Zuckerberg rushing into every new fad with billions of dollars has somehow tricked people into thinking that's what big tech is about and all of them should be shovelling money into this.

But actually every other company has been much more strategic, Microsoft is bullish because they partnered up with OpenAI and it pumps their share price to be bullish, Google is the natural home of a lot of this research.

But actually, Amazon, Apple etc aren't natural homes for this, they don't need to burn money to chase it.

So there we have it, the companies that have a good strategy for this are investing heavily, the others will pick up merges and key technological partners as the market matures, and presumably Zuck will go off and burn $XB on the next fad once AI has cooled down.

• h1fra

  today at 12:05 PM

  Amazon strategy is to invest in the infrastructure, money is where the machines live. I think they just realized none of those companies have a moat, so why would they? But all of them will buy compute

• spjt

  today at 12:33 PM

  I suppose you could argue that Amazon does have one special thing going for it here, idle compute resources in AWS. However that is not the sort of thing that requires "AI talent" to make use of.

• physhster

  today at 12:00 PM

  So does Pichai... Every time there is something new, he forces Google to pivot, upending everything without much to show for it.

  • 42lux

    today at 12:13 PM

    When did Google ever pivot?

    • chubot

      today at 12:43 PM

      I haven't followed that closely, but Gemini seems like a pivot based on ChatGPT's market success

      Google is leading in terms of fundamental technology, but not in terms of products

      They had the LLambda chatbot before that, but I guess it was being de-emphasized, until ChatGPT came along

      Social was a big pivot, though that wasn't really due to Pichai. That was while Larry Page was CEO and he argued for it hard. I can't say anyone could have known beforehand, but in retrospect, Google+ was poorly conceived and executed

      ---

      I also believe the Nth Google chat app was based on WhatsApp success, but I can't remember the name now

      Google Compute Engine was also following AWS success, after initially developling Google App Engine

    • ethbr1

      today at 12:18 PM

      Social. User-facing AI.

      • earth2mars

        today at 12:37 PM

        Social: YouTube User facing AI: Gemini, Google photos, NotebookLM and plenty of products.

The evidence shows that there is no methodological moat for LLMS. The moat of the frontier folks is just compute. xAI went in months from nothing to competing with the top dogs. DeepSeek too. So why bother with splurging billions in talent when you can buy GPUs and energy instead and serve the compute needs of everyone?

Also Amazon is in another capital intensive business. Retail. Spending billions on dubious AWS moonshots vs just buying more widgets and placing them across the houses of US customers for even faster deliveries does not make sense.

• cedws

  today at 7:40 AM

  A lot of C-suite people seem to have an idea that if they just throw enough compute at LLMs that AGI will eventually emerge, even though it's pretty clear at this point that LLMs are never going to lead to general intelligence. In their view it makes sense to invest massive amounts of capital because it's like a lottery ticket to being the future AGI company that dominates the world.

  I recall Zuckerberg saying something about how there were early signs of AI "improving itself." I don't know what he was talking about but if he really believes that's true and that we're at the bottom of an exponential curve then Meta's rabid hiring and datacenter buildout makes sense.

  • hliyan

    today at 12:02 PM

    In early 2023, I remember someone breathlessly explaining that there are signs that LLMs that are seemingly good at chess/checkers moves may have a rudimentary model of the board within them, somehow magically encoded into the model weights through the training. I was stupid enough to briefly entertain the possibility until I actually bothered to develop a high level understanding of the transformer architecture. It's surprising how much mysticism this field seems to attract. Perhaps it being a non-deterministic, linguistically invoked black box, triggers the same internal impulses that draw some people to magic and spellcasting.

    • pegasus

      today at 12:47 PM

      Just because it's not that hard to reach a high-level understanding of the transformer pipeline doesn't mean we understand how these systems function, or that there can be no form of world model that they are developing. Recently there has been more evidence for that particular idea [1]. The feats of apparent intelligence LLMs sometimes display have taken even their creators by surprise. Sure, there's a lot of hype too, that's part and parcel of any new technology today, but we are far from understanding what makes them perform so well. In that sense, yeah you could say they are a bit "magical".

      [1] https://the-decoder.com/new-othello-experiment-supports-the-...

  • stuaxo

    today at 8:13 AM

    Its insane really, anyone who has worked with LLMs for a bit and has an idea of how they work shouldn't think its going to lead to "AGI".

    Hopefully some big players, like FB bankrupt themselves.

    • IanCal

      today at 10:07 AM

      Tbh I find this view odd, and I wonder what people view as agi now. It used to be that we had extremely narrow pieces of AI and I remember being on a research project about architectures and just very basic “what’s going on?” was advanced. Understanding that someone asked a question, that would be solved by getting a book and being able to then go and navigate to the place the book was likely to be was fancy. Most systems could solve literally one type of problem. They weren’t just bad at other things they were fundamentally incapable of anything but an extremely narrow use case.

      I can throw wide ranging problems at things like gpt5 and get what seem like dramatically better answers than if I asked a random person. The amount of common sense is so far beyond what we had it’s hard to express. It used to be always pointed out that the things we had were below basic insect level. Now I have something that can research a charity, find grants and make coherent arguments for them, read matrix specs and debug error messages, and understand sarcasm.

      To me, it’s clear that agi is here. But then what I always pictured from it may be very different to you. What’s your image of it?

      • whizzter

        today at 11:19 AM

        It's more that "random" people are dumb as bricks (but we've in the name of equality and historic measurement errors decided to forgo that), add to it that AI's have a phenomenal (internet sized) memory makes them far more capable than many people.

        However, even "dumb" people can often make judgements structures in a way that AI's cannot, it's just that many have such a bad knowledge-base that they cannot build the structures coherently whereas AI's succeed thanks to their knowledge.

        I wouldn't be surprised if the top AI firms today spend an inordinate amount of time to build "manual" appendages into the LLM systems to cater to tasks such as debugging to uphold the facade that the system is really smart, while in reality it's mostly papering up a leaky model to avoid losing the enormous investments they need to stay alive with a hope that someone on their staff comes up a real solution to self-learning.

        https://magazine.sebastianraschka.com/p/understanding-reason...

      • Yoric

        today at 10:45 AM

        I think it's clear that nobody agrees what AGI is. OpenAI describes it in terms of revenue. Other people/orgs in terms of, essentially, magic.

        If I had to pick a name, I'd probably describe ChatGPT & co as advanced proof of concepts for general purpose agents, rather than AGI.

      • boppo1

        today at 10:57 AM

        Human-level intelligence. Being able to know what it doesn't know. Having a practical grasp on the idea of truth. Doing math correctly, every time.

        I give it a high-res photo of a kitchen and ask it to calculate the volume of a pot in the image.

        • snapcaster

          today at 12:29 PM

          But many humans can't do a lot of those things and we still consider them "generally intelligent"

        • tomaskafka

          today at 11:19 AM

          You discover truth by doing stuff in real world and observing the results. Current LLM have enough intelligence, but all the inputs they have are the “he said she said” by us monkeys, including all omissions and biases.

        • 293984j29384

          today at 11:20 AM

          None of what you describe would I label within the realm of 'average'

      • homarp

        today at 11:32 AM

        my picture of AGI is 1) autonomous improvement 2) ability to say 'i don't know/can't be done'

      • adwn

        today at 10:22 AM

        I think the discrepancy between different views on the matter mainly stems from the fact that state-of-the-art LLMs are better (sometimes extremely better) at some tasks, and worse (sometimes extremely worse) at other tasks, compared to average humans. For example, they're better at retrieving information from huge amounts of unstructured data. But they're also terrible at learning: any "experience" which falls out of the context window is lost forever, and the model can't learn from its mistakes. To actually make it learn something requires very many examples and a lot of compute, whereas a human can permanently learn from a single example.

        • andsoitis

          today at 12:41 PM

          > human can permanently learn from a single example

          This, to me at least, seems like an important ingredient to satisfying a practical definition / implementation of AGI.

          Another might be curiosity, and I think perhaps also agency.

      • AlienRobot

        today at 10:41 AM

        Nobody is saying that LLM's don't work like magic. I know how neural networks work and they still feel like voodoo to me.

        What we are saying is that LLM's can't become AGI. I don't know what AGI will look like, but it won't look like an LLM.

        There is a difference between being able to melt iron and being able to melt tungsten.

    • thaawyy33432434

      today at 11:38 AM

      Recently I realized that US are very close to a centrally planned economy. Meta wasted 50B on metaverse, which like how much Texas spends on healthcare. Now the "AI" investments seems dubious.

      You could fund 1000+ projects with this kinds of money. This is not an effective capital allocation.

    • amelius

      today at 9:23 AM

      The only way we'll have AGI is if people get dumber. Using modern tech like LLMs makes people dumber. Ergo, we might see AGI sooner than expected.

    • menaerus

      today at 9:45 AM

      > ... and has an idea of how they work shouldn't think its going to lead to "AGI"

      Not sure what level of understanding are you referring to but having learned and researched about the pretty much all LLM internals I think this has led me exactly to the opposite line of thinking. To me it's unbelievable what we have today.

    • meowface

      today at 11:58 AM

      This is not and has not been the consensus opinion. If you're not an AI researcher you shouldn't write as if you've set your confidence parameter to 0.95.

      Of course it might be the case, but it's not a thing that should be expressed with such confidence.

    • guardian5x

      today at 8:25 AM

      Just scaling them up might not leat to "AGI", but they can still lead to AGI as a bridge.

    • blackhaz

      today at 8:27 AM

      Is it widely accepted that LLMs won't lead to AGI? I've asked Gemini, so it came up with four primary arguments for this claim, commenting on them briefly:

      1) LLMs as simple "next token predictors" so they just mimicry thinking: But can it be argued that current models operate on layers of multiple depth and are able to actually understand by building concepts and making connections on abstract levels? Also, don't we all mimicry?

      2) Grounding problem: Yes, models build their world models on text data, but we have models operating on non-textual data already, so this appears to be a technical obstacle rather than fundamental.

      3) Lack of World Model. But can anyone really claim they have a coherent model of reality? There are flat-earthers, yet I still wouldn't deny them having AGI. People hallucinate and make mistakes all the time. I'd argue hallucinations is in fact the sign of an emerging intelligence.

      4) Fixed learning data sets. Looks like this is now being actively solved with self-improving models?

      I just couldn't find a strong argument supporting this claim. What am I missing?

      • globnomulous

        today at 8:50 AM

        Why on earth would you copy and paste an LLM's output into a comment? What does that accomplish or provide that just a simply stated argument doesn't accomplish more succinctly? If you don't know something, simply don't comment on it -- or ask a question.

      • welferkj

        today at 9:36 AM

        Fur future reference, pasting llm slop feels exactly as patronizing as back when people pasted links to google searches in response to questions they considered beneath their dignity to answer. Except in this case, no-one asked to begin with.

  • qcnguy

    today at 10:23 AM

    > I don't know what he was talking about

    There's a bunch of ways AI is improving itself, depending on how you want to interpret that. But it's been true since the start.

    1. AI is used to train AI. RLHF uses this, curriculum learning is full of it, video model training pipelines are overflowing with it. AI gets used in pipelines to clean and upgrade training data a lot.

    2. There are experimental AI agents that can patch their own code and explore a tree of possibilities to boost their own performance. However, at the moment they tap out after getting about as good as open source agents, but before they're as good as proprietary agents. There isn't exponential growth. There might be if you throw enough compute at it, but this tactic is very compute hungry. At current prices it's cheaper to pay an AI expert to implement your agent than use this.

    • Yoric

      today at 10:42 AM

      > There are experimental AI agents that can patch their own code and explore a tree of possibilities to boost their own performance. However, at the moment they tap out after getting about as good as open source agents, but before they're as good as proprietary agents.

      Interesting. Do you have links?

      • torbab

        today at 11:36 AM

        Not OP, but the Darwin Godel machine comes to mind: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.22954

  • epolanski

    today at 10:09 AM

    I don't get it, I really don't.

    Even assuming a company gets to AGI first this doesn't mean another one will follow.

    Suppose that FooAI gets to it first: - competitors may get there too in a different or more efficient way - Some FooAI staff can leave and found their own company - Some FooAI staff can join a competitor - FooAI "secret sauce" can be figured out, or simply stolen, by a competitor

    At the end of the day, it really doesn't matter, the equation AI === commodity just does not change.

    There is no way to make money by going into this never ending frontier model war, price of training keeps getting higher and higher, but your competitors few months later can achieve your own results for a fraction of your $.

    • cedws

      today at 11:41 AM

      Some would say that the race to AGI is like the race to nuclear weapons and that the first to get there will hold all the cards (and be potentially able to stop others getting there.) It's a bit too sci-fi for me.

  • CrossVR

    today at 8:15 AM

    I don't know if AGI will emerge from LLM, but I'm always reminded of the Chinese room thought experiment. With billions thrown at the idea it will certainly be the ultimate answer as to whether true understanding can emerge from a large enough dictionary.

    • torginus

      today at 8:59 AM

      Please stop refering to the Chinese Room - it's just magical/deist thinking in disguise. It postulates that humans have way of 'understanding' things that is impossible to replicate mechanically.

      The fact that philosophy hasn't recognized and rejected this argument based on this speaks volumes of the quality of arguments accepted there.

      (That doesn't mean LLMs are or will be AGI, its just this argument is tautological and meaningless)

      • armada651

        today at 9:26 AM

        That some people use the Chinese Room to ascribe some magical properties to human consciousness says more about the person drawing that conclusion than the thought experiment itself.

        I think it's entirely valid to question whether a computer can form an understanding through deterministically processing instructions, whether that be through programming language or language training data.

        If the answer is no, that shouldn't lead to a deist conclusion. It can just as easily lead to the conclusion that a non-deterministic Turing machine is required.

        • torginus

          today at 12:32 PM

          I'd appreciate if you tried to explain why instead of resorting to ad hominem.

          > I think it's entirely valid to question whether a computer can form an understanding through deterministically processing instructions, whether that be through programming language or language training data.

          Since the real world (including probabilistic and quantum phenomena) can be modeled with deterministic computation (a pseudorandom sequence is deterministic, yet simulates randomness), if we have a powerful enough computer we can simulate the brain to a sufficient degree to have it behave identically as the real thing.

          The original 'Chinese Room' experiment describes a book of static rules of Chinese - which is probably not the way to go, and AI does not work like that. It's probabilistic in its training and evaluation.

          What you are arguing is that constructing an artificial consciousness lies beyond our current computational ability(probably), and understanding of physics (possibly), but that does not rule out that we might solve these issues at some point, and there's no fundamental roadblock to artificial consciousness.

          I've re-read the argument (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room) and I cannot help but conclude that Searle argues that 'understanding' is only something that humans can do, which means that real humans are special in some way a simulation of human-shaped atoms are not.

          Which is an argument for the existence of the supernatural and deist thinking.

      • globnomulous

        today at 11:12 AM

        > The fact that philosophy hasn't recognized and rejected this argument based on this speaks volumes of the quality of arguments accepted there.

        That's one possibility. The other is that your pomposity and dismissiveness towards the entire field of philosophy speaks volumes on how little you know about either philosophical arguments in general or this philosophical argument in particular.

        • torginus

          today at 12:35 PM

          Another ad hominem, I'd like you to refute my claim that Searle's argument is essentially 100% magical thinking.

          And yes, if for example, medicine would be no worse at curing cancer than it is today, yet doctors asserted that crystal healing is a serious study, that would reflect badly on the field at large, despite most of it being sound.

      • simianparrot

        today at 9:04 AM

        It is still relevant because it hasn’t been disproven yet. So far all computer programs are Chinese Rooms, LLM’s included.

        • IanCal

          today at 10:09 AM

          If you’re talking about it being proven or disproven you’re misunderstanding the point of the thought experiment.

      • herculity275

        today at 10:28 AM

        "Please stop referring to this thought experiment because it has possible interpretations I don't personally agree with"

        • torginus

          today at 12:45 PM

          Please give me an interpretation that is both correct an meaningful (as in possible to disprove)

      • welferkj

        today at 9:37 AM

        The human way of understanding things can be replicated mechanically, because it is mechanical in nature. The contents of your skull are an existence proof of AGI.

        • hiatus

          today at 10:04 AM

          The A stands for artificial.

