The Hallucination Slayer

BYRON COOK HAS SPENT A DECADE DEPLOYING A POWERFUL BUT OBSCURE TYPE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE CALLED AUTOMATED REASONING AT Amazon. NOW HE'S GIVING THE TECH GIANT A MAJOR ADVANTAGE IN THE AI BATTLEFIELD.

- BY JOHN PAVLUS

AMAZON VP AND DISTINGUISHED SCIENTIST BYRON COOK

UP IN THE CASCADE MOUNTAINS, 90 miles east of Seattle, a group of high-ranking Amazon engineers gather for a private offsite. They hail from the company's North America Stores division, and they're here at this Hyatt resort on a crisp September morning to brainstorm new ways to power Amazon's retail experiences. Passing the hotel lobby's IMAX-like mountain views, they filter into windowless meeting rooms.

Down the hall, the offsite's keynote speaker—Byron Cook, vice president and distinguished scientist at Amazon—slips into an empty conference room to have some breakfast before his presentation. Cook is 6-foot-6, but with sloping shoulders that make his otherwise imposing frame appear disarmingly concave. He's wearing a rumpled version of his typical uniform: a thick black hoodie and loose black pants hanging slightly high at the ankles. An ashy thatch of hair points in whatever direction his hands happen to push it. Cook, 54, doesn't look much like a scientist, distinguished or otherwise, and certainly not like a VP—more like a nerdy roadie.

"They don't know who I am yet," he tells me between bites of breakfast, referring to the two dozen or so engineers now taking their seats. Despite his exalted title, Cook has faced plenty of rooms like this in his self-made role as a kind of missionary within Amazon, spreading the word about a powerful but obscure type of artificial intelligence called “automated reasoning.” As he’s done many times before, Cook is here to get the highly technical people in that room to become believers. He’s championing an approach to AI that isn’t powered by gigawatt data centers stuffed with GPUs, but by principles old enough to be written on papyrus—and one that’s already positioning Amazon as a leader in the tech industry’s quest to solve the problem of hallucinations.