persons with disabilities. Governors, directors, distinguished ladies and gentlemen, as we deliberate on how to create the future we want, I ask you to join our coalition for development, including the development institutions here with us, the regional and international private sectors, the regional public sector, and our development partners. I ask us all to recommit to action, enough said, to not allow the optimism of the will to be overcome by the pessimism of the intellect. We can do what we need to do as long as we have the will to do it. CDB is the Caribbean's Development Bank and I pledge our readiness to act. As the governor for St. Vincent and the Grenadines employed us yesterday, let us not be caught arranging the chairs on the deck of the Titanic. Instead, let us match words with action and transform our reimagined visions into reality for our people. Let us move forward with deliberate haste. I thank you. Thank you, Mr. President, for that comprehensive address and timely. I think we are now ready to hear from China and on behalf of the non-regional members, member countries of the CDB. Mr. Chairman, Mr. President, fellow governors, ladies and gentlemen, I am very pleased to represent the Chinese governor for the Caribbean Development Bank, Mr. Yigang, governor of the People's Bank of China, to deliver this statement on behalf of the non-regional members. Please allow me to extend our sincere thanks to Premier Misik of the Turks and the Caikgogs Islands, governor of the British Overseas Territories and the management and staff for the excellent organization of the two-week events in a hybrid format. We truly understand the difficulties the current global circumstances have put on the bank and its members. And the meeting is a good opportunity to discuss how we can tackle these challenges together. In 2021, countries in the Caribbean region have generally implemented strong stimulus policies in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The increase of vaccination rates and the relaxation of public health restrictions have boosted the recovery of tourism and the regional economy is going out of recession. According to the data released by the CDB, the regional economy as a whole achieved an annual growth rate of 3.1 percent after a sharp recession in 2020. The labor market has improved with significant drop of unemployment in some member countries and greater fiscal space for the region. Entering 2022, thanks to further recovery of tourism, growth is expected to continue. Nevertheless, many uncertainties remain, which may bring new challenges. This includes inflationary pressure, natural disaster, geopolitical tension, and the virus variants. Therefore, a plan to achieve a resilient and sustainable development is crucial to the region. We highly commend the achievements made by the CDB last year under the leadership of President Leon. In terms of its operations with a total approval of US$123 million new loans in 2021, the CDB has been an active contributor to the region's growth and resilience. In terms of its strategy, the CDB has incorporated social resilience, production resilience, environmental resilience, fiscal resilience, and institutional resilience into its strategic plan update 2020 to 2024. We appreciate the bank's bold efforts to manage the balance between economic recovery and sustainable development. The theme of this annual meeting is measure better to target better adaptation and resilience. Indeed, strengthening that stability and building resilience is of great importance. It will not only help cope with the many risks and challenges facing the region, but also promote high-quality development in the long run so as to achieve the objectives of the United Nations sustainable development goals. We welcome the bank's efforts to mobilize additional resources from both private sector and regional and international institutions to accelerate sustainable growth of foreign countries. We encourage the bank to fully leverage its convenient power and expertise in sustainable energy, infrastructure, agriculture, and digital transformation to help borrowing countries to cope with major challenges including food security, climate change, and COVID-19. As an integral part of the CDB family, non-regional members have been and will continue to be strong partners that the CDB can rely on. Together with other non-regional members, China attaches great importance to bilateral and multilateral cooperation with the Caribbean region through trade, investment, and cultural exchanges. With the support of the Belt and Road Initiative, we will maintain close cooperation with the CDB and all member states. Spare no efforts to support the CDB in key areas such as regional infrastructure, environmental protection, private sector development, poverty reduction, educational transformation, and the pandemic response. With that, we wish the annual meeting a complete success. Thank you. On behalf of the non-regional members, now I would like to call on the alternate Governor for the British Overseas Territories, the Honorable Dr. Alice Webster, Premier of Anguilla to give the report of the Procedures Committee. Protocol already established. Good morning. I feel like a vote of thanks is necessary for this beautiful session we've had this morning. We had, I'd like to thank the Chairman and of the Board of Governors, the Premier, Turks and Caicos Islands for the warm welcome and certainly the hospitality shown during this 52nd annual meeting of the Board of Governors of the Caribbean Development Bank. You know, Ms. Robin Forbes, she raised the roof this morning