        • armada651

          today at 10:03 AM

          The contents of my skull are only a proof for AGI if your mechanical machine replicates all its processes. It's not a question about whether a machine can reproduce that, it's a question about whether we have given our current machines all the tools it needs to do that.

          • torginus

            today at 12:41 PM

            The theory of special relativity does not say 'you can't exceed the speed of light(unless you have a really big rocket)'. It presents a theoretical limit. Likewise the Chinese room doesn't state that consciousness is an intractable engineering problem, but an impossibility.

            But the way Searle formulates his argument, by not defining what consciousness is, he essentially gives himself enough wiggle room to be always right - he's essentially making the 'No True Scotsman' fallacy.

• Lyapunov_Lover

  today at 7:38 AM

  > The evidence shows that there is no methodological moat for LLMS.

  Does it? Then how come Meta hasn't been able to release a SOTA model? It's not for a lack of trying. Or compute. And it's not like DeepSeek had access to vastly more compute than other Chinese AI companies. Alibaba and Baidu have been working on AI for a long time and have way more money and compute, but they haven't been able to do what DeepSeek did.

  • postexitus

    today at 10:57 AM

    They may not have been leading (as in, releasing a SOTA model), but they definitely can match others - easily, as shown by llama 3/4, which proves the point - there is no moat. With enough money and resources, you can match others. Whether without SOTA models you can make a business out of it is a different question.

    • Lyapunov_Lover

      today at 11:30 AM

      Meta never matched the competition with their Llama models. They've never even come close. And Llama 4 was an actual disaster.

      • postexitus

        today at 12:20 PM

        I am not a daily user, so only rely on reviews and benchmarks - actual experience may be different.

• bhl

  today at 6:44 AM

  The moat is people, data, and compute in that order.

  It’s not just compute. That has mostly plateaued. What matters now is quality of data and what type of experiments to run, which environments to build.

  • sigmoid10

    today at 7:22 AM

    This "moat" is actually constantly shifting (which is why it isn't really a moat to begin with). Originally, it was all about quality data sources. But that saturated quite some time ago (at least for text). Before RLHF/RLAIF it was primarily a race who could throw more compute at a model and train longer on the same data. Then it was who could come up with the best RL approach. Now we're back to who can throw more compute at it since everyone is once again doing pretty much the same thing. With reasoning we now also opened a second avenue where it's all about who can throw more compute at it during runtime and not just while training. So in the end, it's mostly about compute. The last years have taught us that any significant algorithmic improvement will soon permeate across the entire field, no matter who originally invented it. So people are important for finding this stuff, but not for making the most of it. On top of that, I think we are very close to the point where LLMs can compete with humans on their own algorithmic development. Then it will be even more about who can spend more compute, because there will be tons of ideas to evaluate.

    • DrScientist

      today at 9:17 AM

      To put that into a scientific context - compute is capacity to do experiments and generate data ( about how best to build models ).

      However I do think you are missing an important aspect - and that's people who properly understand important solvable problems.

      ie I see quite a bit "we will solve this x, with AI' from startup's that don't fundamentally understand x.

      • sigmoid10

        today at 10:57 AM

        >we will solve this x, with AI

        You usually see this from startup techbro CEOs understand neither x nor AI. Those people are already replacable by AI today. The kind of people who think they can query ChatGPT once with "How to create a cutting edge model" and make millions. But when you go in on the deep end, there are very few people who still have enough tech knowledge to compete with your average modern LLM. And even the Math Olympiad gold medalists high-flyers at DeepSeek are about to have a run for their money with the next generation. Current AI engineers will shift more and more towards senior architecture and PM roles, because those will be the only ones that matter. But PM and architecture is already something that you could replace today.

• StopDisinfo910

  today at 9:00 AM

  The barriers to entry for LLM are obvious: as you pointed, the field is extremely capital intensive. The only reason there are seemingly multiple players is because the amount of capital thrown at it at the moment is tremendous but that's unlikely to last forever.

  From my admittely poorly informed point of view, strategy-wise, it's hard to tell how wise it is investing in foundational work at the moment. As long as some players release competitive open weight models, the competitive advantage of being a leader in R&D will be limited.

  Amazon already has the compute power to place itself as a reseller without investing or having to share the revenue generated. Sure, they won't be at the forefront but they can still get their slice of the pie without exposing themselves too much to an eventual downturn.

• karterk

  today at 5:06 AM

  > The moat of the frontier folks is just compute.

  This is not really true. Google has all the compute but in many dimensions they lag behind GPT-5 class (catching up, but it has not been a given).

  Amazon itself did try to train a model (so did Meta) and had limited success.

  • empiko

    today at 5:29 AM

    I switched to Gemini with my new phone and I literally couldn't tell a difference. It is actually crazy how small the cost of switching is for LLMs. It feels like AI is more like a commodity than a service.

    • lelanthran

      today at 6:06 AM

      > I switched to Gemini with my new phone and I literally couldn't tell a difference. It is actually crazy how small the cost of switching is for LLMs. It feels like AI is more like a commodity than a service.

      It is. It's wild to me that all these VCs pouring money into AI companies don't know what a value-chain is.

      Tokens are the bottom of the value-chain; it's where the lowest margins exist because the product at that level is a widely available commodity.

      I wrote about this already (shameless plug: https://www.rundata.co.za/blog/index.html?the-ai-value-chain )

    • physicsguy

      today at 8:09 AM

      On top of that, the on-device models have got stronger and stronger as the base models + RL has got better. You can do on your laptop now what 2 years ago was state of the art.

  • gnfargbl

    today at 5:49 AM

    Which dimensions do you see Google lagging on? They seem broadly comparable on the usual leaderboard (https://lmarena.ai/leaderboard) and anecdotally I can't tell the difference in quality.

    I tend personally to stick with ChatGPT most of the time, but only because I prefer the "tone" of the thing somehow. If you forced me to move to Gemini tomorrow I wouldn't be particularly upset.

    • motorest

      today at 6:53 AM

      > Which dimensions do you see Google lagging on? They seem broadly comparable on the usual leaderboard (https://lmarena.ai/leaderboard) and anecdotally I can't tell the difference in quality.

      Gemini holds indeed the top spot, but I feel you framed your response quite well: they are all broadly comparable. The difference in the synthetic benchmark from the top spot and the 20th spot was something like 57 points on a scale of 0-1500

  • Keyframe

    today at 5:46 AM

    " in many dimensions they lag behind GPT-5 class " - such as?

    Outside of computer, "the moat" is also data to train on. That's an even wider moat. Now, google has all the data. Data no one else has or ever will have. If anything, I'd expect them to outclass everyone by a fat margin. I think we're seeing that on video however.

    • seunosewa

      today at 11:02 AM

      counterpoint: with their aggressive crawlers, most AI companies can have as much data as google...

    • willvarfar

      today at 5:53 AM

      not according to google: “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI”: the big memo and the big HN thread on same https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35813322

      • Keyframe

        today at 5:58 AM

        a bit weird to think about it since google has literally internet.zip in multiple versions over the years, all of email, all of usenet, all of the videos, all of the music, all of the user's search interest, ads, everything..

        • lelanthran

          today at 6:15 AM

          > a bit weird to think about it since google has literally internet.zip in multiple versions over the years, all of email, all of usenet, all of the videos, all of the music, all of the user's search interest, ads, everything..

          Yeah, Google totally has a moat. Them saying that they have no moat doesn't magically make that moat go away.

          They also own the entire vertical which none of the competitors do - all their competitors have to buy compute from someone who makes a profit just on compute (Nvidia, for example). Google owns the entire vertical, from silicon to end-user.

          It would be crazy if they can't make this work.

        • lrem

          today at 9:35 AM

          > all of the videos, [...], all of the user's search interest, ads, everything..

          And privacy policies that are actually limiting what information gets used in what.

          • Keyframe

            today at 11:50 AM

            and even then!

        • rvba

          today at 9:08 AM

          That's why robots make so much traffic now. Those other companies are trying to get data.

          Google theoretically has reddit access. I wonder if they have sort of an internet archive - data unpolutted by LLMs

          On a side note, funny how all the companies seem to train on book archivr which they just downloaded from the internet

    • ivape

      today at 6:45 AM

      You think Chinese companies are short on data and people? Google doesn’t have an advantage there until the CCP takes on a more hands on approach.

      Tin foil hat time:

      - If you were a God and you wanted to create an ideal situation for the arrival of AI

      - It would make sense to precede it with a social media phenomena that introduces mass scale normalization of sharing of personal information

      Yes, that would be ideal …

      People can’t stop sharing and creating data on anything, for awhile now. It’s a perfect situation for AI as an independent, uncontrollable force.

      • rusk

        today at 7:00 AM

        > People can’t stop sharing and creating data on anything

        Garbage in. Garbage out.

        There has never been a better time to produce an AI that mimics a racist uneducated teenager.

        • ivape

          today at 8:08 AM

          Do you want to model the world accurately or not? That person is part of our authentic reality. The most sophisticated AI in the world will always include that person(s).

          • rusk

            today at 8:16 AM

            Not in the slightest. I want useful information services that behave in a mature and respectable fashion.

  • motorest

    today at 6:49 AM

    > This is not really true. Google has all the compute but in many dimensions they lag behind GPT-5 class (catching up, but it has not been a given).

    I don't know what you are talking about. I use Gemini on a daily basis and I honestly can't tell a difference.

    We are at a point where training corpus and hallucinations makes more of a difference than "model class".

  • jorisboris

    today at 6:45 AM

    Yes, or Apple who with all the talent don’t manage to pull off anything useful in AI

    xAI seems to be the exception, not the rule

    • rusk

      today at 7:03 AM

      Given Apple’s moat is their devices, their particular spin on AI is very much edge focussed, which isn’t as spectacular as the current wave of cloud based LLM. Apple’s cloud stuff is laughably poor.

  • jeanloolz

    today at 6:27 AM

    Depending on how you look at it I suppose but I believe Gemini surpasses OpenAI on many levels now. Better photo and video models. The leaderboard for text and embeddings are also putting Google on top of Openai.

  • ebonnafoux

    today at 7:44 AM

    gemini-2.5-pro is ranked number 1 in llmarena (https://lmarena.ai/leaderboard) before gpt-5-high. In the Text-to-Video and Image-to-video, google also have the highest places, OpenAI is nowhere.

    • IX-103

      today at 11:21 AM

      Yes, but they're also slower. As LLMs start to be used for more general purpose things, they are becoming a productivity bottle-neck. If I get a mostly right answer in a few seconds that's much better than a perfect answer in 5 minutes.

      Right now the delay for Google's AI coding assistant is high enough for humans to context switch and do something else while waiting. Particularly since one of the main features of AI code assistants is rapid iteration.

  • paulddraper

    today at 5:46 AM

    It doesn’t guarantee success, but the point stands about X and Deepseek

• DrScientist

  today at 9:12 AM

  I think I'm right in saying that AWS, rather than deliveries, is by far the most profitable part of Amazon.

  Also a smart move is to be selling shovels in a gold rush - and that's exactly what Amazon is doing with AWS.

• abtinf

  today at 8:04 AM

  The idea that models are copyrightable is also extremely dubious.

  So there probably isn’t even a legal moat.

• ml-anon

  today at 8:29 AM

  Lets not pretend this is strategy. Amazon has been trying and failing to hire top AI people. No-one in their right minds would join. Even Meta has to shell out 8-9 figures for top people, who with any modicum of talent or self respect would go to Amazon rather than Anthropic, OAI, GDM? They bought Adept, everyone left.

  AWS is also falling far behind Azure wrt serving AI needs at the frontier. GCP is also growing at a faster rate and has a way more promising future than AWS in this space.

• energy123

  today at 11:07 AM

  There's not much of an architectural moat, but there is a methodological moat, such as with RL synthetic data.

• jojobas

  today at 5:15 AM

  Amazon retail runs on ridiculously low margins compared to AWS. Revenue-wise retail dwarfs AWS, profit-wise it's vice-versa.

• VirusNewbie

  today at 6:36 AM

  Are you arguing anthropic has more compute than Amazon?

  Are you saying the only reason Meta is behind everyone else is compute????

  • benterix

    today at 6:48 AM

    Think well: why should a platform provider get into a terribly expensive and unprofitable business when they can just provide hardware for those with money to spend? This was AWS strategy for years and it's been working well for them.

  • motorest

    today at 6:45 AM

    > Are you arguing anthropic has more compute than Amazon?

    I wouldn't be surprised if the likes of Anthropic wasn't paying AWS for its compute.

    As the saying goes, the ones who got rich from the gold rush were the ones selling shovels.

    • ospray

      today at 7:09 AM

      I wouldn't be surprised if Amazon just buys Anthropic or another lab rather than competing for individuals.

Does Amazon want to be an AI innovator or an AI enabler?

AWS enables thousands of other companies to run their business. Amazon has designed their own Graviton ARM CPUS and their own Trainium AI chips. You can access these through AWS for your business.

I think Amazon sees AI being used in AWS as a bigger money generator than designing new AI algorithms.

• justinator

  today at 3:43 AM

  Selling pick axes vs. mining for gold yet again!

  • dangus

    today at 4:20 AM

    I'm glad this analogy is at the top. I think that some large companies like AWS really should not try to blow money on AI in ways that only make a lot more sense for companies like Meta, Google, and Apple. AWS can't trap you in their AI systems with network effects that the other competitors can.

    Companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are still incredibly risky investments especially because of the wild capital investments and complete lack of moat.

    At least when Facebook was making OpenAI's revenue numbers off of 2 billion active users it was trapping people in a social network where there were real negative consequences to leaving. In the world of open source chatbots and VSClone forks there's zero friction to moving on to some other solution.

    OpenAI is making $12 billion a year off of 700 million users [1], or around $17 per user annually. What other products that have no ad support perform that badly? And that's a company that is signing enterprise contracts with companies like Apple, not just some Spotify-like consumer service.

    [1] This is almost the exact same user count that Facebook had when it turned its first profit.

    • jsnell

      today at 4:52 AM

      > OpenAI is making $12 billion a year off of 700 million users [1], or around $17 per user annually. What other products that have no ad support perform that badly?

      That's a bit of a strange spin. Their ARPU is low because they are choosing not to monetize 95% of their users at all, and for now are just providing practically limitless free service.

      But monetising those free users via ads will pretty obviously be both practical and lucrative.

      And even if there is no technical moat, they seem to have a very solid mind share moat for consumer apps. It isn't enough for competitors to just catch up. They need to be significantly better to shift consumer habits.

      (For APIs, I agree there is no moat. Switching is just so easy.)

      • chii

        today at 8:23 AM

        > They need to be significantly better to shift consumer habits.

        i am hoping that a device local model would eventually be possible (may be a beefy home setup, and then an app that connects to your home on mobile devices for use on the go).

        currently, hardware restrictions prevent this type of home setup (not to mention the open source/free models aren't quite there and difficulty for non-tech users to actually setup). However, i choose to believe the hardware issues will get solved, and it will merely be just time.

        The software/model issue, on the other hand is harder to see solved. I pin my hopes onto deepseek, but may be meta or some other company will surprise me.

      • hiatus

        today at 12:03 PM

        Which advertisers would risk having their product advertised by models that have encouraged kids to commit suicide?

      • 8n4vidtmkvmk

        today at 5:52 AM

        There does seem to be a mind share mote, but all you have to do is piss off users a little bit when there's a good competitor. See Digg to Reddit exodus.

• today at 4:15 AM

• PartiallyTyped

  today at 12:47 AM

  Reading comments from the appropriate VPs will illuminate the situation.. Swami is looking to democratise AI, and the company is geared towards that more than anything else.

  Disclaimer; I work for amzn, opinions my own.

  https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/machine-learning/aws-and-mistra...

  • mips_avatar

    today at 4:04 AM

    I don't know what democratizing AI means, AWS doesn't have the GPU infrastructure to host inference or training on a large scale.

    • PartiallyTyped

      today at 6:11 AM

      Huh? That’s quite the assertion. They provide the infrastructure for Anthropic, so if that’s not large scale idk what is.

