I have to say I'm disappointed by the mild boosterism that runs through Steven Levy's coverage of large corporations. For example: > Amazon’s product recommend

I have to say I'm disappointed by the mild boosterism that runs through Steven Levy's coverage of large corporations. For example: > Amazon’s product recommendations had been infused with AI since the company’s very early days, Really? Is it the kind of AI that impresses people today? Or was it just collaborative filtering. This narrative that "things were good and now they're getting better" is common in corporate communications, but shouldn't be part of neutral coverage. Or this: > “But they have really come on aggressively. Now they are becoming a force.” > Maybe the force. That's absurd. When you look at where Google has taken TensorFlow, AlphaGo and Waymo, and compare it with really any other company in the world, it would be hard to anticipate that Amazon would become the force. Amazon was forced to adopt an outside machine-learning framework, MxNet, as its own when its in-house toolkit didn't get traction. That's in stark contrast to Google, again. I'd say Amazon's main advantage is in its ability to sell infrastructure and platforms that enable developers to build apps -- which in this case will help productize ML in various ways. But I would not call it the force in AI.