with the Turks and Caicos National Song and certainly the Cadet Corps smartly dressed and are tired, marched the Governors in. I think that is befitting for this type of a gathering. I also would like to say yesterday the seminar that was put on met the theme, Measure Better, Target Better and interpreted by Mr. Ian Durant, Data-Driven Decision Making. That is important as we move forward and I would like to thank the Governor from the St. Vincent and the Grenadines, the Honorable Camilla Gonzales, for nominating me as the reporting member and for your unanimous support for selecting me. Premier, I feel that I should run for seat here in this territory. It's the only time I've had unanimous consent. Mr. Chairman, Governors, Directors, the Procedures Committee met on Tuesday, June 14, 2022 at 9.30 a.m. and the report of this committee dated June 15, 2022 is before you. I have the honor to table the report on behalf of the committee and move that the Board of Governors adopt the recommendations contained therein. The report of the Procedures Committee. Mr. Chairman, the Procedures Committee met at 9.30 a.m. on Tuesday, June 14, 2022. Representatives are Trinidad and Tobago, also representing Haiti, Jamaica, the Commonwealth of the Bahamas, Barbados, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, the People's Republic of China, Germany, Guyana, Italy, Mexico, Antigua and Barbuda, Senkets and Nevis, Venezuela, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, also representing Grenada, United Kingdom, Suriname, St. Lucia, also representing the Commonwealth of Dominica, Belize, Turks and Caicos Islands, also representing Anguilla, the British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands and Montserrat were present at the meeting. The committee submits the following report. One, schedule of the annual meeting. The committee agreed to the schedule of the meeting as set out in paper BG 52-1. Two, provisions relating to the conduct of the meeting. The committee recommends that the provisions relating to the conduct of the meeting embodied in paper BG 52-2 be approved. Three, the agenda for the meeting. The committee recommends the adoption of the agenda as circulated in paper BG 52-3. Regarding the items on the agenda, the committee reports on the following recommendations. A, annual report for 2021. The submission to governors of the annual report for 2021 was noted. B, audited financial statements and reports of the independent auditors 2021. The committee considered the report of the Board of Directors paper BG 52-4 and the audited financial statements and reports of the independent auditors contained in the annual report and recommends that the draft resolution entitled audited financial statements and reports of the independent auditors 2021 be adopted. C, allocation of net income for the year ended December 31, 2021. The committee considered the report of the Board of Directors paper BG 52-5 and recommends that the draft resolution entitled allocation of net income for the year ended December 31, 2021 be adopted. D, administrative budget for the year ending December 31, 2022. The committee considered the report of the Board of Directors paper BG 52-6 entitled administrative budget for the year ending December 31, 2022 and recommends that governors note the budget. C, expenses of governors and alternates attending meetings of the Board of Governors or committees thereof. The committee considered the report of the Board of Directors paper BG 52-7 and recommends that the draft resolution entitled expenses of governors and alternates attending meetings of the Board of Governors or committees thereof be adopted. F, place and date of the 53rd 2023 annual meeting. The committee considered the report of the Board of Directors paper BG 52-8 and recommends that the draft resolution entitled place and date of the 53rd 2023 annual meeting be adopted. G, election of officers of the Board of Governors. The committee recommends that the governor for St. Lucia be elected as chairperson and the governors for Venezuela and Germany be elected as vice chair to hold their respective offices until the election of officers at the end of the 53rd that is in 2023 annual meeting of the Board of Governors and that the draft resolution entitled election of officers of the Board of Governors attach here to be adopted. H, selection of directors. The chairman will make a report to the Board of Governors and I, there being no other business, the committee meeting ended at 10 a.m. Continuing with the draft resolution attachment one draft resolution number they said they've heard enough of me so I won't read the resolutions they will be sent to your inbox. Thank you very much for your attention. H, selection of directors, accordance with paragraph 4 article 29 of the agreement establishing the Caribbean Development Bank, the following persons have been elected, selected as directors. Jamaica, Mrs. Joanna Trinidad and Tobago and Haiti, Mr. Simon Wilson, the Bahamas, Mr. Tarachand Belgobin from Guyana and Mr. Ian Carrington Barbados, Mr. Claudius Emmanuel St. Lucia and the Commonwealth of Dominica, Dr. Kevin Michael George, Grenada and St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Mr. Whitfield Harris and Tiga and Barbuda and St. Kidd's and Nevis, Mr. Usman Martinez, Belize and Anguilla, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Montserrat and Turks and Caicos Islands and Ms. Iris Sandoval Suriname, Ms. Olga Lucia Micao from Colombia, Mr. Enrique Nevas from Venezuela, Mr. Manuel Alejandro Orientia Bostas from Mexico and Mr. Eduardo Pantes Vieira from Brazil, Ms. Sharon