• DoesntMatter22

  yesterday at 11:38 PM

  Also I think that they realize this is just a money losing proposition right now for the most part. And they're not going to have a problem getting in later when there's a clear solution. Why fight it out? I don't think they're going to miss much because they can use any models they need and as you said some of that stuff may be run on their servers

• Mars008

  today at 4:52 AM

  This is not mutually exclusive. They have home made robots and let others sell robots on their website. The same way they want to use AI and have resources to make their own. One way to use is to drive those robots. Another to enhance their web site. Current version sucks. I recently return the item because their bot told it has functionality while in fact it didn't.

  • rswail

    today at 6:44 AM

    AWS is very much not the same as Amazon the product selling website.

    The two are effectively separate businesses with a completely separate customer base.

Amazon still has huge R&D spends, always had. Bezos had a dictum around having a high experimentation (and failure) rate as a matter of principle. They may not be making news-making moves, but I'm sure they'll develop the muscle in AI. Probably - just really honing on the customer use cases and working backwards over the long term.

> Of course, the AI talent war may end up being an expensive and misguided strategy, stoked by hype and investor over-exuberance.

To me, that's a pretty good explanation.

The world is crazy with AI right now, but when we see how DeepSeek became a major player at a fraction of the cost, and, according to Google researchers, without making theoretical breakthroughs. It looks foolish to be in this race, especially now that we are seeing diminishing returns. Waiting until things settle, learning from others attempts and designing your system not for top performance but for efficiency and profit seems like a sane strategy.

And it is not like Amazon is out of the AI game, they have what really matters: GPUs. This is a gold rush, and as the saying goes, they are more interested in selling pickaxes that finding gold.

• bee_rider

  today at 2:59 AM

  I guess Amazon can also probably afford to wait until somebody comes up with an application for AI that is, like, something Amazon can actually sell or use…

  Customer service bots? Maybe. Coding bots? I bet they use some internally. Their customers don’t really need them, or if the customer does, the customer can run it on their side.

  • janalsncm

    today at 4:38 AM

    As I’ve said before, the kind of AI that makes money is called machine learning. Pricing ads, recommending products, improving search, optimizing routing.

    In general these fall into the category of things humans cannot do at the scale and speed necessary to run SaaS companies.

    Many of the things LLMs attempt to do are things people already do, slowly and relatively accurately. But until hallucinations are rare, slow expensive humans will typically need to be around. The AI booster’s strategy of ignoring/minimizing hallucinations or equivocating with human fallibility doesn’t work for businesses where reliability is important.

    Note that ML algorithms are highly imperfect as well. Uber’s prices aren’t optimal. Google search surfaces tons of spam. But they are better than the baseline of no service exists.

  • wiether

    today at 9:51 AM

    You mean something like Kiro?

    https://kiro.dev/

• janalsncm

  today at 4:23 AM

  AI is huge, it’s just not the only thing happening in tech right now. I say this as an MLE but it seems really unbalanced that LLMs have gotten trillions in investment when other groundbreaking innovations like battery improvements or fusion power or gene therapy have gotten substantially less attention.

  Disagree re: DeepSeek theoretical breakthroughs, MLA and GRPO are pretty good and paved the way for others e.g. Kimi K2 uses MLA for a 1T MoE.

  • bigbuppo

    today at 7:32 AM

    Big money investors know that real tangible products that have real tangible benefits aren't usually decimal-point-shifting-your-net-worth jackpots. They make money, sure, but factories can't be built in a day. Also, if they can make AI work as it says on the box, they'll be able to get rid of all those pesky employees and turn their companies into pure money-printing enterprises.

    Pay no attention to the cracks that are showing. Nevermind the chill. Everything is fine.

• energy123

  today at 11:14 AM

  I don't agree, based on my experience trying all Deepseek models on real world software tasks.

That's because there is no lock-in in the current ecosystems for AI. Yet. But once AIs become your lifetime companion that know everything there is to know about you and the lock-in is maximized (imagine leaving your AI provider will be something like a divorce with you losing half your memory) these parties will flock to it.

The blessing right now is the limit to contextual memory. Once those limits fall away and all of your previous conversations are made part of the context I suspect the game will change considerably, as will the players.

• IceHegel

  today at 5:42 AM

  There's a chance this memory problem is not going to be that easy to solve. It's true context lengths have gotten much longer, but all context is not created equal.

  There's like a significant loss of model sharpness as context goes over 100K. Sometimes earlier, sometimes later. Even using context windows to their maximum extent today, the models are not always especially nuanced over the long ctx. I compact after 100K tokens.

  • Ozzie_osman

    today at 6:15 AM

    But you don't have to hold the entire memory in context. You just need to perfect techniques to pull in parts of the context that you need. This can be done via RAG, multi-agent architectures, etc. It's not perfect but it will get better over time.

  • elorant

    today at 6:47 AM

    From my experience context window by itself tells half the story. You load a big document that’s 200k tokens and ask it a question, it will answer just fine. You start a conversation that soon enough balloons past 100k then it starts losing coherence pretty quickly. So I guess batch size plays a more significant role.

  • luckydata

    today at 8:27 AM

    I'm over simplifying here but graph database and knowledge graphs exist. An LLM doesn't need to preserve everything in context, just what it needs for that conversation.

  • spiderfarmer

    today at 6:45 AM

    Context will need to go in layers. Like when you tell someone what you do for a living, your first version will be very broad. But when they ask the right questions, you can dive into details pretty quick.

• sebastianz

  today at 7:49 AM

  > But once AIs become your lifetime companion that know everything there is to know about you and the lock-in is maximized

  Why? It's just a bunch of text. They are forced by law to allow you to export your data - so you just take your life's "novel" and copy paste it into their competition's robot.

  • Steve16384

    today at 8:07 AM

    It's never quite that straightforward, or perceived as that straightforward. That's why most people just renew their insurance as it's easier than messing about changing and worrying if it will be any better. And how easy is it to transfer emails to another provider?

• visarga

  today at 8:09 AM

  Export your old chats and put them in a RAG system accessible on the new LLM provider. I did it. I made my chat history into a MCP tool I can use with Claude Desktop or Cursor.

  Ever since I started taking care of my LLM logs and memory, I had no issue switching model providers.

  • luckydata

    today at 8:28 AM

    Do you have some kind of tooling to automate the process? Would like to try it.

• zwnow

  today at 6:06 AM

  Who even wants all your previous conversations taken into account for everything you do? How do you grow from never forgetting anything, making mistakes, etc? This is highly dystopian and I sure hope this will forever just be a fantasy.

  • visarga

    today at 8:22 AM

    I have made 100MB of my own chat logs into a RAG memory and was surprised I didn't like using it much. Why? it floods the LLM with so much prior thinking that it loses the creative spark. I now realize the sweet spot is in the middle - don't recall everything, strategic disclosure to get the max out of AI. LLM memory should be like a sexy dress - not too long, not too short. You get the most creative outputs when you hide part of your prior thinking and let the mode infer it back.

    • zwnow

      today at 9:59 AM

      I am not an AI enthusiast but I get what you're saying. I occasionally use ChatGPT due to Google being enshittified pretty much. I often do not like the things it tells me and I for sure do not like it complimenting everything I do, but thats something other people seem to like... In my experience starting a fresh chat after a while of back and forth can really help, so I agree with you. Having little to zero prior context is actually the point of view one needs sometimes.

• paool

  today at 6:20 AM

  in order for that lifetime companion, we'll need to make a leap in agentic memory.

  how do you know memory won't be modular and avoid lock-in?

  I can easily see a decentralized solution where the user owns the memory, and AIs need permission to access your data, which can be revoked.

  • randomNumber7

    today at 6:44 AM

    I can easily see a world where users own the devices they buy and install the software they want, but the trend goes in the other direction.

  • ivape

    today at 7:12 AM

    in order for that lifetime companion, we'll need to make a leap in agentic memory.

    Well, let’s take your life. Your life is about 3 billion seconds (100 year life). That’s just 3 billion next-tokens. The thing you do on second N is just, as a whole, a next token. If next-token prediction can be scaled up such that we redefine a token from a part of language to an entire discrete event or action, then it won’t be hard for the model to just know what you will think and do … next. Memory in that case is just the next possible recall of a specific memory, or next possible action, and so on. It doesn’t actually need all the memory information, it just needs to know that that you will seek a specific memory next.

    Why would it need your entire database of memories if it already knows you will be looking for one exact memory next? The only thing that could explode the computational cost of this is if dynamic inputs fuck with your next token prediction. For example, you must now absolutely think about a Pink Elephant. But even that is constrained in our material world (still bounded physically, as the world can’t transfer that much information through your senses physically).

    A human life up to this exact moment is just a series of tokens, believe it or not. We know it for a fact because we’re bounded by time. The thing you just thought was an entire world snapshot that’s no longer here, just like an LLM output. We have not yet trained a model on human lives yet, just knowledge.

    We’re not done with the bitter lesson.

• diffeomorphism

  today at 6:14 AM

  Basic questions: what does a GDPR request get you? Wouldn't providers like you to switch to them?

  Just look at the smartphone market.

• lelanthran

  today at 6:03 AM

  > Once those limits fall away and all of your previous conversations are made part of the context I suspect the game will change considerably, as will the players.

  I dunno if this is possible; sounds like an informally specified ad-hoc statement of the halting problem.

AWS specifically have really dropped the ball on this.

I interact regularly with AWS to support our needs in MLOps and to some extent GenAI. 3 of the experts we talked to have all left for competitors in the last year.

re:Invent London this year presented nothing new of note on the GenAI front. The year before was full of promise on Bedrock.

Outside of AWS, I still can’t fathom how they haven’t integrated an AI assistant into Alexa yet either

• jackwilsdon

  yesterday at 7:18 PM

  There's Alexa+ [0] which uses generative AI but it's planned to be a paid option at $20/mo.

  [0]: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/devices/new-alexa-generativ...

  • spanishgum

    yesterday at 7:32 PM

    > Alexa+ costs $19.99 per month, but all Amazon Prime members will get it for free.

    I'm curious if non prime members make up a big market for Alexa. I rarely use my smart devices for anything beyond lights, music, and occasional Q&A, and certainly can't see myself paying 20$/month for it.

    • vitus

      yesterday at 7:34 PM

      I'm curious why anyone would pay $19.99/month for Alexa+ rather than just buy a Prime membership (which is $14.99/month).

      Unless of course this is going to be met with a price hike for Prime...

      • wccrawford

        yesterday at 7:51 PM

        That's what happened with Prime TV, and I absolutely expect it for the AI, too. And it might finally mean I cancel my Prime membership.

        • x2tyfi

          yesterday at 8:02 PM

          Amazon Prime’s price hikes have a predictable cadence: * 2014: $79 to $99

          * 2018: $99 to $119

          * 2022: $119 to $139

          We should expect a price hike from $139 to $159 in 2026, assuming the trend continues.

          • echelon

            yesterday at 8:57 PM

            Meanwhile, Google Fiber has been the same price for 15 years. At least according to the billboard outside my window.

            • ls612

              yesterday at 9:20 PM

              It works out for them because bandwidth gets cheaper over time but inflation eats away at that. $70 today is like $50 back in 2010 when GFiber first launched.

    • wenc

      yesterday at 8:55 PM

      If ChatGPT's Advanced Voice Mode could be served through an always-on device like Alexa, I'd pay for it.

      Hmmm... maybe I can install do this through a cheap tablet....

      • janalsncm

        today at 4:41 AM

        Model sizes have come down enough that it will be possible to run smart home control and simple Q&A entirely locally.

      • shaklee3

        today at 4:40 AM

        you can do this with home assistant already

  • serial_dev

    yesterday at 7:22 PM

    Alexa consistently fails with the simplest of questions.

    Only thing it can do is set a timer, turn off a light and play music.

    It is still nice, but it’s so frustrating when a question pops into my mind, and I accidentally ask Alexa just to get reminded yet again how useless it is for everything but the most basic tasks.

    And no, I won’t pay 240 dollars a year so that I can get a proper response to my random questions that I realistically have only about once a week.

    • WaltPurvis

      yesterday at 10:04 PM

      > Only thing it can do is set a timer, turn off a light

      And it can't even do that without an Internet connection. As someone who experiences annoyingly frequent outages, it never ceases to boggle my mind that I have a $200 computer, with an 8" monitor and everything, that can't even understand "set a timer for 10 minutes" on its own.

    • seviu

      yesterday at 7:31 PM

      and despite all this, I would pay 240$ a year so that Siri can reliably do what Alexa does today

      oh the irony

    • ghaff

      yesterday at 9:25 PM

      Alexa has pretty much zero value for me.

      Being able to just order something with zero shipping has a ton of value. I could drive down the street but it would still be an hour at the end of the day.

      Video streaming has some value but there are a lot of options.

    • bboygravity

      yesterday at 7:27 PM

      Just pay 0 USD and use Grok app for free?

      By far the best thing currently available.

      • echelon

        yesterday at 8:50 PM

        I'm predicting that Grok fails simply due to half (?) the software engineering populating not wanting to use anything Musk has developed.

        Grok has to be more than n-times (2x?) as good as anything else on the market to attain any sort of lead. Falling short of that, people will simply choose alternatives out of brand preference.

        This might be the first case of a company having difficulty selling its product, even if it's a superior product, due to its leader being disliked. I'm not aware of any other instances of this.

        Maybe if Musk switches to selling B2B and to the US government...

        If you piss off half of your possible user base, adoption becomes incredibly difficult. This is why tech and business leaders should stay out of politics.

        • lelanthran

          today at 8:36 AM

          > I'm predicting that Grok fails simply due to half (?) the software engineering populating not wanting to use anything Musk has developed.

          I think that's a wildly optimistic figure on your part.

          Lets assume that developers are split almost 50/50 on politics.

          Of that 50% that follows the politics you approve off, lets err on the side of your argument and assume that 50% of those actually care enough to change their purchases because of it.

          Of the 25% we have left, lets once again err on the side of your argument and assume 50% care enough about the politics to disregard any technology superiority in favour of sticking to their political leanings.

          Of the 12.5% left, how many do you think are going to say "well, let me get beaten by my competitors because I am taking a stand!", especially when the "beaten" means a comparative drop in income?

          After all, after nazi-salute, mecha-hitler, etc blew up, by just how much did the demand for Teslas fall?

          The fraction of the population that cares enough about these (on both sides) things are, thankfully, single-digit percentages. Maybe even less.

        • rs186

          today at 3:44 AM

          Yeah, a simple example is to just look at how many companies/universities have ChatGPT vs Grok subscriptions internally. I can imagine that many people would have a problem with subscribing to Grok, even if its performance is comparable.

        • redditor98654

          today at 2:40 AM

          Hmmm, thinking aloud, Oracle?

        • qcnguy

          today at 10:27 AM

          > This is why tech and business leaders should stay out of politics.

          Yeah but they don't stay out of politics, do they? Gemini painting black Nazis was a deliberate choice to troll the vast majority of the population who isn't woke extremists.

          My family subscribes to Grok and it's because of politics, not in spite of it. The answer gap isn't large today but I support Musk's goal of building a truth seeking AI, and he is right about a lot of things in politics too. Grok might well fail financially, the current AI market is too competitive and the world probably doesn't need so many LLM companies. But it's good someone wants AI to say what's true and not merely what's popular in its training set.

        • transcriptase

          yesterday at 9:50 PM

          [flagged]

          • bee_rider

            yesterday at 11:20 PM

            I think their point was that becoming very involved in politics in a way that alienates half of the population has tarnished Musk’s brand (although, I’d personally adjust that down to more like 1/3). If the point of your whataboutism is that previously it alienated the other 1/3… that doesn’t seem to improve their odds, right?

            If anything they’ve now pissed off 2/3 of the population at some point or another.

          • felixgallo

            yesterday at 10:15 PM

            None of that actually happened.

            • inquirerGeneral

              today at 1:27 AM

              Literally documented proof.

      • kentm

        yesterday at 9:54 PM

        Mechahitler, the South African genocide debacle, explicitly checking Elons Twitter feed, “You get your news from infowars” system prompts, etc have basically made Grok not a real option for me. I do not want to use a product that is specifically being engineered to be a right wing disinformation machine.

        And no, generic brand safety mishaps are not the same; everyone is not doing this.

  • israrkhan

    yesterday at 11:19 PM

    I enabled Alexa+ few days ago on my devices. Everyone in our home immediately disliked the new Alexa. There were some fairly basic things that Alexa+ cannot do, and Alexa was able to do. Some fairly simple question/answering tasks, and questoins about status of an order.

