- Andrej Karpathy recently suggested AI could enhance e-book reading with interactive features.
- Amazon may already be thinking about this for its Kindle e-books.
- The company is looking for an applied scientist to improve the reading and publishing experience.
The AI pioneer and OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy thinks AI can significantly improve how people read books. Amazon may already be thinking about how to do this for its Kindle e-books business.
In a series of posts on X this week, Karpathy proposed building an AI application that could read books together with humans, answering questions and generating discussion around the content. He said it would be a “huge hit” if Amazon or some other company built it.
A recent job post by Amazon suggests the tech giant may be doing just that.
Amazon is looking for a senior applied scientist for the “books content experience” team who can leverage “advances in AI to improve the reading experience for Kindle customers,” the job post said.
The goal is “unlocking capabilities like analysis, enhancement, curation, moderation, translation, transformation and generation in Books based on Content structure, features, Intent, Synthesis and publisher details,” it added.
The role will focus on not just the reading experience but also the broader publishing and distribution space. The Amazon team wants to “streamline the publishing lifecycle, improve digital reading, and empower book publishers through innovative AI tools and solutions to grow their business on Amazon,” the job post said.
3 phases
Amazon identified three major phases of the book life cycle and thinks AI could improve each one.
- First up is the publishing part where books are created.
- Second is the reading experience where AI can help build new features and “representation” in books and drive higher reading “engagement.”
- The third stage is “reporting” to help improve “sales & business growth,” the job post said.
An Amazon spokesperson didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday.
‘I love this idea’
There seems to be huge demand for this type of service, based on the response to Karpathy’s X post.
Stripe CEO Patrick Collison wrote under the post that it’s “annoying” to have to build this AI feature on his own, adding that it would be “awesome when it’s super streamlined.”
Reddit’s cofounder Alexis Ohanian wrote, “I love this idea.”
Do you work at Amazon? Got a tip?
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