Peake from Canada, Ms. Stefan Kosoff, United Kingdom, Mr. Christian Thiel, Germany and Jin Zhuge from the People's Republic of China. Thank you very much. So I take it then that the recommendations set out in the report of the Procedure Committee are approved and the resolutions before the Board are adopted. Silence, give consent. I think we've kept you long enough and so at this juncture we'll come to a close on this section or element of our business for today and it just left for me to really extend my pleasure for you accepting our invitation, those of you and the audience and of course our governors, directors who've made it here from different parts of the region and the world for that matter. Thank you for being here and this part of the proceedings is now closed. What I would like also to do is to invite governors and directors to remain for the photograph opportunity and to say that to you that at 3 p.m. we look forward to your participation in the seminar on measuring vulnerability and resilience for small states and this will be held at the Beaches Resort at 3 p.m. And then you'll hear more about the recovery duration adjuster. So I think this is a very important aspect and you'll be able to drill deeper down into this whole concept of targeting better, I'm sorry, measuring better to target better. So I invite you, those of you who can make it, please be there. Thank you very much. This section is now closed. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.


Hello and welcome to this CUBE Conversation Exclusive. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We have Matt Garmin, SVP of Sales and Marketing for AWS. Matt formerly ran for a long time, the EC2 team, which we know is the compute in the cloud, which has really changed the game, is a core product. We want to continue to get more compute, big part of it. Of course, Matt led that team now. He runs sales and marketing and global services for AWS. Of course, he's a CUBE alumni. Matt is here to talk about the surge in generative AI and Amazon's role in bringing that value of the enterprise and the ISV. Matt, thanks for joining me today and joining our podcast. Great, John, nice to be here. Thanks for inviting me back. Great to see you. I know you guys got a lot going on. I reported the other day that you guys announced the AI initiative and a lot of people were jumping on the Amazon's catching up kind of bandwagon. You guys have been doing AI for a long time. Many have saw that and even Jim Kramer from CNBC publicly walked back his comments acknowledging Amazon's deep work in ML and AI. Let's start out by clearing the air in AWS position, you know, it's history. Andy Jassy always said there's no compression algorithm for experience, you guys have that. Briefly explain the history, the trajectory and the experience AWS has with ML AI. Yeah, happy to do it. So at Amazon and AWS, we've been super focused on AI and ML and have long felt for frankly, 20 years we've been working on the space and have known that this has been and will continue to transform how companies do business. And so like you said, we've had an expertise in this for a really long time. And at AWS in particular, our focus is always on how do we help our customers get the most out of new technologies that come up. And I think recently lots of folks, us included are incredibly excited about the potential that generative AI has to fully transform lots and lots of industries and businesses. And when customers think about that, you know, we wanted to make sure that we don't just toss a brand new technology out there, but we wanna really be sure that customers can leverage it in a safe, effective way that makes sense for their business. And that's how we really think about this space. It's an area that we've been deeply investing in and an area that we feel passionate about will help our AWS customers and all customers all over the world really transform their business. And we think the approach that we're taking in AWS is ultimately how most customers are gonna want to consume and build generative AI into the applications that they run. Yeah, I definitely want to get into those approaches and some of the experiences you've had.  What's going on here? Why are people freaking out about AI? I mean, it's too early to ban in my opinion or even regulate. What is your position on this? How do you see this playing out? What's going on? Yeah, I think ban is a fun word that people like to use, but that's not really it. I think what you read is that when chat GPT came out, it really inspired and caused a lot of broad swath of people to really understand what the power of AI was. And that's where a lot of us have been working on this for a long time, but it did a great job of really kind of bringing into the public consciousness of what's possible. And so I think you saw a lot of people get really excited and want to jump in quickly. And I think when you look at what some of the banks are doing or what some of the companies are doing, they're not so much banning the idea of generative AI. They're encouraged, I mean, they're putting the brakes on their own teams to be careful about putting their own IP into those systems. Part of how those systems learn, like chat GPT and others, is that when you enter questions in, when you put data into that system, it takes that system, integrates it into what it knows, and then it builds a broader corpus of knowledge that it can go answer questions from. And so a lot of companies are, you know, banning, they're putting the brakes in so that they have the right controls and security in place so