  • HuwFulcher

    yesterday at 7:21 PM

    Yes have seen about that. It’s crazy to me that they still haven’t released it. Really think it could save a dying product

  • yesterday at 8:54 PM

  • iLoveOncall

    yesterday at 7:29 PM

    It will be free if you have a Prime subscription (which means nobody will ever pay for it given Prime is cheaper and you get much more included).

    But the project is pretty much dead, it was supposed to launch in February or March and is still not anywhere close to being out.

• Jordan-117

  yesterday at 10:10 PM

  They basically have with Alexa+. It's slightly more limited than ChatGPT, but it sounds much more realistic than stock Alexa and blows it out of the water in terms of smarts. The old model was basically a Siri-like "set timers and check the weather with specific commands," plus some hit-or-miss skills you had to install separately. But the new one gives much more of a sense of understanding your question and can carry on conversations with contextual responses. I've been pretty impressed with it, and the nature of the Echo device makes it much easier to query at will than having to open the ChatGPT app and switch to voice mode.

  • chihuahua

    today at 1:20 AM

    I agree. I think the Echo devices are good for certain kinds of voice-driven LLM experience. Although it's not that useful for detailed responses and serious questions, since you can't go back and read its response again.

• el_benhameen

  yesterday at 9:39 PM

  Having briefly interacted with AWS Q out of curiosity, I can see why they haven’t pushed much out publicly. Aside from giving someone a chuckle when they decided to call its suggestions “Q Tips”, it’s functionally useless.

• kotaKat

  yesterday at 7:18 PM

  They all but abandoned Astro, their home robot. My suspicion (and information I've heard internally) all but points at them only using Astro as a testbed for self-navigating warehouse robotics, and now that they got what they wanted out of it, the Vesta team basically got thrown to the wolves.

  • newsclues

    yesterday at 8:41 PM

    They bought a company that did warehouse robots called kiva before that

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Robotics

• bee_rider

  yesterday at 11:41 PM

  Lingo question: is MLOps like devops for ML, or like flops for ML? I wonder because… actually, either case seems like somewhere Amazon might be losing experts to hot startups.

  • HuwFulcher

    today at 6:22 AM

    As the other response said. It’s DevOps for ML. They have Amazon SageMaker which is the managed ML/MLOps offering that we use extensively because we’re a small team. The documentation is awful

  • snoman

    today at 3:49 AM

    The former. Basically: build, train, test, deploy, monitor, repeat for ML algos.

• mv4

  yesterday at 7:19 PM

  Isn't "Alexa+" doing this? (I have not signed up)

• liquidpele

  yesterday at 7:35 PM

  Didnt they basically can most of Alexa a few years ago? I think they realized asking a device questions doesn’t generate profit.

  • redditor98654

    today at 2:44 AM

    They thought Alexa will enable users to buy more from Amazon just by voice. But most users turned out like me. I would not spend a single dollar on Amazon without actually seeing the item on my mobile or desktop. I wouldn’t even add to cart via Alexa. That’s not an ideal user for device and service that requires hundreds of millions to run.

    • ghaff

      today at 12:29 PM

      You saw this with Amazon Dash buttons too. This idea that users would just go "Hey order me some more Tide" and Amazon would just do the right thing at the right price like some sort of intelligent personal assistant. Which it by no means is.

• 42lux

  yesterday at 8:32 PM

  They still have no serverless inference.

  • zmmmmm

    today at 6:41 AM

    Bedrock is not usable for that?

    • 42lux

      today at 7:43 AM

      Not for custom models.

AWS has always ridden other products (Postgres, MS-SQL, Redis, etc) that are open source or has negotiated licenses (Windows, MS-SQL, Oracle RDBMS) that are bundled in the end-user price per hour/GB/whatever.

AWS has Bedrock to use various AI providers and has bundled the licensing into the price, so they are getting the users without having to develop the actual AI.

They provide the compute, networking etc, and they provide the users to the AI vendors.

Why would they need to develop their own?

Web archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20250901163205/https://www.busin...

Amazon is one of the few companies that could benefit the most. Here's an exchange I had with one of their "human" support people:

"Search is broken. If I search for wwvb watch, I get shown tons of watches which are definitely NOT WWVB."

"What browser are you using? Could you try Chrome?"

I do not see it as a master strategy. It is just something that happened. Similar to having no plan of having million fakeish Chinese brand selling crap on Amazon.com. But ones they are there then Sure, why not . May be in few year a lot of crashed and burned AI talent will be looking for boring corporate IT/AI job and Amazon will be around to offer that. And if does not happen there will still be ton of other work to do for Amazon.

• sampton

  today at 3:18 AM

  I don't that's true. Amazon sells infrastructure to other AI companies. If they jump into the model race they become a competitor not an infrastructure provider.

  • ciberado

    today at 6:20 AM

    Amazon always competes with everybody. Clients, partners... Everybody.

    My intuition is that the root cause it's their frugal culture (frugal as in cheap). They don't want to start a compensation race.

Amazon seems to be taking the "When Everybody Is Digging for Gold, It’s Good To Be in the Pick and Shovel Business" approach here.

Don't need to train the models to make money hosting them.

• frollogaston

  yesterday at 10:25 PM

  There's also dogfooding though

I like how the author threw this in as (nearly) the last sentence:

Of course, the AI talent war may end up being an expensive and misguided strategy, stoked by hype and investor over-exuberance.

Isnt amazon basically Anthropic's HW partner very much like OpenAI has microsoft ?

• NewJazz

  yesterday at 10:11 PM

  Not only that, I understand they are an investor.

I don't know who needs to hear this but, you can be a big tech company and not compete for every single market the other big tech companies are going for.

• ants_everywhere

  today at 12:03 AM

  but in practice the firms that missed major technological advances like the internet or mobile did not fare well.

  • postexitus

    today at 12:24 PM

    apple missed the internet amazon missed the mobile

    at that given point in time, this was not their main businesses and they fared quite well.

    microsoft missing the mobile is different, because mobile being a competitor to desktop destroyed microsoft's main business.

  • lelanthran

    today at 9:58 AM

    > but in practice the firms that missed major technological advances like the internet or mobile did not fare well.

    *Microsoft enters the conversation

    • ants_everywhere

      today at 11:46 AM

      https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-is-still-paying-for-...

      https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/24/23930478/microsoft-ceo-s...

      • lelanthran

        today at 11:54 AM

        Right, but the firm "Microsoft" is still faring well in spite of missing out on both the major technological leaps at the time.

        • ants_everywhere

          today at 12:11 PM

          You have to be joking about them missing the internet?

          They became nearly irrelevant because of mobile and had to claw their way back. That is not faring well.

          They eventually made it out and survived because of cloud and gaming, but it took what many people consider a major transformation of the company.

          Don't let your personal bias about AI cloud the way you see the world.

  • today at 5:40 AM

The back-loaded vesting schedule is such blatantly cynical bullshit. It shows that they're planning to overwork you, push you to wash out, and undercompensate you for the experience, which is exactly what I've seen happen to a good number of friends. Amazon has become notorious here in Seattle - everyone knows they're a burnout factory. Some people make it through, and they make good money, but you have to really care about money for that to be worth the effort.

I had an Amazon interview loop on the calendar during my recent job search, a couple of months back, but it was difficult to get excited; they think so very highly of themselves, for what they're offering - and I don't just mean the money, but the culture too. They treat you like an interchangeable wage slave, not like a respected professional; it's all hoops to jump through, and procedures to memorize - dance, monkey, dance!

The recruiter was shocked when I cancelled the rest of the interviews, like, aren't you even going to give us a chance? But no: I had received a good offer from an ambitious, well-organized, well-funded AI startup which was excited to have me on board. With that on the table, why would I put up with Amazon? They won't offer better pay, they can't offer a better culture, and they don't have more interesting problems to work on.

• JCM9

  today at 11:41 AM

  They got away with this attitude in the earlier days but it’s really hurting them now. A good chunk of the best talent out there won’t even consider Amazon. Culturally it’s very hard to turn that around now and catch up.

  90% of the folks there that I know that were good have left for elsewhere. Of the ones that didn’t most are on H1Bs and basically have no choice but to stay and deal with the toxic environment.

• throwboy2047

  yesterday at 8:53 PM

  The problem with working at places where you care that much about money is having to work with people who only care about money.

  • andy99

    yesterday at 10:02 PM

    This is a serious challenge in relation to hiring also. If you want to pay for good talent, and so are prepared to pay good money, how do you avoid people who are there for the money.

• pawelos

  yesterday at 8:09 PM

  > The back-loaded vesting schedule is such blatantly cynical bullshit;

  I don’t understand the complains about it. Amazon pays monthly cash ”sign-on bonus” in the first two years, which is ~ equal to the stock that you get in the years three and four (counting at the grant price). Is this fact not advertized well enough?

  • marssaxman

    yesterday at 8:14 PM

    The "sign-on bonus" comes with serious strings attached. A good friend of mine got royally screwed when he mistook that bonus for real money, then got pushed to the point of burnout and had to leave; Amazon demanded a lot of the money back, but he didn't have it anymore.

    • stormbeard

      yesterday at 8:56 PM

      I worked at Amazon in 2021 and rage-quit after 9 months. The sign-on bonus I received was paid out monthly, so I didn't have to pay anything back. If it's large enough, they pay it monthly because they know it's very likely you won't make it to the 2nd year.

      • marssaxman

        yesterday at 8:59 PM

        Glad they've fixed that.

        (Still, though - why work for people who know they're going to treat you so badly you'll probably have to quit?)

        • scarface_74

          yesterday at 9:50 PM

          Well for me, I was already 46 when a recruiter from Amazon Retail reached out to me about an SDE (software development) position at Amazon Retail. They said it would require relocation after COVID (this was April 2020). I knew about Amazon’s reputation from both stories and my best friend who had worked as an L6 in the finance department.

          There was no way in hell I was going to sell my house and uproot my life to work for Amazon. Then the recruiter after she kept talking suggests I interview for a “permanently remote” [1] “field by design” role at AWS ProServe. I thought sure why not?

          The plan was always to make some money - I made over a quarter million more over 3.5 years than I could have made as an enterprise dev working in Atlanta - put AWS on my resume, gain some industry contacts and move on in four years.

          I saw the writing on the wall shortly before my 3 year anniversary. I played the game well enough to get past my next vesting period and get my “bust your ass and try to work through your PIP or receive a $40K+ severance and ‘leave immediately’”.

          I didn’t hesitate. I took the severance and already had two job offers lined up and had been waiting on the severance offer.

          [1] They forced their “field by design” customer facing roles in the office at the end of last year. I would have left anyway before I ever went back into the office.

        • ghaff

          yesterday at 9:48 PM

          Amazon doesn't seem to work out for a lot of people. I've tended to have long term jobs and probably wouldn't have been tempted to give them a shot.

    • pawelos

      yesterday at 8:16 PM

      Sign-on bonus is prorated and payed monthly, you definitely don’t need to pay back anything (source: I worked at Amazon).

      Maybe your friend talked about relocation bonus, which you need to pay back if you don’t work long enough.

      • marssaxman

        yesterday at 8:18 PM

        My friend is a native-born Seattleite, so no, it was definitely not a relocation bonus.

        Perhaps they recently changed their policies? I don't know, but it's not a risk I would want to take. Who would want to work for people who treated their coworkers like that?

        • pawelos

          yesterday at 8:33 PM

          Alright, I did some quick research and it seems that they do sometimes pay full first year of sign-on bonus, which you need to repay (prorated). I didn’t see that that during my time at Amazon.

          • pvtmert

            yesterday at 10:59 PM

            Ah, I just saw this, although I wrote a (much comprehensive) reply here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45097345

            The full payment that requires pro-rates is even worse. They expect you to pay it fully back. (ie. with the deducted taxes included!)

            I bet it is possible to profit from a such scheme if Amazon is able to declare that as a reversed-transaction (similar to VAT-refunds) at the end of the fiscal year.

          • stormbeard

            yesterday at 8:55 PM

            IIRC they pay it out monthly if the bonus is large enough.

        • chihuahua

          today at 1:34 AM

          I worked there in 2013 and had the signing bonus paid monthly. I thought it was great since I could work there as long as I could tolerate it (10 months) and leave without regrets about having to pay back anything. Decent cash comp so I feel I got a good deal.

      • pvtmert

        yesterday at 10:56 PM

        I joined in 2022 from a different location, there were 2 kinds of comp in terms of bonues, each split into 2 other;

        1. Relocation package a. Lump-sum (7k EUR): You get certain amount of money, and you deal with your own move yourself. (Albeit with some reimbursement possible for the initial trips) b. "Other" (I don't remember the name): More supportive option, good if you have family & furniture to move. They essentially pay everything for you. c. Important: The 7k EUR was subject to the tax, hence I got taxed at 55% (EU) due to having no tax residency at the moment (obviously). Nobody ever mentions this. But the re-payment is with the tax-included, ie. you are expected to pay 7k back! 2. Sign-on bonus: This splits into 2-year period a. 1st year: 50% of the total bonus, transferred to your bank account on your first work day. b. 2nd year: Each month, you get 1/12 of the remaining 50%, essentially something like ~4.18% each month on the second year. c. The 50%/50% ratio may depend on the team/role/location, I heard some of the L4s joined to the team got split of 40%/60% (ie less in the first year) for reasons unbeknownst to me.

        Conditions are pretty simple, if you leave (for any reason), you must repay monthly-pro-rated amount that you haven't worked given the total period is 24-months. ie. In Luxembourg, probation is 6-months. (Until) at the end of the probation, Amazon can just fire you for no reason. In this case, since the 2nd year sign-on hasn't vested yet, nothing to pay from that, but you must pay 1/4th of your "relocation expenses" and full half of (ie untaxed full amount divided by 2) sign-on bonus you receive on your first day. (ie. 25% of the total sign-on bonus)

        Firstly, I know someone (a Greek national) who left Amazon during his 12th Month. Amazon demanded total of 4k+ euros from the guy, citing he hasn't finished his 12th month, hence the first half of his relocation bonus plus the 1-month of pro-rated sign-on bonus, before tax. As far as I know, it was more or less equivalent to his monthly gross salary, and he paid in installments.

        Secondly, I heard someone joined from non-EU country in 2023, and essentially got laid off. But because she was in probation and obviously worker rights are much stricter in EU, Amazon just declared her as a probation-failed case instead of layoff. (She also got laid off within last 2 weeks of her 6-months long probation). Since she only got the residence permit recently, not having more than a few months (when unemployed as a 3rd-country national), plus Amazon demanded money to be paid back. As far as I know she contacted an labour lawyer and they basically advised her to go back and not to pay anything back as it becomes an international matter. And the costs/fees for such is much higher than what would Amazon get it back, hence she did what was suggested. Although it obviously burns the bridges but in this case, Amazon started the fire first...

        ---

        As a result, the practices applied here falls no short of what you can hear from the news. As the company has no heart or soul, people are just numbers in a balance-sheet...

    • scarface_74

      yesterday at 9:33 PM

      Amazon does not demand your pro rated cash sign on bonus back that you get every pay period for the first two years.

      Source: I worked at AWS from 2020-2023.

      • marssaxman

        yesterday at 9:36 PM

        Glad to hear they fixed this broken policy.

• sophia01

  yesterday at 10:34 PM

  > The back-loaded vesting schedule is such blatantly cynical bullshit.

  I don't understand this. A friend was recently offered an insane pay package from Amazon (compared to another big-tech). The way I saw it, the Amazon pay package was more attractive than the alternative because of the back-loaded vesting schedule.

  Basically they pay you out in cash for the first two years, then after that you have an option to keep working there. If the stock price goes down in the first two years, you got your guaranteed cash -- no risk (and it would be a good time to interview again). If the stock price goes up, you now have basically an option on extra exposure in the form of staying longer with highly valued RSUs, and now getting some high proportion of your pay in RSUs.

  It just seems straight up better? If you want the stock instead of fungible cash, just buy it on the open market?

• scarface_74

  yesterday at 9:32 PM

  This is an uninformed take. Yes the RSU is backloaded. But during the first two years, you get a large monthly cash sign up bonuses so that assuming the stock stays flat, over the four years, your total comp stays flat. If the stock increases your comp goes up.

  I spoke to someone who is there now and when you get your yearly review, now you can choose between mostly cash vs mostly stock for your raise and most people choose mostly cash.

