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1. Very few things directly monetized Alexa. Doing so was basically impossible. I was in a brain storming session in 2017 on this topic, I walked in very opti

by htag 4y ago

1. Very few things directly monetized Alexa. Doing so was basically impossible. I was in a brain storming session in 2017 on this topic, I walked in very optimistic and walked out very pessimistic. 2. Voice interface is often slower than preexisting solutions. It's faster to pull a phone out of a pocket, unlock it, and load a weather app then it is to ask Alexa what the weather is. Loading the weather app will show you more information. 3. Alexa is kind of clumsy. It will trigger accidentally. It will not understand you. 4. ChatGPT is clearly better at answering questions. It's probably better at running commands. It doesn't directly compete with Alexa, but it highlights how outdated Alexa really is. 5. Alexa was awesome for some things. It was awesome for vision impairment. It was awesome for hands free situations, when you cannot spare the mechanical efforts of using another device or the visual attention.

makeitdouble 4y ago
> 2. Voice interface is often slower than preexisting solutions. Yes. This is also why assistants with a screen are so much more useful. Google´s hubs aren´t blazing fast either (and get slower over time...), but getting the full visual information at the same time as the voice answer helps a lot.
oezi 4y ago
> 4. ChatGPT is clearly better at answering questions. It is stunning that Amazon wasn't the forerunner in using ChatGPT/LLM-based tech for Alexa. A mistake in the tens, if not hundred billion dollars when looking at the price MS paid for OpenAI. Why aren't they hooking up a LLM right now?
- xypage 4y ago
  Because LLMs are so unreliable. Alexa misinterpreting and giving a nonsensical/unrelated answer is annoying, but fine. If it was an LLM, when it was wrong it would be lying confidently and unless you're double checking everything it outputs (in which case just search it that way in the first place) then that means it'll be misinforming you without you having a clue, as opposed to the current system where it's obvious when it gets it wrong. That's clearly just worse. And that's ignoring the fact that all the publicly accessible LLMs have been "jailbroken" and you can get them to say all manner of wild things, and Amazon is definitely aware that all it takes is one or two viral clips of Alexa saying something unhinged for their sales to start dropping, and the tech isn't currently sufficiently understood for them to avoid that.
  - oezi 4y ago
    I think you are missing the point that using LLMs to improve Alexa would certainly be hard, but it would have been massively worthwhile if it worked. Microsoft and Google are well aware that LLMs have the potential to upend the search dominance of Google. I am also much less concerned about jailbroken LLMs, because Alexa is already so broken it can't get much worse. Normal users don't seem to care much about potential misuses (compare with search autocomplete biases of Google) as long as a service works for them. But unless you widely deploy a tool, you won't uncover how it is abused (see Sidney's launch).
    - dragonwriter 4y ago
      > But unless you widely deploy a tool, you won't uncover how it is abused (see Sidney's launch). ChatGPT was, while less widely deployed, being abused (very publicly) in very similar manners to the way Sydney was; Microsoft could have learned about those abuses by paying attention to the public information about ChatGPT.
      - oezi 4y ago
        I don't think you can learn about it much unless you have the tech deployed yourself. Microsoft obviously believed that their own prompt design and the learnings at OpenAI would prevent this, but was shown quickly otherwise. I believe they will use the beta to iterate this quickly to a point where we come to accept the residual level of abuse potential.
    - nemothekid 4y ago
      >I think you are missing the point that using LLMs to improve Alexa would certainly be hard, but it would have been massively worthwhile if it worked. I really struggle to think how it would have worthwhile. My problem with smart speakers isn't that they aren't smart enough - it's that for anything slightly more complex, my phone has 100x better UX and information density. An Alexa LLM sounds cool in a sci-fi sort of way, but still feels like it would be useless.
      - 4y ago
- letitgo12345 4y ago
  > It is stunning that Amazon wasn't the forerunner in using ChatGPT/LLM-based tech for Alexa I'm a current scientist at Amazon. Amazon has little ability to invest in longer term research. While you have scope to pursue projects without immediate product application to some extent (though far less than you would at Alphabet/Meta/Microsoft), that is less valued than at the other Big Tech companies. There's also a far more bureaucratic hurdles to jump through to publish at Amazon. The lack of care for non-product research shows at every instance. Amazon also has extremely low -- or I should say non-existent standards for hiring scientists. If you're putting a person with a decent and non-existent pub record on the same level, that is not going to yield great results. Luckily for Amazon, their bread and butter -- Ads via retail and AWS -- are not immediately threatened by LLMs. Honestly if they had taken the billions they burnt on Alexa and put it in research they would be far far far better off today. But try explaining that to the bean counter mentality of executives that Bezos cultivated...
  - oezi 4y ago
    This is a good point. For an outsider it always seems that Amazon (or at least AWS) excels at deploying microservice solutions which plug into an ever growing ecosystem of interconnected offerings. I would have imagined that Alexa org is setup similarly and allows teams to deploy a solution such as an LLM and then given success be rewarded with growth.
tootie 4y ago
ChatGPT and Alexa are not comparable at all. ChatGPT build a language model on a giant but static corpus. Alexa is trying to give mostly timely answers do work in real time and in response to an active environment.