that their own IP doesn't leak into those models. And I think that's appropriate. It's in fact, when I talk to customers and enterprises, one of the things that they're most worried about is that they understand that in the future, their own IP and their data is actually what's going to be one of the most valuable and differentiating things that they have going forward. And so what they're putting in place is controls to ensure that they have that right set of controls over their IPs so that their employees don't inadvertently share it into one of these models and it gets kind of uploaded and then available for everybody and they kind of lose that IP. They don't realize what you're saying is they don't realize that they're actually contributing to the revised corpus with their IP which then comes into all kinds of issues around IP rights and releases it essentially. That's right, that's right, exactly it. And so, you know, I think if you're bank number one, you want to make sure that your data doesn't get loaded up into the model and so that bank number two can learn from what you're doing. A lot of great possibilities. I think one of the things that I've observed over the past 13 years covering you guys and 10 years at re-invent looking forward to this year is the makeup of your customers, right? You've had a mix of customers from early startups and enterprise quick adoption and then massive growth, more higher level services. You guys serve essentially every kind of customer at this point in every industry and those customers want different things. And if you look at the enterprises today versus say ISVs even of yester year and today, enterprises are merging with this kind of like super cloud mindset or ISVs just want to do SaaS. They all want different things. What are some of the key differences on how enterprises want to consume generative AI versus say how an ISV wants to consume it, generate AI? Yeah, I think, well, the first thing that you mentioned is spot on. I think everyone is going to want to use generative AI and appropriately so it is a powerful technology that has a potential to help us be more efficient, more effective and really change customer experiences. I think when you think about those differences and how a startup thinks about things or how a large enterprise thinks about things or a SaaS provider thinks about things. You know, a lot of them are not totally different. As you might think, their stages of adoption may be different.  How can you iterate quickly? How can you get access to some of these technologies that may only normally be accessible to really large companies? And that's one of the things that cloud and AWS enable. And so you see startups like Hugging Face, like stability, like runway, I can go on and on anthropic building on top of AWS because they can get large scale capacity quickly. They can iterate quickly. They can learn and they can grow. So that's where a lot of startups love to use the cloud. And that was, as you know, that's where we kind of grew up from the very beginning as the value proposition and generative AI is no different there. I was talking with Swan. Okay, that's right, interrupt, go ahead. I was saying, when you go look at larger scaled ISVs, it's really not that different of a story. I think one of the things that they love is the ability to scale, the ability to test new capabilities. I think if you look at, you know, large ISVs like Adobe just launched last week new generative AI capabilities inside of their creative cloud. Really cool stuff that these larger established ISVs are doing and rolling out really innovative new technologies and capabilities all based on generative AI. So go ahead. Yeah, I just was just going down the same road I was thinking, which is enterprises have a little bit different needs than say a developer or startup that's growing rapidly. Enterprises might want SaaS like experiences like Code Whisperer, right? For example, or developers wanting like say, bedrock for the building blocks. How do you mix that together? What's your take on that? Do you see that same thing more SaaS for the consumption side? Developers want to build with bedrock. Isn't that kind of where the action is? I mean, where is the, because my question is, do you believe that to be true? And where's the action? Yeah, I'll tell you like, you know, John, I think really our take is there is no such thing as a homogenous customer. Customers all have different ways that they want to consume this technology. Some are going to want to consume it at a package layer. Some are going to want to consume it all the way at the infrastructure layer. And I think that's where AWS really shines in how our product strategy is, is that we want to have capabilities for everyone. For people that want to build their own models, we build our own silicon. And I think increasingly that is going to be a competitive advantage for us to have choice. We have, and for a long time, have been the best place to run GPU infrastructure. And so customers love running large scale GPU clusters in AWS. But we also build our own infrastructure that we think has costs and performance advantages in the sense of training for large training clusters and inferential for running large inference clusters. If you think about SageMaker, it's the development platform of choice of almost every single ML developer out there to do things like make sure that you're doing safe by AI, make sure that you're testing various different models to see what actually works well with your applications. And then Bedrock is providing an easy to use API so that the variety