  I make the same now as I did when I was at AWS and I much prefer my all cash comp over my less cash + RSUs when I was there.

  • snoman

    today at 4:04 AM

    RSU grants assume a growth rate (15%? I forget) so if they stay flat, go down, or grow slower than the baked-in growth rate, then you make less each year. If you do well enough, they’ll give you some RSUs to “make you whole” (as they used to say) but that doesn’t really happen anymore (or not much).

    • scarface_74

      today at 7:43 AM

      This is not true for your initial four year grant. I’m going to make up a number to make the math easy. Say my total compensation target was $200K. My initial 4 year offer was structured based on the then current stock price.

      It would have been what ever it takes where base + prorated signing bonus + RSUs would equal $200K taking into account the 5/15/40/40 RSU schedule.

I am reminded of the Uncomfortable Amazon Truths ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20980025 ) by Corey Quinn.

While they're protected now, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20980557 quotes the one I recall...

      - Nobody has figured out how to make money from AI/ML other than by selling you a pile of compute and storage for your AI/ML misadventures.

• chillee

  today at 12:45 AM

  Clearly not true anymore given OpenAI and Anthropic's revenue growth.

  • shagie

    today at 1:19 AM

    Revenue... yes. Profit is still an open question.

    https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/08/chatgpt-gpt-5-openai-altman-...

    > Last year, OpenAI expected about $5 billion in losses on $3.7 billion in revenue. OpenAI’s annual recurring revenue is now on track to pass $20 billion this year, but the company is still losing money.

    > “As long as we’re on this very distinct curve of the model getting better and better, I think the rational thing to do is to just be willing to run the loss for quite a while,” Altman told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” in an interview Friday following the release of GPT-5.

    Selling compute for less than it cost you will have as much revenue as you want to pay for.

    • soared

      today at 2:42 AM

      Anthropic founder described it as: if each model were a company, they be hugely profitable. It looks bad since when the model you trained in 2024 is generating net positive revenue, you’re also training a more expensive model for 2025 that won’t generate revenue until then. So currently, they’re always burning more cash than they’re bringing in, under the expectation that every model will increase revenue even more. Who knows how long that lasts, but it’s working so far.

      Paraphrase is from the podcast he was in with the stripe founder, cheeky pints I think

    • chillee

      today at 2:32 AM

      Their gross profits are very high even though they're not making operating profit.

    • jquery

      today at 2:35 AM

      >Revenue... yes. Profit is still an open question.

      could have said the same thing about most FAANG companies at one point or another.

      • jcranmer

        today at 4:43 AM

        If I have the numbers right, OpenAI will burn more money this year alone than all of those prior companies did in their entire profitless phase of existence.

Sounds like a winning strategy and a money saver to boot.

• pm90

  yesterday at 8:04 PM

  Exactly! Just build capacity, let other companies duke it out; ultimately they will all likely use AWS for their products anyway.

If you are a top AI researcher, there is no good reason to go to Amazon. For what? Pay? Career development? Company prospect? Work-life balance? You get nothing compared to what other companies offer.

And I say, good. We need new, smaller companies with different cultures in this space. We don't want these giant corporations to dominate and control everything.

• bdangubic

  yesterday at 7:31 PM

  > We need new, smaller companies with different cultures in this space

  we need new, smaller companies with different cultures in every space but won’t be getting any in any space, especially not in this one

  • jonny_eh

    yesterday at 10:36 PM

    AI is full of new and smaller companies. Both OpenAI and Anthropic are quite new, but growing fast.

    • bdangubic

      today at 12:04 AM

      Sam Altman et al are only “quite new” to my friend’s newborn son :)

    • __loam

      yesterday at 11:07 PM

      OpenAI and Anthropic are practically subsidiaries of Microsoft and Amazon. Neither would exist without billions in cloud compute credits from their corporate benefactors. Competing in Generative AI requires the kind of resources that are only available to extremely large and established companies. I do not think all the wrapper companies count when most of them are either being bought out by the big guys or have products that are immediately outmoded in the span of months. Maybe you can make the argument for AI art companies, but Stability basically disintegrated after wasting $100m dollars and Mid journey is directly competing with Google and Meta which is not where I would want to be (aside from running a ghoulishly evil company trying to kill artistic expression).

    • israrkhan

      yesterday at 10:48 PM

      new ok.. but smaller? that is not true.

      • michaelt

        yesterday at 11:13 PM

        According to Wikipedia, Google has 187,103 employees, Amazon has 1,556,000, and OpenAI has a mere 3,000 employees.

        So essentially a lifestyle business - but some people do think they have growth potential.

        • alistairSH

          yesterday at 11:32 PM

          3000 employees is a lifestyle business? lol. That’s a new one.

        • israrkhan

          yesterday at 11:23 PM

          In terms of market cap OpenAI (500B valuation) is 5x smaller than Google.

          • malfist

            yesterday at 11:35 PM

            Leaving aside the pendatic "you can't be a multiple smaller than another object", 1/5 the valuation of the 5th most valuable company in the world is probably big enough to qualify you as a big company

          • not_kurt_godel

            yesterday at 11:47 PM

            > Leaving aside the pendatic "you can't be a multiple smaller than another object"

            Feel free to not leave this out, it's a pet peeve of mine. Thank you for the moment of catharsis.

            • capyba

              today at 1:23 AM

              Can you explain this to me? Trying to understand but can’t haha.

              • CoffeeOnWrite

                today at 1:46 AM

                Grandparent comment should have said "1/5th the size" instead of 5x smaller.

                • pests

                  today at 4:00 AM

                  Oddly we all knew what he meant. Huh.

              • not_kurt_godel

                today at 5:03 AM

                How small are you? How small are you multiplied by 5?

          • rpcope1

            today at 12:49 AM

            Market cap doesn't really feel like a good metric of anything other than what it would take to buy a company out. DuPont has a market cap of 30ish billion and 3M around 80B, and both are both larger and frankly more important than probably even Google.

            • hollerith

              today at 1:47 AM

              Yeah, the fact that $2.5 trillion of actual investor money chose Google (Alphabet) means very little: what really matters is the opinions of anonymous commenters on HN (especially opinions that start with "doesn't really feel like")

              People are so careful when writing anonymous HN comments and so careless in choosing where to invest their own money and the money of funds of which they are the professional manager

              • majormajor

                today at 2:25 AM

                > the fact that $2.5 trillion of actual investor money chose Google

                Of course, a lot of money invested in Google was invested at a much lower price; if everyone sold all at once you'd have a hard time finding 2.5T of new money to buy all those shares. We could argue about if "not selling" is the same as "choosing again at the new price" every day... but... Google's not the interesting case here anyway.

                For a young company in a hot industry like OpenAI total market cap is even less relevant since so much of the company simply isn't liquid anyway and the numbers come from far fewer instances of purchases than for an established public one.

                • hollerith

                  today at 2:34 AM

                  Yes, OpenAI's not being publicly traded makes it harder to value it, but the comment to which I replied referenced 3 publicly-traded companies.

              • Jensson

                today at 2:04 AM

                That is a bet and not a metric of company size. Some people bet a lot on small companies, doesn't make them large.

                • hollerith

                  today at 2:40 AM

                  Investors look at how much money is already invested in a company in deciding whether to invest. I.e., investors pay close attention to market cap.

                  If Google's market cap were $25 trillion, practically nobody would buy Google stock (and practically everyone who already held the stock would immediately sell) because most investors do not believe that Google can ever pay enough dividends or buy back enough stock to justify such a high valuation.

                  A company's market cap is a collective estimate of how much money the company will to return to investors in the future. When the company is publicly-traded in an open informational regime such as the US, this collective estimate is usually quite "accurate" in the sense that it is very difficult for any single analyst or single team of analysts to improve on the estimate.

                  An investor can make a big bet on a small company, yes, but the market cap of a company is more than just an indication of how much money has been bet on the company: it also mean that every investor (big or small) who still holds the stock believes that the expected amount of money that company will return to shareholders exceeds the market cap: if there were a holder of Google stock that did not believe that, he would convert the shares into treasury bills or cash in the bank.

      • umeshunni

        yesterday at 11:04 PM

        Both those companies are 2 orders of magnitude smaller than Amazon or Google.

        • israrkhan

          yesterday at 11:24 PM

          By what metric? I meant valuation.

          OpenAI has 500B valuation, Anthropic has more than 60B.

          • umeshunni

            today at 7:18 AM

            Private market valuations and public market caps shouldn't be compared. Compare revenue or employee count instead.

• screye

  today at 12:31 AM

  Amazon and Apple have never had fundamental research groups. Even before LLMs, the top big-tech fundamental labs were FAIR, Google Research and MSR.

  It has never been in Amazon or Apple's DNA to chase a product that doesn't have clear revenue outcomes (as long as adoption lands). AI is no different.

  IMO, it's the right decision for Amazon and wrong decision for Apple.

  • DrewADesign

    today at 1:31 AM

    They got burned by over-promising Apple Intelligence and then embarking on a so-far failed, rudderless journey to land features regular people actually gave a shit about. I’m no expert, but I reckon the exact right move is concentrating on their actual deliverable products and features and letting everyone else blow their cash on a maybe months-long moat for dubiously useful advances in categories most of their customers wish everyone would stop talking about.

    • chrisweekly

      today at 1:55 AM

      yeah what IS the deal w/ Apple Intelligence falling off the world?

      • DrewADesign

        today at 2:05 AM

        Beats me. My best guess is they let the hype blind them to the reality that this tech wasn’t merely a few months away from the production-level reliability they needed from it. After a while, it sank in that they couldn’t play this up as a ‘just around the corner’ release and stopped hyping up every useless beta-at-best feature like it was a huge deal. Then, when the “we’re nowhere close” internal communique was leaked, it was officially time to bow out of the hype cycle for a while.

      • lotsofpulp

        today at 2:41 AM

        First, I’d like to know what is the deal with Siri not being able to tell me the date without a network connection.

      • nightsd01

        today at 2:56 AM

        Apple’s biggest problem is their commitment to privacy. Delivering effective AI requires a substantial amount of user data that Apple doesn’t collect.

        Their other problem is they value designers and product managers more than engineers (especially top tier AI engineers).

        Both problems are basically the death knell of any hope for Apple to have good AI, but combined? It’s never gonna happen. Which is sad because Apple’s on-device hardware is quite good.

  • stingraycharles

    today at 12:40 AM

    Didn’t Amazon invest a total of $8 billion in Anthropic? Seems like a much better choice than trying to do things in-house.

    Apple, on the other hand, hasn’t even invested in any of the players.

    • rossdavidh

      today at 2:13 AM

      Was it an investment of actual dollars, or "just" cloud compute credits? Microsoft's investment in OpenAI was over 90% Azure credits, we're told. Which raises the possibility that the whole business is mostly about making your cloud compute business look better than it really is...

    • DSingularity

      today at 1:22 AM

      That’s an investment that’s going to be a write off.

  • bionhoward

    today at 1:33 AM

    What about Amazon’s work in formal verification research and Apple’s machine learning research?

    [1] https://www.amazon.science/tag/formal-verification

    [2] https://machinelearning.apple.com/research

• prmph

  yesterday at 9:47 PM

  This. It's weird how most of the top tech companies are all morphing into amorphous blobs that want to get into everything and are indistinguishable from each other.

  • patrickthebold

    yesterday at 11:22 PM

    One thought I had recently: Their shareholders are probably mostly the same people. So why even compete?

    • treyd

      today at 1:49 AM

      Because that's all they know how to do.

    • dullcrisp

      today at 1:35 AM

      Don’t give the FTC any ideas.

    • vel0city

      today at 2:43 AM

      Aren't every big publicly traded companies shareholders pretty much the same large index fund managers?

  • tonyedgecombe

    today at 6:46 AM

    I don't know, there doesn't seem to be much overlap to me. Apple is a hardware business, Microsoft is software, Google is search, Facebook is social media, Amazon is distribution and compute. They do have their fingers in each other's pies but not to a large extent.

  • epolanski

    yesterday at 10:04 PM

    Stakeholders expect (and price assets for) endless growth.

    • gxs

      today at 12:48 AM

      This is the unfortunate answer to a lot about why companies do

      We are all addicted to growth - everyone is chasing the hockey stick curve which means a business that provides a stable business and grows modestly is seen as a failure in some parts

  • raincole

    today at 12:00 AM

    Which is a godsend for the users. Can you imagine a world where there is only one big cloud provide, say AWS, and all the big companies with the infra just sit out? Can you imagine how expensive AWS would be and how much power it has over the users?

  • Izikiel43

    yesterday at 9:54 PM

    Isn’t this something like how everything ends up evolving into a crab?

    • dragontamer

      today at 12:11 AM

      Nit: Trees/Grass are even more of this than Crabs.

      The two strategies for plants are to grow super tall to absorb the sun, or super wide (and small) to.... absorb the sun.

      Tall needs wood or other 'strong' polymer to support height. Short and wide is perhaps weak from an individual level but far more efficient.

      And trees and grass respectively have such genetic diversity that it's clear that none of these damn plants are of the same genetic line.

    • makeitdouble

      yesterday at 11:09 PM

      There's no point in discussing a meme, but carcinisation doesn't occur in that wide of a range, and of course the reverse phenomenon (decarcinisation) is also observed.

      It's a fun image, but just as Facebook isn't becoming Apple, and Amazon won't become OpenAI, evolution phenomenons are more complex than "everything becomes X"

    • lazide

      yesterday at 9:58 PM

      Carcinisation [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation], yeah.

      Or ‘why every large public company tends to suck the same ways in the US eventually’

      • nsriv

        yesterday at 10:24 PM

        In the US it seems like every company eventually turns into a bank.

        • Spooky23

          yesterday at 11:43 PM

          My father in law was an IRS Revenue Agent. His quip was that about 20-30% of the civilian economy has tax avoidance as a primary business objective. Real estate is probably the greatest example.

          Since financial engineering is in many ways more essential than the actual business. His best example was a chain hotel. In the majority of cases, a typical hotel is a tax vehicle that happens to rent rooms. So no wonder everything becomes a bank. :)

          • lotsofpulp

            today at 2:52 AM

            A typical chain hotel (by which I assume you mean a Marriott/Hyatt/Hilton/IHG/Choice/etc brand) is a franchised “small” business.

            The franchisee typically pays 10% to 20% royalty to the franchisor (the aforementioned companies). Otherwise, they rent hotel rooms and pay staff to clean them and rent them again.

            What is the tax play? That the hotel owner can 1031 into bigger and better hotels? Anyone who owns real estate can do that.

            • lazide

              today at 12:00 PM

              Well, one could argue the entire setup is a means of structuring investments and organizing/attracting Capital eh?

              Hotel owner (aka franchisee) puts in capital in a specific way under license, gets help operating it, in exchange for the 10-20% licensing fee paid back to the main corporation.

              In many cases, the owner/operator is nearly turnkey, and it’s an effective way of setting up a defacto managed business investment, almost like a LP. Many of the franchised hotels are actually owned/operated by LPs setup for the purpose.

              Also in many of these cases, the franchiser provides contacts for financing, may directly facilitate/recruit Capital, and may even provide loans to the franchisee directly.

              For most of these larger hotels, the actual act of renting out rooms, etc. is pretty much all automated/managed through the central system anyway, and the majority of the operating costs are structured in such a way as to minimize tax liability.

              Is it clearer now?

        • kelvinjps10

          yesterday at 11:29 PM

          This is kind of true I never thought about it until now

        • lotsofpulp

          today at 2:59 AM

          Can you give examples? I thought becoming a bank in the US is famously difficult and regulated, so much so that most businesses who can avoid it do so by partnering up with existing, tiny banks. See almost any “fintech” solution, from startups all the way up to Apple.

          As far as I understand, becoming a bank is inviting a ton of overhead with little profit potential.

          • pests

            today at 4:05 AM

            I don’t think they meant a literal bank, but finance games become a bigger part of their core strategy. For example, AirBnB for a while made a majority of its profits by investing the money guests paid during the gap between booking and actual stay (paying the host).

            • lazide

              today at 12:06 PM

              Correct - at some point, the enterprise revolves around either finding better return on excess Capital they have, or finding additional Capital.

              Which is the core premise of a bank, even if the business doesn’t say ‘Bank’ on the side of the building.