of models, whether you're using, we think that over time, there's going to be a large number of these foundational models that folks are going to want to be able to use for a different set of use cases. And they may even want to combine different ones. And so Bedrock provides a really easy to use API so that customers can combine those. Now, the one thing that I will say is consistent across almost every single customer that wants to use generative AI is that they want to make sure that they do it in a secure, safe environment where they know that their IP is safe, where they can have explainability, where they have as much information as possible on how the model was created. And really that's where our focus is, is how can we give enterprises that assurance that they have the highest performing infrastructure but also the best and most secure platform in order to go build that generative AI so that they know that their data and their IP doesn't leak out to places where they don't control it. On the security thing, how do you ensure that? What's the key value proposition there? I mean, sounds good. Back that up, be specific. What's the security compliance? Is it more regional thing? Is it you guys have with your architecture? What's the security, I guess, how can you seal an approval from AWS? How do you ensure that? I think there's a range of things. For our first party models, we have our own models, which we refer to as our Titan models. And those, we're very careful from a copyright perspective of which data has been used to build that model. And we're very clear about that. So customers know that they can be assured that the data that went to build that model is something that we have the rights to use to go build it. We provide things like open source models inside of Jumpstart. And when you're running on some of those open source models, many of which are becoming really, really powerful. And in many cases are actually outperforming some of the proprietary models today. Customers are able to run those entirely inside of their own proprietary VPC or networking. And so they can run that model. There is, they can isolate that from any sort of external connectivity and know that anything that they use in that model stays inside of that model, stays inside of their VPC. The same with Bedrock, where people, anyone who uses any sort of a tuning to tune Bedrock models, which is one of the key features that we'll have inside of our Titan models. We ensure that that data doesn't leak back into the core foundational model and stays inside of the customer's VPC. So many of the controls that they use for the rest of their enterprise data work just the same for their general AI capabilities. And we think when we've talked to a lot of customers, they've come to trust AWS and our security models. They trust their data inside of AWS. And now when they run their generative models on top of some of that data, we can provide some of those same controls to help them understand how their data stays inside of their environment. I think that's a really great point. In fact, we've been talking about this whole prompt engineering wave where it's essentially a call. I mean, as a prompt is a call. In prompt tuning, that's operational. And then obviously auto autonomous is just software. You mentioned choice earlier. I think that's a fundamental comment. I want to just double down on that. You guys have been known as a company, even Amazon from the early days of selling books choice. Now you guys got a broad selection of general. You mentioned a few first party models. That's your model and open AI has theirs. It's not on AWS. We'll come back to that in a second. Third party models via bedrock, which you guys announced, which is getting a lot of traction. And then the recent wave of open source innovation just in the past like month and a half, you saw a huge surge. You guys got a hugging face out there. Some of these individual models are clearly very more prominent. Get that and important. Looking ahead, when will customers want to use the prominent models that you guys have? And when will they want to use some of these long tail bedrock like products and open source? How will you balance those? Yeah. I mean, our goal is to give customers both the choice to be able to run what's best for their application because the model that's optimized for a financial services customer may not be the one that's optimized for genomics data may not be the one that performs best for e-commerce or images or any of those other things. And that's why stability AI is a great model for images right now, but not for text. And by the way, they'll change over time and they'll add some of those. And so we want customers to be able to pick and choose what the best model that they want to use for the best use case. And that's part of where SageMaker plays a big role. And we make it really easy for customers to AB test things. And in a cloud, you can do that. You don't have to spend billions of dollars to go build your own model. You can leverage some of these others and test if model A performs better than model B, or if some combination of models is actually the optimal one for you. And I think over time, that's largely where people will land is they'll tune and kind of build on top of some of these foundational models and they'll have their own model that they tune and then condense from those. And that's the thing that they'll actually use in production. And we want to make it super easy for them to do that process, but then also cost effective and secure in order to actually use that and scale that out