            • beAbU

              today at 5:42 AM

              Tesla has huge crypto holdings.

      • miltonlost

        yesterday at 10:25 PM

        Also got to love the linguistic coincidence of Crabs and Cancer and how tech companies grow ever larger (monopolistic) to the detriment of their host (the greater economy/humanity)

        • jounker

          yesterday at 10:35 PM

          It’s not a linguistic coincidence. The disease is named after the animal.

          • bee_rider

            yesterday at 10:56 PM

            The coincidence is that all animals evolve in a crab-shaped direction (as the meme goes), and all tech companies evolve in a cancer-shaped direction.

            That these two “inevitable endpoint things” would happen to be linguistically closely related was unlikely.

        • Ygg2

          yesterday at 10:33 PM

          It's not a coincidence. Cancer means crab, because the earliest known physicians saw tumors and thought they looked like crabs.

  • lovich

    today at 1:45 AM

    They’re just turning into conglomerates.

    It was common in the post wwii era in America and its Asian allies like Korea with its chaebols and Japan with its somethings I can’t remember the name of. The Asian countries forms were normally based around a single family, we’ll need more time with the current US form to see if they are also dynastic

    • sehansen

      today at 9:06 AM

      The Japanese, family-owned, generally pre-WWII conglomerates were called zaibatsus. After WWII they were (nominally) dissolved and the now more loosely connected groups of companies are called keiretsus.

  • tehjoker

    yesterday at 10:09 PM

    They'll just buy the competition once it seems like it's at a good price. Capitalism leads to concentration.

    • BLKNSLVR

      yesterday at 11:54 PM

      Power accretes.

  • taneq

    yesterday at 9:57 PM

    That’s what happens when you print trillions of dollars. Suddenly investors have too much Monopoly money and they want to spend it on something, anything, that might not make as much of a loss as holding cash during the subsequent inflation.

• maxdo

  yesterday at 10:10 PM

  Yeah, they will come, new companies from China, that will eat the market too, with their beautiful 996 work life balance, and we will go back to growing corn.

  As a bonus you will have a very long vacation.

  We, the tech, are literally a leftover of the once overwhelming engineering superiority of the west that will shrink in the next 5 years.

• thinkingtoilet

  yesterday at 7:30 PM

  The problem is that when you start that smaller company and it gets successful, you will be acquired. Big companies rarely build things anymore.

  • worldsayshi

    yesterday at 7:42 PM

    It makes some sense to sell out if you're building a product that will at best acquire a tiny sliver of the market, which almost all companies will. But there's at least a few AI companies, like Anthropic, that could potentially balloon towards becoming a Big Tech company. So it makes sense for them to not sell out for the time being.

    • newsclues

      yesterday at 8:33 PM

      Sell out, or get big enough to buy out others.

      • bluGill

        yesterday at 10:06 PM

        You don'thave to - but that means setteling for a job that earns an okay income. Sell out for millions now - more that your lifetime earnings and use the time and money for - what you want

        • mattgreenrocks

          today at 12:42 AM

          I wonder what percentage of people in tech are working to cash out some way. 60%? More?

          I argue it is both understandable (autonomy is a healthy thing) and also damages the culture at large.

          • bluGill

            today at 11:36 AM

            Most by far are working for someone else. They get no stock option, or if they get them they are of minimal value. Their generally get a good 401k (us only) and so can retire well off but would not call themselves rich.

  • awesome_dude

    yesterday at 9:39 PM

    Just FTR - it's VERY rare for people to come up with more than one winning idea

    Once a company gets big off its grand idea, there's little to no chance of it having another big winner, so buying one is best (and its cheaper too, you know it's a good idea, and you don't have to spend so much R&D on it.

  • delfinom

    yesterday at 11:26 PM

    Big companies have never built anything new. It goes back decades. before tech companies, it was giants like GE who grew through acquisition after acquisition and eventually imploded from the incompetence blob (which takes a long time to accumulate the damage). The same will happen to the current big tech companies in a few decades.

    • yuliyp

      yesterday at 11:32 PM

      Sure they do. Amazon built AWS well after it was big. Apple built the iPhone. Microsoft built VS Code. just to name a few examples.

  • southernplaces7

    yesterday at 11:40 PM

    >you will be acquired.

    You say this as if it's a coercive given, when you could just as easily say.. Nope, and continue to see how you compete with some agility. It might fail, but most of the big tech companies currently acquiring smaller companies themselves started small with acquisition offers being rejected along the way. Sure, there's selection bias at work there, but there are also many cases of smaller to mid-size companies that also said no to acquisition and still managed to find their successful niche.

    Being acquired is not a given and neither is failure if you do compete in some way with the megacorps.

    I see nothing about the current tech landscape that at all distinguishes it from previous landscapes in which smaller companies succeeded AND rejected acquisition.

    • lovich

      today at 1:56 AM

      > You say this as if it's a coercive given, when you could just as easily say.. Nope, and continue to see how you compete with some agility.

      It’s the same framing as calling offering someone a higher salary as “poaching” like we’re property being stolen by one lord from another.

      Looking at you Steve Jobs and your anti poaching agreement

• daft_pink

  yesterday at 7:41 PM

  They sponsor your visa. That’s it.

  • sieabahlpark

    yesterday at 9:33 PM

    [dead]

• ants_everywhere

  yesterday at 10:48 PM

  Smaller companies will still be VC backed, which limits the variation you'll see in culture

• jstummbillig

  yesterday at 7:41 PM

  If that is how you feel, then the reason for why it currently is the way it is should not give you much comfort. It's not like Amazon can not decide to change things and throw more money at the issue from a different angle in the future.

• crystal_revenge

  today at 2:37 AM

  Even if you’re a mid-tier AI researcher… or even a hobbyist one, I can’t see a good reason to go to Amazon.

• SilverElfin

  yesterday at 8:49 PM

  Yep Amazon should be split up. No reason that AWS, Alexa, satellite internet, their online store, and groceries have to be one company.

  • gadflyinyoureye

    yesterday at 9:27 PM

    But is there grounds to say that as a conglomerate they pose a large harm to market health to merit a breakup? For example, few regulators want to break up Mondragon.

• awesome_dude

  yesterday at 9:37 PM

  The current SoA AI requires massive investment and CPU time (which isn't free)

  No matter who is funding that, they are going to be pushing hard for a return (ell, unless they like money going up in smoke)

• mountainriver

  yesterday at 9:36 PM

  AWS has now become one of the most hated tools, right next to Jenkins.

  Amazon is turning into a dinosaur like Cisco or IBM.

  • weego

    yesterday at 9:41 PM

    There's no value in Amazon burning money to 'compete' when there no clear endgame. Right now the competition seems to be who can burn a a hundred billion dollars the fastest.

    Once a use case and platform has stabilized, they'll provide it via AWS, at which poiny the SME market will eat it up.

    • bbarnett

      yesterday at 10:06 PM

      Not only that, but all the compute spent, and hardware bought, will be worthless in 5 years.

      Just the training. Training off of the internet! Filled with extremists, made up nuttery, biased bs, dogma, a large portion of the internet is stupids talking to stupids.

      Just look at all the gibberish scientific papers!

      If you want a hallucination prone dataset, just train on the Internet.

      Over the next few years, we'll see training on encyclopedias and other data sources from pre-Internet. And we'll see it done on increasingly cheaper hardware.

      This tiny branch of computer sciences is decades old, and hasn't even taken off yet. There's plenty of chance for new players.

      • wiredpancake

        yesterday at 10:18 PM

        How exactly do you foresee "pre-internet" data sources being the future of AI.

        We already train on these encyclopedias, we've trained models on massive percentages of entire published book content.

        None of this will be helpful either, it will be outdated and won't have modern findings, understandings. Nor will it help me diagnose a Windows Server 2019 and a DHCP issue or similar.

        • bbarnett

          yesterday at 11:12 PM

          We're certainly not going to get accurate data via the internet, that's for sure.

          Just taking a look at python. How often does the AI know it's python 2.7 vs 3? You may think all the headers say /usr/bin/python3, but they don't. And code snippets don't.

          How many coders have read something, then realised it wasn't applicable to their version of the language? My point is, we need to train with certainty, not with random gibberish off the net. We need curated data, to a degree, and even SO isn't curated enough.

          And of course, that's even with good data, just not categorized enough.

          So one way is to create realms of trust. Some data trusted more deeply, others less so. And we need more categorization of data, and yes, that reduces model complexity and therefore some capabilities.

          But we keep aiming for that complexity, without caring about where the data comes from.

          And this is where I think smaller companies will come in. The big boys are focusing in brute force. We need subtle.

          • ipaddr

            today at 2:36 AM

            New languages will emerge or at least versions of existing languages till come with codenames. What about Thunder python or uber python for the next release.

  • neilv

    yesterday at 10:49 PM

    I like AWS overall.

    (Though I'm pretty familiar with some of the concepts, I know some things to avoid (e.g., "push this button to set up a very expensive global enterprise scale observability platform of numerous complicated services, because you asked about a very simple turn-key syslog service"), and I'm expecting the occasional configuration headache (and, lately, configuration wizard bugs).)

    For a new startup, I'd use AWS for all serving and hosting purposes by default, iff you have someone who can avoid pitfalls, and handle problems.

    If you don't have such a technical person, maybe start off with managed Kubernetes service with high-level UI, at AWS or one of the other cloud providers, and try not to make too big a mess (which might slow you down, or take you down) before you can afford to hire specialists to make sure it keeps working for you.

  • caleblloyd

    yesterday at 9:54 PM

    I still like AWS all these years later. It’s trusted in the enterprise and you can empower people to do what they need to themselves with IAM. And it’s pretty reliable.

  • rswail

    today at 9:03 AM

    I don't think cloud computing is a hated "tool", it's effectively taken over running on-prem.

    It's the same as saying buying electricity from a network is worse than having your own generators.

  • anon7000

    yesterday at 9:51 PM

    Since when? It’s extremely popular

  • rpcope1

    today at 12:54 AM

    You say Jenkins is hated, but surely it's no more hated or worse than any other bigger player in the space like Teamcity or Bamboo.

  • SalmoShalazar

    yesterday at 11:13 PM

    This is a weird take. I don’t know any developers who hate AWS. It’s the dominant cloud provider for a reason.

  • mvdtnz

    yesterday at 9:51 PM

    > AWS has now become one of the most hated tools

    By whom? Certainly no one I work with. AWS has some sharp edges and frustrations but we couldn't do half of what we do without it.

  • zaphirplane

    yesterday at 11:10 PM

    > AWS has now become one of the most hated tools

    News to me

  • pandemic_region

    yesterday at 10:03 PM

    huh how did Jenkins all of a sudden get into this discussion? And why the hate, it was king of CI for over a decade and for good reason.

  • nimchimpsky

    yesterday at 9:52 PM

    [dead]

AWS is a fantastic metaphor for selling shovels during a goldrush. I can see how Amazon would not be motivated to go out and "look for gold" itself.

I am sure that Amazon is making big piles of money proving hardware to run AI compute and related infrastructure products.

Amazon also didn't read the room when it fired most of its Alexa staff just as GenAI was taking off.

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/17/amazon-cuts-several-hundred-...

Of course not being able to monetise Alexa has always been a problem, but these and the article's issues are all to do with poor planning and top tier business direction.

creative talents needs more comfortable and unconstrained working environment.But that against and broke many Amazon‘s leadership principal. Also amazon dont want to pay more money to those expensive ai talents.

Under Andy Jassy’s watch Amazon really just missed the boat on AI big time. Alexa was a huge missed opportunity. They had a huge foothold and then basically did nothing with it. AWS doesn’t really have compelling AI offerings. Bedrock should be good but is a mess. The GPU offerings struggle to keep pace with competitors.

The rambling answer to the “why are you behind” question on the last earnings call indicates it’s a sore spot for leadership, but at this point it’s too little too late. The best talent has already settled elsewhere. The only real saving grace is that if/when the AI bubble pops being so far behind might not be a terrible thing.

from outside looking in i think this is a move i would support if i were in amazon leadership. let the other players pay for the AI movement, pick up the fruits of their labor a couple of years down the line. i dont think amazon's main play is AI anyways, if anything it's to facilitate AI with their complementary platforms in AWS

Of course they've stood it out. The rate of change and the R&D expenditure is off the charts. It buys them marginal utility to hire AI talent at incredible salaries to keep them at table stakes.

Meanwhile, the models are getting larger and more complex, with more users, putting the support infrastructure well beyond what individuals and even small companies can afford to outright buy. You can easily spend well over a million on even basic infrastructure to try to support some of the newer models and make it available to a few end users.

As a point of strategy for individuals and small entities, it really is cheaper in this case to spin up some AWS instances for a bit to do some LLM work and then spin them down when not in use.

So if you were AWS do you mine for gold? Or do you sell shovels?

• npalli

  today at 2:59 AM

  That whole “sell shovels” thing never really made sense, even in the pre-GPU hyperscaler days. BTW, the shovel is GPU (owned by NVidia for now).

  AWS, Azure, GCP weren’t just renting servers. They built whole platforms - databases, ML stacks, dev tools, security. Way more than shovels.

  The moat was owning the stack. MS used Azure to power Office and now Copilot. Google used infra to juice Search, YouTube, Ads. Even Amazon used it for retail + Alexa. They were mining gold and selling shovels.

  And raw compute was never where the money was. Renting VMs was the cheap layer. The profits came from all the higher level services built on top.

  Now with AI it’s even more obvious:

  Models drive the workloads. OpenAI/Anthropic/DeepMind aren’t just customers, they’re shaping the infra itself. Whoever owns the models sets the rules.

  No models = no moat. If AWS isn’t building frontier models, it’s just reselling Nvidia GPUs while MS + Google wrap their clouds around first party models + SDKs. That pulls customers deeper into their stacks, not Amazon’s.

  Falling behind compounds. Training/deploying models forces infra breakthroughs (chips, compilers, scaling). If AWS isn’t in that game, they’ll eventually struggle to even run other ppl’s models as well as rivals.

  So if Amazon “sits this one out,” it’s not just losing bragging rights. It’s giving up control of the future of compute.

  • bitmasher9

    today at 3:07 AM

    Are modals the future of compute?

    I’m not 100% convinced this is true. Additionally, I’m not convinced that a waiting pattern right now sets Amazon up for a point of no return. It seems plausible for Amazon to pull an Apple here, to wait until technology is more mature and use their unique position to provide a quality offering.

    • enos_feedler

      today at 3:30 AM

      The problem is Amazon is usually Apples non competitive cloud partner. They can’t both sit this out. AWS needs to learn in a hurry whether they should be in the model business to supply Apple with Siri LLMs. Bc if not Apple is going to Google (and Google cloud). Thats not good for AWS. Amazon is in a bit of a bind bc they should be acquiring Anthropic but not at bubble prices.

      • dangus

        today at 4:41 AM

        I don't understand why AWS needs to be in the model business. They didn't develop databases, they didn't develop Kubernetes, they didn't develop Linux, and the list goes on and on.

        Not a whole lot in their portfolio actually has a lot of Amazon technology behind it. They've got some mild forks here and there, and they've got some stuff like Fargate that has AWS R&D work behind it but piggybacks concepts/tech stacks that definitely didn't originate from Amazon.

        A lot of their value has really nothing to do with developing the underlying technology.

  • today at 3:01 AM

  • dangus

    today at 4:35 AM

    I agree with you that the profit comes from higher level services built on top.

    But I think you are making it sound like Amazon's moat is that it came up with its own technology behind its services.

    A lot of times AWS was just grabbing a bunch of popular open source stuff off the shelf and hosting it (e.g., RDS, EKS, etc). Yes there is some R&D work but almost none of what Amazon has come up with is rooted in their own work.

    The value they give you is the hosting, maintenance, and compliance of all these services. If you're paying AWS extra to host your database on RDS or your Kubernetes cluster in EKS, you're generally not paying AWS to come up with a better database than anyone else, you're just paying them to help you manage permissions, backups, replication, and other maintenance/compliance/management issues that a company needs for its internal services.

    In other words, Amazon's AI customers don't need Amazon to build models. They just need Amazon to use someone else's models, host them on private enterprise compute that easily ties in to existing infrastructure, RBAC, etc, and make everything compliant and easy to maintain. A whole lot of the value is being able to answer audits with "AWS handles our database backups/data security/etc" rather than saying "we have a great ops team and here's all our proof that we handle our database backups/data security/etc properly."