because cost is one of the long things people are looking out in the future and they're worrying about the cost of generative AI is going to be. And so we focus on all areas of that to try to make sure that we can meet all of those concerns and have the best option for them. Whether it's first party Amazon models or models open source or other proprietary ones. Our goal is over time to support every single model out there. That's awesome. And this whole conversation reminds me of early days of AWS when you had the same. Do I build the data center and provision all this stuff or do I put it in the cloud and get instant value, variable, elasticity? I mean, same kind of thing happening dynamic here with the cloud and foundational models. It feels the same. You can stand up your own if you want. Good luck with that or mix and match and code your own. That's right. And look, and over time, you'll see us leveraging generative AI more and more in some of the applications that we make available to customers as well. I think you mentioned earlier code whisper is a great example of that where it's a coding companion but still with that enterprise in mind, right? We're still, we have automated reasoning built in to make sure that you're building secure code. We have the ability to highlight if we're showing you code samples that come from open source, what is the licenses and to ensure that you want to use the code sample that comes from open source. These are, it starts from that fundamental starting with the customer that we do and working backwards. And we really like to think what are the things that customers are really going to care about when we roll these out and our focus, which is a little different than others which is we are laser focused in AWS on how can we have generative AI make our customers successful and a little bit less, we're not distracted by productivity suites or search or any of those other things. We are laser focused on how can we make sure that our AWS customers can take best advantage of these technologies and we start with those use cases and then work from there. So Andy Jets his shareholder letter, he was very optimistic and bullish on this basically saying this is a transformer type Adam Sileski's comments as well and what kind of what you're getting at it reminds me of the old days of AWS early days. You know, Andy's would say, undifferentiated heavy, we automate away the undifferentiated heavy lifting. Well kind of AI can do the same thing for differentiated heavy lifting. What's your reaction to that? Because now it can do both, right? You got the cloud for undifferentiated all the toil provisioning and all that stuff. Now you're seeing AI take on more tasks shifting the human augmenting the human capabilities. So differentiating, seeing a lot of conversations today around how AI can actually automate and differentiate for companies. This is a big part of the refactoring on the business side. What's your reaction to that comment? Yeah, I mean, I think, look, I think generative AI is an incredibly powerful capability that has a chance to make us much more efficient, much more effective. You know, it's not going to replace people anytime soon, you know, I think that's a long way off and a lot of people are worried about that. But you know, every time a new tool or capability comes out that's kind of transformational in what you can do, I think people will worry a little bit about that. But if you think about Code Whisper, Code Whisper is not going to make it so that you don't need developers anymore. It's going to make it so developers don't have to write bespoke code. It's going to make it so that developers can write more secure code, but they can focus on some of that piece that's like, what is the innovative customer experience that I can go deliver for my business and for customers and not have to worry about, you know, the blocking and tackling of necessarily writing code? I think, you know, like the future coding language is probably going to be English and that's okay. You know? Yeah, exactly. But it's going to be saying it in English and then the tools will translate that into code. And so, you know, the expertise may not be understanding the nuances of Java or C++ or anything like that, but that's okay. I don't think it doesn't make, it just changes some of that skill pieces. Now you got to think about the parts of your application that you want to go build as opposed to how you build it. So- Yeah, humans plus AI is better than AI by itself. 100%, yep. And that's going to be like that for a really, really long time and probably forever. I think that's the big thing that we want to get out there is people shouldn't be afraid of it. It's not opportunity. I think it's one of the biggest ways we've seen combined all the other ones and we're going to report it heavily. You mentioned GPUs. I want to jump on that real quick. So supply seems to be a bottleneck. Nvidia stock is all high. And I think they're kind of like hoarding all the GPUs in my opinion, but I won't get into that. There's demand for the training and inference. What do you see as the core constraint in the industry and what does usually have to do to have a line of sight to relieve the pressure? There's more demand. You mentioned you've got the GPU service. How long do you expect it to take to clear this up and get more freed up? You know, I think that's a good question. I think there's a number of constraints here. I think one of the things that's key is that it takes a lot of compute power to go build some of these foundational models. It takes billions of dollars of GPUs, but not just GPUs, servers, networking, data center, power, electricity, all of those pieces, right? And we've been building a lot of those things for a long time. We have the largest GPU clusters anywhere in the cloud. We have the best performing GPU clusters in the cloud. And long term, I think that power is actually one of those things that you have to really think about because these clusters have the potential to use hundreds of megawatts to gigawatts of power. Now, by 2025 we'll be running all of our global data centers on renewable energy, which helps a lot because there's a risk that some of that power causes environmental issues. And so I'm super happy that we made that investment and commitments 10 plus years ago to do that. And that's great. But we're also gonna wanna think about how do we scale those in a bunch of different ways? And I think that's part of where our custom silicon comes in. GPUs are awesome, Nvidia does a fantastic job of building a really good product and they're gonna be super important in this space for a really long time. But we also think there's space for custom design silicon.  And there's a lot of work to get there and there's a lot of innovation that's gonna happen in the industry because of so much focus in this space. But we feel like we're at the forefront of that and can have a competitive advantage for our customers and for our business by having that low cost option for customers that actually in some cases can outperform what GPUs can do. Yeah, I think you'll be a little bit humble there, Matt. You guys have had, I'll give you props to silicon work and the physical layer. You guys have been squeezing every ounce of physics out of it at AWS for years. I've reported many stories on that with James Hamilton, Peter DeSantis. A lot of great work there. But that brings up a good point. You know, AI is all about chat GPT which shows a ubiquity of, if you're always writing a paper for me, blog posts and tweets, but the action of AI is up and down the stack. It's physical layer. Reminds me of the old OSI model back in the day. You mentioned physical. This AI up and down the stack and it's gonna be startups are gonna leverage this not just for the application layer, but there's work to be done. Can you just share your thoughts on the kind of generative AI that's happening up and down the stack? I think that there's just gonna be innovation across the board. I think every single industry, there's gonna be innovation at networking. There's gonna be innovation at the compute layer. There's gonna be innovation at the tool layers. There's gonna be innovation in supporting services like vector databases and other things like that. There's new startups that are popping up every day focusing on different parts of that tool chain. I think all of those things are really interesting. And as we've talked about all the way up to the application stack where there's all sorts of new technologies. So I think it's a technology that can be applied almost anywhere. And that's part of what makes it super exciting and it's an incredibly fast moving space. And frankly, whatever we talk about this month may be totally different six months from now is there's a lot of folks out there innovating. And that's part of why AWS is great. We give people a platform to go innovate. And I'm not the one to guess what all those folks are gonna go build with the capabilities we give them. Other than I know that they'll build some stuff we don't expect and that's part of the fun of it. Well, just our surprise on SiliconANGLE and theCUBE is we stored all of our transcripts for 35,000 interviews in the cloud on Amazon. And we've been using transcribe and other services. We have an index, turns out it's a large language wall. Hey, great, we're turning on a CUBE AI right now. So that kind of never would have been available. How do we not been leaning in? And this is something that I want to ask you because what I'm seeing in my reporting is that there's two types of customers right now on the AI side. There's ones that have been into the cloud and ones that aren't or not, they've been listed in shift but not truly in the cloud. The pandemic showed us if you were leaning into the cloud you had a tailwind, if not you had a headwind. With AI there's a feeling that if I don't lean in I might be caught flat footed like the folks that didn't get into the cloud with the pandemic. What's your reaction to that? Do you hear that? And what do you tell customers? Because it's not like just jump in because you have to. Like there's a benefit for getting in there. I'm hearing that from customers saying I'll put the toe in the water, I'll jump in, I'll play around, I'll explore, discover but I don't want to be flat footed like the pandemic where I didn't have leverage. That's right. I think that you're exactly right. I think getting all of your data and your workloads in the cloud enables you to adjust to changing trends and technologies. And I do think generative AI is one of those that every single customer and company has to really think about how they're going to integrate into everything that they do. And it's harder if your data is not in the cloud. And so almost like a step zero is to make sure your data is in AWS that it's available in a data lake that you can look at that your compute workloads are there that you have your structure around it. And so many of the customers who've already jumped in that cloud journey are in a good place to move fast and others are hustling because they realize that this is capability that just not going to be able to do in their own data