    I think it's actually explicitly Amazon's job to sit this one out, especially since they never successfully made a good business or consumer ecosystem device like a smartphone or PC operating system.

• boplicity

  today at 2:08 AM

  This follows my take, in terms of where the profitability will be long term. It will be with the hardware vendors, and not the model creators. Time will see if I'm right, but, as hard as it is to create a good model, it does seem to be something that can be replicated by others.

  • somenameforme

    today at 3:39 AM

    More cynically, the way to get rich during a gold rush is to sell shovels.

  • mrits

    today at 2:26 AM

    Not exactly going out on a limb here by predicting hardware manufacturers are going to make money on AI

• gundmc

  today at 2:45 AM

  If AWS instances in this analogy are shovels, what are the GPUs?

  • matsz

    today at 2:55 AM

    One layer up, the blade. Silicon would be the iron in this analogy.

    The physical server itself would be the wooden handle, I guess.

  • GarnetFloride

    today at 2:49 AM

    Picks or any of the other required equipment.

• amy_petrik

  today at 2:13 AM

  it's also a "moneyball" situation - hire hyper expensive AI stars or get 10-fold? 100-fold? cheaper smart AI folk sans star power

• doctorpangloss

  today at 3:32 AM

  > Blah blah blah, money this, money that

  See, that’s the problem with what Amazon has done to you. It’s always about money with you guys. Good research is about the opposite of money. The people who don’t know what that means, who can’t fathom to understand what “the opposite of money” means without turning everything into a contrived story about money: they can’t do good R&D. Every single great R&D director will tell you this, and a bunch of people will downvote this comment, who have never been in a meaningful R&D role.

  A good research culture is capable of listening to broad, generalized, completely accurate criticism in public and not downvote. Downvoting is your problem guys!

  OpenAI has a million little haters out there and do you know how much time their people spend downvoting comments online? Zero. And honestly they’re paid way better than the poor souls who have wound up at Amazon, so it’s really, truly the case that none of this money money money culture really adds up to much for the little guy.

  If there’s any one person to point the finger at - like why does Amazon, with its vast resources and tremendous talent, produce basically zero meaningful publicly influential research - it’s Jeff Bezos. You’re talking about strategy? The guy in charge is a colossal piece of shit, with a piece of shit girlfriend and a piece of shit world view, at least as bad as Larry Ellison, whose only redeeming factor is that MacKenzie Scott is a much smarter person than he ever was.

Why would they? I hear their main revenue is in AWS and AdTech. Assuming this is true, why would they need bleeding edge AI?

That’s because LLMs are just snake oil… Look at what a flop ChatGPT 5 was. If someone manages to actually make something useful, Amazon has a stake in Anthropic. Otherwise why should they waste their money while competitors bankrupt themselves at scale over a hype cycle.

Isn't amazon the metaphorical guy selling shovels at the gold rush.

> Amazon doesn't provide useful tools for building durable multi-AZ applications. Most customers are not going to implement Paxos

Don't really agree here, yes they screw you financially on cross-AZ bandwidth, but all of their popular services are built to work well across availability zones.

Most people don't need access to a low level consensus service like Paxos, instead they will be using one of amazons managed database services, or s3, that provides higher level abstractions, and automatically manages consensus behind the scenes.

• lovich

  today at 1:10 AM

  Unless it’s documentDB in which case it manages it front of the scene by just freezing the entire db for minutes on end

Amazon would have a lot of trouble competing for top talent due to their reputation.

AWS dropped the ball but they didn’t really try. Apple OTOH…

• mensetmanusman

  yesterday at 8:52 PM

  Apple finance took over and scoffed at their engineers wanting to spend $10B on AI hardware, so they bought back stocks instead because Buffet understands that.

  • coliveira

    yesterday at 10:23 PM

    MS, Google, and Meta are spending hundreds of billions on AI, however their stocks are growing by the same amount. This doesn't seem like a crazy spending when looking at this, and better than just buying stock back and doing exactly nothing like Apple is doing.

    • tonyedgecombe

      today at 6:53 AM

      Apple can afford to take their time, people will keep buying phones no matter whose AI they run on them. Google on the other hand can see its search business evaporating within a few years.

Well Amazon is mostly guided by pragmatism rather then than hype, so there they are, waiting for the dust to settle to see what directly helps their bottom line.

They are in the shovel sales business in this gold rush.

• fuckaj

  today at 5:50 AM

  [dead]

You have all these labs spending billions on researchers and training clusters, not seeing much return on investment, meanwhile Amazon just partners with the labs, and provides inference for their models, and that seems to be fairly profitable for them.

Why buy the cow if you can get the milk for free?

Amazon will reap the results of the talent war. Why?

Because Amazon will build services on top of the technologies that come out.

Just today on hn there was a guy that trained his tiny model and got better results than most of the big models. He wasn’t paid 200m.

The gold rush is here, but the results are still shaking out.

AI will subvert and destroy Amazon's internal management culture, where status is gatekept by who can write the best 6-page reports to read before the meeting!

Or more likely -- Amazon management knows just how hard writing actually is, how hard to produce something with clarity and signal instead of just common-knowledge cliches, and so they understand that this LLM wave is overhyped. They're letting the other big players do the hard work, and effectively selling LLMs short by abstaining from the race.

• anon191928

  yesterday at 7:49 PM

  I think Amazon and Apple see who is doing the "work" in commerce and manufacturing and they know and realize that some non deterministic AI is not a big threat. Sure it creates nice text, video or image but that is not "work" for these small company eating giants. They know that work counts with real goods moving in the real world, energy moving and robots that can actually act with certainity (99,999% time like internet, web as a tech ?)

  • mediaman

    yesterday at 8:32 PM

    Interesting theory, but Amazon uses tons of stochastic methods (including deep reinforcement learning) throughout the business, including warehouse inventory management. "Determinism" is not some north star that operations people always adhere to, because the physical world is deeply stochastic and pretending it isn't does not make for a successful operations career.

    • DenisM

      yesterday at 10:06 PM

      There’s Gaussian and fractal randomness. Fraud and transportation losses are Gaussian, for example - they average out to known values. An empowered LLM can wreck absolute havoc, and if it’s not empowered there’s no reason to spend $100b on training it.

      • master_crab

        yesterday at 11:43 PM

        This really isn’t highlighted enough. Most real world probabilities that are evaluated follow a Gaussian structure. LLMs…don’t? Fractal probably? Heavy tailed maybe (like a Cauchy distribution)? But certainly not in ways that companies are currently accustomed to.

  • mensetmanusman

    yesterday at 8:49 PM

    My favorite science fiction threat is an AI able to hallucinate an OS so well any hardware rectangle could be used.

    • selimthegrim

      today at 12:05 AM

      Somebody needs to update that sci-fi story “BLIT”

  • arduanika

    yesterday at 7:54 PM

    A reasonable theory. Apple does hardware and supply chains, and sees how far there is to go. Nvidia does hardware too, but it's profiting hugely from the AI boom and has no reason to push back.

    How do you explain the Elon keiretsu, though? Tesla and SpaceX are pretty tethered to the physical world, and in theory should have visibility into the same discrepancies that Apple sees. So why is Elon pushing so hard to develop Grok? Is it just ideology for him, or what?

    • 4dregress

      yesterday at 8:19 PM

      Who knows what’s going on in that mad man’s mind!

      • mensetmanusman

        yesterday at 8:48 PM

        Elon, like everyone, is smart at some things and dumb at others. When you realize that about the world, it will help you learn from the smart sides of folks.

        • lawlessone

          yesterday at 9:26 PM

          what's Elon smart at though? so i can learn..

          • Nevermark

            today at 1:24 AM

            Despite his mad and destructive social and political side, as an engineer and business man he is extremely smart and effective.

            He makes lots of unnecessary major and cringy mistakes in both engineering and business too, but his net on both counts is astounding.

            And while he may overuse it for PR, he has put himself at great financial risk when pushing through major capability developments and business hurdles. His rewards were earned.

            But the sick picture of the richest person in the world, spamming stupidity, and harming countless numbers of people's lives in order to prop up his juvenile ego is hard to look past for many. For good reason.

            He is a strong mix of both extremes of capability/impact spectrum, not just one.

          • decimalenough

            yesterday at 9:34 PM

            Reality distortion. Financial shenanigans. Hiring people who can execute.

            And, despite all the haters, he does understand rocket science pretty well, and rocket economics even better.

            • habinero

              today at 12:11 AM

              Eh, not really. He managed to hire people who can manage him well enough to get him out of the way.

              • decimalenough

                today at 3:28 AM

                Spin it any way you like, but he's still hiring people who deliver.

                • habinero

                  today at 7:35 AM

                  It's not really spin. He's the wallet, not the talent.

                  • decimalenough

                    today at 9:18 AM

                    So why did Bezos get nowhere with Blue Origin despite throwing more money at it? Or every car manufacturer that tried to build EVs before Tesla? Or every satellite internet provider before Starlink?

              • mensetmanusman

                today at 1:36 AM

                Apparently nearly zero people can do this.

                • stockresearcher

                  today at 2:27 AM

                  (2012) https://www.northwestern.edu/magazine/spring2012/feature/roc...

                  > Shotwell had lunch with a co-worker who had just joined the then-startup company SpaceX. They walked by the cubicle of CEO Elon Musk. “I said, ‘Oh, Elon, nice to meet you. You really need a new business developer,’” Shotwell recalls. “It just popped out. I was bad. It was very rude.” Or just bold enough to capture Musk’s attention. He called her later that day in 2002 and recruited her to be vice president of business development, his seventh employee.

                  Can you imagine something like that working today?

          • jlarocco

            today at 3:38 AM

            I've heard he's pretty smart at making money.

            • tonyedgecombe

              today at 6:55 AM

              The recent Tesla figures indicate otherwise.

          • vkou

            today at 12:54 AM

            Politics. Not the kind of politics that makes people like you, but the kind of politics that gives you power.

    • llbbdd

      yesterday at 8:20 PM

      IMO Grok is the downstream consumer result of internal investment in AI at Twitter. One of the first things Elon did after buying was put all the useful APIs behind a paywall, which would be a reasonable first step if you bought it in part for the enormous training data the platform generates every day and wanted to limit competitors' access to it. Grok is then mostly just a way to get feedback on the tech.

      • newsclues

        yesterday at 8:37 PM

        Twitter and Tesla have two interesting datasets for AI.

    • Rover222

      yesterday at 8:52 PM

      [dead]

    • hugedickfounder

      yesterday at 8:15 PM

      [dead]

  • nikodunk

    yesterday at 10:41 PM

    Hey! Your words echo this IMO! If not, strongly recommended :) https://www.notboring.co/p/the-electric-slide

  • flyinglizard

    yesterday at 9:29 PM

    I think Apple is just sitting idly and waiting for AI to mature to "just works" level without all the potential legal and PR minefields. It's too wild and unpredictable of an experience for their buttoned down, bland and inclusive corporate image. Apple may soon find itself producing very capable but dumb bricks if they don't catch up. Google can and will go all out on AI in Android at some point.

    Amazon I think just hasn't understood how to cohesively integrate AI into their offerings. Meanwhile they're selling shovels to the prospectors with AWS.

    I guess both of these understand the Ai moat is not very large, and don't buy into AGI dreams.

    • pram

      yesterday at 9:43 PM

      Assuming most people will want more AI in Android, doesn't seem so popular shoehorned into Windows 11.

      • flyinglizard

        yesterday at 9:49 PM

        It has much better utility in a phone (accessibility to camera and photos, various sensors, contacts, chats, smart home, payment methods...) than on a PC. I can imagine an AI that's more proactive, I don't go to ask a question but it helps me manage my day effectively and get more information where its useful.

        • beeflet

          today at 12:55 AM

          Okay, but does it need to be deeply integrated into the OS or can it just interact with programs through their normal interfaces?

          The most effective way to get an LLM to control a computer right now is to just give it a unix terminal because it's already a text-based environment where programs are expected to be highly interoperable.

          What I'm saying is that you don't need to stop everything to redesign around AI, just allow for a decent level of interoperability that iOS (and largely android) doesn't currently have.

          The mobile app development model is oriented around packaging somewhat useful software (that could usually be a web app) with malware and selling it for $0.99, necessitating a ton of sandboxing and preventing this type of interoperability in the first place. I would say focus on the semantic HTML aspect of the web and design some way for LLMs to interact with websites in an open-ended way.

• mikert89

  yesterday at 11:58 PM

  Yeah they have a rigid structure of document writing, most of which is now obsolete.

  • PartiallyTyped

    today at 12:50 AM

    I’d argue it’s the opposite. Good documents are far more important when everyone can generate garbage.

It's probably trying to figure out what it can sell at a large margin.

Amazon doesn't need people with particular credentials on the org chart to bring in VC money. They already have plenty.

Yeah Amazon is massively struggling to hire due to the extremely bad reputation of Andy Jasshole and the RTO 5 policy, and this is not exclusive to AI talents, but is the case for every single role. We have had reqs open for a year in my team and nobody wants to join.

Truthfully, I don't think anyone would recommend their acquaintances to join Amazon right now.

That said, Amazon is actually winning the AI war. They're selling shovels (Bedrock) in the gold rush.

• __turbobrew__

  yesterday at 7:31 PM

  I have had multiple recruiter reachouts from AWS who obviously read my resume and are interested in short cutting me into a senior role at AWS doing interesting things, but at this point AWS reputation is so bad I don’t even entertain such offers.

  For senior in-demand talent you are not desperate, and really only desperate people go to work for AWS as they don’t have any better options at a company which respects their employees.

• alkonaut

  yesterday at 8:04 PM

  It's not like it had a good reputation earlier either (as a company, perhaps less problematic as an employer). But if I was offered multiple FAANG positions because I had some really attractive skill set, then I'd want a _lot_ more to work at Meta or Amazon than Netflix or Google, just based on my view of the corporate evilness. It's probably completely unfounded, but the fact I have that feeling just shows they haven't taken care of their brand.

  • Aeolun

    today at 12:00 AM

    I think I’d work at Amazon purely to save the world from the abomination that is cloudformation.

• coliveira

  yesterday at 10:24 PM

  Amazon having trouble to hire I think it is a well deserved result. I hope they never hire great talent again. Lately I heard they're looking for contract hires, which seems to fit their cheapness and lack of ability to attract talent.

  • untrust

    today at 2:37 AM

    At some point, the turnover has to lead to "the blind leading the blind" with nobody having a clearer big picture view on the software they own. This can't be a productive way to run a company, but they seem to persist nonetheless. It may take many years, but I imagine their software will rot from within due to their hiring practices.

    • coliveira

      today at 2:45 AM

      Exactly, Amazon practices the equivalent of a decimation of their workforce. This may even work in the initial years, but over time they'll quickly lose their best minds and the software will be unmaintainable.

• chihuahua

  today at 1:41 AM

  It's almost funny how they just don't give a shit about being an attractive employer. They never have. Going back to 2002, it's always been "if you don't like it, there's the door."

  It seems that they just don't care about the high turnover.

• cyberax

  yesterday at 7:48 PM

  Bedrock? It's like a vibe-coded "router" app. It really doesn't provide anything that is not provided by countless other companies.

  AWS is falling behind even in their most traditional area: renting compute capacity.

  For example, I can't easily run models that need GPUs without launching classic EC2 instances. Fargate or Lambda _still_ don't support GPUs. Sagemaker Serverless exists but has some weird limits (like 10GB limit on Docker images).

  • internetter

    yesterday at 9:35 PM

    AWS doesn't need to do anything innovative and the enterprises still come. Every product AWS sells has a similar offering from a competitor. But businesses stick with amazon because its all in one. They get bills from one company, trust their security with one company, ect. The only thing that matters to AWS is its reputation.

    • cyberax

      today at 3:50 AM

      This works up to a point. I'm extremely familiar with AWS, but we simply _can't_ use it to train our models because it costs 2-3 times more than their competitors. All while requiring us to basically bring up all the infrastructure around maintaining the training cluster ourselves.

  • nickysielicki

    today at 12:26 AM

    Frankly, this is strictly a positive signal to me.