centers. There's just no way of doing it. The scale is just not possible. The speed, the technology is moving. It's just not possible to do in your own data centers. And so that I think this is further evidence and impetus for people to move to the cloud quickly. But I also encourage every single customer to be thinking about how generative AI is going to change their business over the next, many years. Or if you got a stack of GPUs, keep those and sell as a service opportunity there. I'll link it. Last couple of questions just to end things. I really appreciate your time. I know you're super busy running operations over there at Amazon field and global services. Fun questions, thought exercises you can answer any way you want. I mean, they got open AI, which is not available on AWS. Anthropic, which is available on AWS. I've been talking to insiders and VC firms and some of the top enterprises. And they all want open. They want choice, okay? Many complain privately. They would like to see open AI run with bedrock. Would you ever offer Sam Alton and lots of customers for open AI via bedrock? Sure. There's no, I would love to show. I really like, I think all customers, I want to have choice. And so I would love to have every model that customers are interested and excited about running in bedrock and AWS. All right, there it is, open. Customers and developers also want open source. So you're starting to see that. There's been a big surge just in the past month and a half. A lot of fruits of the labor from the open source community, really jumping on AI big time. We reported explosion of developer and entrepreneurial innovation and value creation. This is the next area where the startups and the unicorns are gonna, the next drop box is gonna be coming out of these communities. All took advantage of AWS in the early days. You guys got the big models, the long tail of open source models are emerging. What's your view on the mix of the models, the big prominence to the open source long tail? How do you see the mix playing out? Do you have an opinion? You have a visibility of kind of how that might shake out in terms of mix. Yeah, it's hard to say. I think some of, we've seen awesome results from some of the distilled open source models recently. Facebook's llama model was awesome. I think there's a new model that just came out this week that's light on, I think, which is an even smaller model that's outperforming Llama now on the open source world totally trained on AWS. I think there's a lot of this interesting, a lot of interesting innovation that's going out there. I think there's also always gonna be need for these really large core models, too, that help distill some of these open source models and specialized models. But I think it's such a fast moving space. It's hard to say. That's why I think that the choice is so important. It's, you know, there's, anybody's guess as to exactly which horse to bet on. We'd prefer to make it really easy for customers to switch horses if they find the one that they like better later. Matt, thanks so much for your time. Final question, as people ride this wave, it's a big one. If they're not on the wave riding it properly, they're going to be driftwood as we've been saying on theCUBE. What's your advice? There's a lot of change. You mentioned just some of these really good examples of, you know, carbon footprint, which by the way Stanford did come out of the study saying it's worse than anything else, even crypto. So that's a good play for the cloud, for you, congratulations. And, but for startups out there, what's your advice? Because the entrepreneurial track is not the same as it was during gen one. You got to get customers, but scale is a huge thing. We've been saying, how do you see this next gen wave hitting? What's your advice to startups and for companies? There's a lot of change. How do you keep on top of it? What would you advise? Part of what we think about is, is that we think AWS is a great place for startups and all sorts of customers to actually as a channel to get to customers. They're, you know, the vast majority of enterprises and companies out there are running their businesses in AWS, but we're not going to go build the broad swath of innovative new technologies. We'll deliver a lot of stuff, but there's a lot that we won't build and partners are key to everything that we do in AWS. And so we have a lot of programs from marketplace all the way through to some of our channel programs and certifications to ensure that our partners are available for our customers to use in a really easy to use, really easy to integrate way. And so I'd encourage all of them to look at some of those programs that we have in the partner ecosystem and in marketplace, as we're seeing that that's one of the ways that a lot of enterprises want to bring these tools together to be able to use broad swath of things. Awesome, Matt Garman, senior vice president. CSM marketing and global services for AWS. Continuing this next level. It's legit next gen AIs here, super exciting. It is transformative. We love it and we love the change and accelerated towards business transformation, Matt. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, exclusive conversation. All right, thanks, John. Happy to be here. Thanks. Bye. Hey, this is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, exclusive customer with all the thought leaders and executives in the business, making things happen. Generative AI is the hottest, changing trend happening right now. Obviously, data is at the heart of it and cloud scale. John Furrier with theCUBE, thanks for watching.