    Fargate and lambda are fundamentally very different from EC2/nitro under the hood, with a very different risk profile in terms of security. The reason you can't run GPU workloads on top of fargate and lambda is because exposing physical 3rd-party hardware to untrusted customer code dramatically increases the startup and shutdown costs (ie: validating that the hardware is still functional, healthy, and hasn't been tampered with in any way). That means scrubbing takes a long time and you can't handle capacity surges as easily as you can with paravirtualized traditional compute workloads.

    There are a lot of business-minded non-technical people running AWS, some of which are sure to be loudly complaining about this horrible loss of revenue... which simply lets you know that when push comes to shove, the right voices are still winning inside AWS (eg: the voices that put security above everything else, where it belongs).

    • cyberax

      today at 1:17 AM

      > Frankly, this is strictly a positive signal to me.

      How?

      > The reason you can't run GPU workloads on top of fargate and lambda is because exposing physical 3rd-party hardware to untrusted customer code dramatically increases the startup and shutdown costs

      This is BS. Both NVidia and AMD offer virtualization extensions. And even without that, they can simply power-cycle the GPUs after switching tenants.

      Moreover, Fargate is used for long-running tasks, and it definitely can run on a regular Nitro stack. They absolutely can provide GPUs for them, but it likely requires a lot of internal work across teams to make it happen. So it doesn't happen.

      I worked at AWS, in a team responsible for EC2 instance launching. So I know how it all works internally :)

      • nickysielicki

        today at 2:14 AM

        You'd have to build totally separate datacenters with totally different hardware than what they have today. You're not thinking about the complexity introduced by the use of pcie switches. For starters, you don't have enough bandwidth to saturate all gpus concurrently, they're sharing pcie root complex bandwidth, which is a non-starter if you want to define any kind of reasonable SLA. You can't really enforce limits, either. Even if you're able to tolerate that and sell customers on it, the security side is worse. All customer GPU transactions would be traversing a shared switch fabric, which means noisy bursty neighbors, timing side-channels, etc., etc., etc.

        • cyberax

          today at 3:47 AM

          > You'd have to build totally separate datacenters with totally different hardware than what they have today.

          No? You can reset GPUs with regular PCI-e commands.

          > You can't really enforce limits, either. Even if you're able to tolerate that and sell customers on it, the security side is worse

          Welp. AWS is already a totally insecure trash, it seems: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/g6e/ Good to know.

          Not having GPUs on Fargate/Lambda is, at this point, just a sign of corporate impotence. They can't marshal internal teams to work together, so all they can do is a wrapper/router for AI models that a student can vibe-code in a month.

          We're doing AI models for aerial imagery analysis, so we need to train and host very custom code. Right now, we have to use third-parties for that because AWS is way more expensive than the competition (e.g. https://lambda.ai/pricing ), _and_ it's harder to use. And yes, we spoke with the sales reps about private pricing offers.

          • nickysielicki

            today at 4:20 AM

            none of this applies to g6e because it doesn’t have/need a pcie switch, because it doesn’t have rdma support (nor nvlink), which means sriov just works.

            • cyberax

              today at 4:32 AM

              And what is your point? What is stopping AWS from using g6e or g6dn on Fargate to keep up with the competitors?

              • nickysielicki

                today at 5:19 AM

                Nothing, but IMO it’s a bad idea. 1. customers who build a compute workload on top of fargate have no future, newer hardware probably won’t ever support it. 2. It’s already ancient hardware from 3 years ago. 3. AWS now has to take responsibility for building an AMI with the latest driver, because the driver must always be newer than whatever toolkit is used inside the container. 4. AWS needs to monitor those instances and write wrappers for things like dgcm.

                • cyberax

                  today at 6:19 AM

                  Fargate is simply a userspace application to manage containers with some ties-in to the AWS control plane for orchestration. It allows users to simply request compute capability from EKS/ECS without caring about autoscaling groups, launch templates, and all the other overhead.

                  "AWS Lambda for model running" would be another nice service.

                  The things that competitors already provide.

                  And this is not a weird nonsense requirement. It's something that a lot of serious AI companies now need. And the AWS is totally dropping the ball.

                  > AWS now has to take responsibility for building an AMI with the latest driver, because the driver must always be newer than whatever toolkit is used inside the container.

                  They already do that for Bedrock, Sagemaker, and other AI apps.

  • iLoveOncall

    yesterday at 7:54 PM

    Bedrock is not at all a router. They do provide a routing capability now, but at its core it's a wrapper around models so you can interact with any model with the same unique API.

    > For example, I can't easily run models that need GPUs without launching classic EC2 instances.

    Yeah okay, but you can run most entreprise-level models via Bedrock.

    • Aeolun

      today at 12:03 AM

      Only if you want them to go to random inference regions. God forbid you would want inference in a single region. Then you need to be satisfied with 12 month old models that have been superseded 2 times already.

• mikert89

  yesterday at 11:59 PM

  Bedrock is terrible and usage is not high, they cant even serve the anthropic models at scale.

• philipallstar

  yesterday at 7:30 PM

  > the RTO 5 policy

  I'm no expert, but I'm pretty sure this[0] is what RTO 5 is.

  [0] https://www.phoenixcontact.com/en-pc/products/bolt-connectio...

  • spanishgum

    yesterday at 7:34 PM

    RTO 5 is "return to office, 5 days a week"

    • mensetmanusman

      yesterday at 8:53 PM

      RTO 996 where it at

  • almostgotcaught

    yesterday at 7:35 PM

    [flagged]

AWS is more focused on making money off the infrastructure than on the application itself. It took same approach with kubernetes and might I say it has been very successful.

They invested $8B in Anthropic so they will be OK.

would have thought that Amazon's API-first internal systems would make it a wonderful case for AI. Unfortunately doesn't seem to be the case.

Didn't Amazon aquihire Adept Labs?

> The company has flagged its unique pay structure, lagging AI reputation, and rigid return-to-office rules as major hurdles.

No mention of reputation for harsh/ruthless/backstabby management practices towards employees (including for tech white collar, not just biz and blue collar)?

Is that not a major factor? Or are they not aware of it? Or is mentioning it politically off-limits? Or is putting it in writing a big PR risk? Or is putting it in writing a big legal risk?

I know Amazon's reputation for treating employees poorly came up in multiple discussions at one university's big-name AI lab, for example. Not only do some people read the news, but people talk, in groups and privately.

• ryandrake

  yesterday at 7:58 PM

  After reading so many horror stories (whether actually true or not), my mind now just associates working at Amazon with mostly negatives: They're going to ride you like a horse and beat you up, for below-average compensation, and then if you want to claw your way up, it's a Game Of Thrones style slugfest with few winners. The opposite of "Rest and Vest." If this is exaggerated, they sure aren't doing any PR work to deny it or counter this negative reputation.

  • dreamcompiler

    today at 2:31 AM

    > they sure aren't doing any PR work to deny it or counter this negative reputation.

    They don't seem to give a shit. In the retail space their name means "low quality Chinese counterfeit products with fake reviews" and I've seen no effort on Amazon's part to counter that perception either.

  • closeparen

    today at 3:05 AM

    Hiring ex-Amazon managers credibly signals to capital markets that a tech company past its hype phase is getting serious about controlling costs and disciplining lazy or entitled engineers. It’s in their interest to have this reputation.

  • rr808

    today at 1:48 AM

    > for below-average compensation

    Maybe compared to FAANG, but not compared to most corporate developer jobs out there.

  • pydry

    yesterday at 8:19 PM

    They also produce legions of managers who get fed up working for amazon and leave for greener pastures which they then turn toxic.

    • PhoenixReborn

      today at 1:44 AM

      I have personally seen this happen (ex-Amazon managers coming in and turning the place toxic) at 2 separate companies now

      • snoman

        today at 3:30 AM

        I’ve heard multiple recruiters (from different agencies in different geos) refer to them as “amholes” and said they’re hard to place and difficult to break their bad habits.

    • neilv

      yesterday at 9:28 PM

      I've bumped into a lot of execs who say they don't want to hire ICs or managers (usually only one or the other) coming from specific big-name companies, and will instruct external and internal recruiters/HR and hiring managers about that.

      Not big-name companies in general, but specific companies among them.

      It seems to be about belief of culture taint risk (e.g., the way engineering is done, or the misaligned careerism or sharp-elbowedness that's promoted by the company). Though there's also sometimes a belief that particular large companies hire lots of people who aren't good (only, apparently, at LeetCode interviews).

      I'm a bit sympathetic to those theories, though I personally don't rule out any individual. I think, say, all the FAANGs do also have individual people who are capable and well-intentioned, and haven't been permanently branded with whatever problematic culture of the company they're at.

      (Though there was a time when I thought a person wouldn't have gone to one particular social media company unless they were either a sociopath or completely unaware of news in the real world, but it's more nuanced now. And there's currently an aggressively pro-fascism company that AFAICT never should've seemed like a good idea to anyone who wasn't evil or oblivious, though, I have to remember that they like to hire "impressionable children", and we now have tech track undergrads who haven't had time for anything but STEM classes and LeetCode since early teens, so they might be forgiven. I was recently considering denylisting anyone who'd gone to a different tech company, which had a well-known decades-long history of chronic underhandedness, but then I saw that a colleague who'd majorly helped me out once had finally gone there. Which is another lesson to myself not to generalize in ways unfair to the individual.)

      • arghnoname

        yesterday at 11:41 PM

        If you want to hire people who share your values and your values include moral responsibility for the megacorp one works for, you’re right not to hire from companies you feel are immoral.

        I personally don’t ascribe corporate amorality (as opposed to immorality) to all who work for it and thus with narrow exceptions would blacklist someone for working at a company who, e.g., has a CEO I dislike, practices wage suppression, etc.

        • trenchpilgrim

          today at 1:22 AM

          I would strongly consider against hiring someone who worked in certain addiction based industries such as tobacco or gaming (not gamedev, the other kind).

      • pydry

        today at 10:42 AM

        I think it's unfair to apply these rules to culture-takers like ICs but an exec who has been there a while? Their CV should go straight in the trash.

  • titanomachy

    today at 1:43 AM

    It’s better for them if they have this reputation. It lets them select for desperate people.

  • PartiallyTyped

    today at 12:44 AM

    At least in Europe I have a lot of trouble finding companies paying me as much as Amzn does, and it’s not even close.

    Perhaps working for American companies remotely will change that view, but it’s too much a hassle for me at the moment.

    • tonyhart7

      today at 2:17 AM

      amazon is known to be lower end of FAANG, its more a logistic company tbh

      logistics in terms of hardware and software not necessary bleeding tech in giants club

      • PartiallyTyped

        today at 6:05 AM

        That’s far from the truth..

        • tonyhart7

          today at 10:18 AM

          so you didn't read the original article????

          • PartiallyTyped

            today at 12:35 PM

            So you are basing your comment on what Amzn does based on comments from HR?

            Please…

            AWS does a lot of bleeding edge stuff, many of which never make it to prod.

• pinkmuffinere

  yesterday at 10:19 PM

  > unique pay structure

  As an ex-Amazonian, I hate seeing this corporate euphemism. We would be reminded yearly that compensation at Amazon was “peculiar”, when really it was just relatively low for FAANG. I would have preferred frank honesty, which I think would look like “we pay relatively low wages, for relatively good engineers, and the difference makes more money”

  • Anon1096

    today at 1:07 AM

    That used to be the case but as of a couple years ago (maybe 2023?) pay packages got bumped and in terms of TC Amazon is very competitive now. You'll likely get a better offer than Google in cash value. But the non-TC benefits are really really bad (no free food, 5 day RTO, oncall policies, etc). For those reasons I think most would take a Meta or AI lab offer over Amazon right now if they're willing to grind.

  • 9tA3xlwgfGlab

    yesterday at 10:24 PM

    Interesting, one would think that would mean easier interviews and whatnot so as to allow for greater number of applicants and churn, but it is not what I have heard about it.

    • israrkhan

      yesterday at 11:08 PM

      it is a good place for new graduates to solve some challenging engineering problems at scale and learn. Most of the employees do not last more than 2 years. People who stick for longer, admire that type of culture and are made for amazon. Their stock has also performed extremely well.

• senderista

  yesterday at 10:46 PM

  I had senior faculty in a top-5 CS program tell me that they steered their students away from AWS because they didn't want them to be miserable.

• downrightmike

  today at 2:16 AM

  That's not a bug, but a feature

Amazon, and AWS specially, just don’t have recognized leaders in this space at the helm. I think that’s OK as they should focus on the more boring but important infrastructure stuff.

Jassy’s long rambling answer on the last earnings call though does suggest that being way behind on AI is a sore spot for leadership.

Attracting top talent though is a challenge for Amazon beyond just AI. Their reputation has become a real issue and the top folks simply have better options.

Apple: Hold my beer!

Eh, looks at my aws bedrock bill, I think they are doing alright.

Amazon just has to host LLaMa and Qwen locally, just as they do so many other packages developed by others, and charge for their AWS compute credits. Why do they need “AI talent”?

It is interesting but I think they're doing the right thing. AWS bedrock works pretty well and you can access frontier models plus everything open source on it. In the end, I was disbelieving that Graviton would be good but the latest r8g series are great for compute so I imagine GPU compute will similarly be mastered by them in time.

No one is looking at this issue correctly. Saying out of the AI "talent war" is a smart move. AI is due to collapse under its own weight.

1) High-quality training data is effectively exhausted. The next 10× scale model would need 10× more tokens than exist.

2) The Chinchilla rule. Hardware gets 2× cheaper every 18 mo, but model budgets rise 4× in that span. Every flagship LLM therefore costs 2× more than the last, while knock-off models appear years later for pennies. Benchmark gains shrink and regulation piles on. Net result: each new dollar on the next big LLM now buys far less payoff. The "wait-and-copy" option is getting cheaper every day.

• pvtmert

  yesterday at 11:11 PM

  I usually do not agree with the Amazon leadership (well, recently they haven't been "Right A lot"!)

  But I agree with the following statement Matt Garman gave recently;

      Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman said that using AI tools in place of junior employees was "one of the dumbest things I've ever heard" because these employees are "the least expensive" and "the most leaned into your AI tools."
  

  It's because AI usually creates slop, without review these "slop" build up. We don't have infinite context window to solve the slop anyway. (even if we do, the context-rot has been confirmed)

  Also, on average, Indian non-Tech employees who manages thousands of spreadsheets or manually manages your in-store cameras are much more cheaper than the "tokens" and the NVIDIA GPUs you can throw at the problem, at least for now and a foreseeable future.

  • ants_everywhere

    today at 12:14 AM

    > It's because AI usually creates slop

    I don't think his point was we should hire junior engineers because they're cheap and lean into AI and AI produces slop. His position is not that he wants to cheaply create slop.

    He wants to hire people who are cheap and love using AI because he sees that as a better long term strategy than making senior engineers embrace AI late into their career.

• liquidpele

  yesterday at 8:03 PM

  I agree but it doesn’t seem to be intentional on their part.

I had totally forgotten that I signed up for the Kiro waitlist. It seems Amazon has also totally sat out the interest in their AI offering.

Has anyone had a chance to use Kiro at all? At this point I'm not even interested in it anymore, even if I got an invite.

The top researchers published enough details on how to build what works well. Amazon can copy what's useful. They'll probably do it in a way that makes profit, too. Neither talent wars nor AI, startup models contribute to that.

Um, Amazon has invested $8B in Anthropic.

I think they learned some hard lessons from Alexa.

So what's the tldr, are they just too cheap too pay for top AI scientist talent-- which is imagine they would need in order to enter the fray?

> "GenAI hiring faces challenges like location

No! Really? With RTO? Unbelievable /s

[dead]

[flagged]

I've been having great success with bottles (https://usebottles.com/). The fact that you can have multiple tweakable prefix helps a lot.

I find AWS extremely difficult to use compared to GCP. Even though we received startup credits—which are essentially free money—we’re letting them go to waste because the platform is so much harder to work with.

It’s no surprise that AWS’s revenue growth is lagging behind GCP and Azure.

Beyond the AI talent gap, Amazon seems to be making serious missteps in its own core business.

It reminds me of Apple. At first, people thought Apple was being strategic by staying out of the AI race and waiting to pick the winner. But in reality, it turned out to be an inability to adapt to the new trend. I expect the same pattern from Amazon.