by htag 4y ago

makeitdouble 4y ago

> 2. Voice interface is often slower than preexisting solutions. Yes. This is also why assistants with a screen are so much more useful. Google´s hubs aren´t blazing fast either (and get slower over time...), but getting the full visual information at the same time as the voice answer helps a lot.

oezi 4y ago

> 4. ChatGPT is clearly better at answering questions. It is stunning that Amazon wasn't the forerunner in using ChatGPT/LLM-based tech for Alexa. A mistake in the tens, if not hundred billion dollars when looking at the price MS paid for OpenAI. Why aren't they hooking up a LLM right now?

xypage 4y ago
Because LLMs are so unreliable. Alexa misinterpreting and giving a nonsensical/unrelated answer is annoying, but fine. If it was an LLM, when it was wrong it would be lying confidently and unless you're double checking everything it outputs (in which case just search it that way in the first place) then that means it'll be misinforming you without you having a clue, as opposed to the current system where it's obvious when it gets it wrong. That's clearly just worse. And that's ignoring the fact that all the publicly accessible LLMs have been "jailbroken" and you can get them to say all manner of wild things, and Amazon is definitely aware that all it takes is one or two viral clips of Alexa saying something unhinged for their sales to start dropping, and the tech isn't currently sufficiently understood for them to avoid that.
- oezi 4y ago
  I think you are missing the point that using LLMs to improve Alexa would certainly be hard, but it would have been massively worthwhile if it worked. Microsoft and Google are well aware that LLMs have the potential to upend the search dominance of Google. I am also much less concerned about jailbroken LLMs, because Alexa is already so broken it can't get much worse. Normal users don't seem to care much about potential misuses (compare with search autocomplete biases of Google) as long as a service works for them. But unless you widely deploy a tool, you won't uncover how it is abused (see Sidney's launch).
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    > But unless you widely deploy a tool, you won't uncover how it is abused (see Sidney's launch). ChatGPT was, while less widely deployed, being abused (very publicly) in very similar manners to the way Sydney was; Microsoft could have learned about those abuses by paying attention to the public information about ChatGPT.
    - oezi 4y ago
      I don't think you can learn about it much unless you have the tech deployed yourself. Microsoft obviously believed that their own prompt design and the learnings at OpenAI would prevent this, but was shown quickly otherwise. I believe they will use the beta to iterate this quickly to a point where we come to accept the residual level of abuse potential.
  - nemothekid 4y ago
    >I think you are missing the point that using LLMs to improve Alexa would certainly be hard, but it would have been massively worthwhile if it worked. I really struggle to think how it would have worthwhile. My problem with smart speakers isn't that they aren't smart enough - it's that for anything slightly more complex, my phone has 100x better UX and information density. An Alexa LLM sounds cool in a sci-fi sort of way, but still feels like it would be useless.
    - 4y ago
letitgo12345 4y ago
> It is stunning that Amazon wasn't the forerunner in using ChatGPT/LLM-based tech for Alexa I'm a current scientist at Amazon. Amazon has little ability to invest in longer term research. While you have scope to pursue projects without immediate product application to some extent (though far less than you would at Alphabet/Meta/Microsoft), that is less valued than at the other Big Tech companies. There's also a far more bureaucratic hurdles to jump through to publish at Amazon. The lack of care for non-product research shows at every instance. Amazon also has extremely low -- or I should say non-existent standards for hiring scientists. If you're putting a person with a decent and non-existent pub record on the same level, that is not going to yield great results. Luckily for Amazon, their bread and butter -- Ads via retail and AWS -- are not immediately threatened by LLMs. Honestly if they had taken the billions they burnt on Alexa and put it in research they would be far far far better off today. But try explaining that to the bean counter mentality of executives that Bezos cultivated...
- oezi 4y ago
  This is a good point. For an outsider it always seems that Amazon (or at least AWS) excels at deploying microservice solutions which plug into an ever growing ecosystem of interconnected offerings. I would have imagined that Alexa org is setup similarly and allows teams to deploy a solution such as an LLM and then given success be rewarded with growth.

tootie 4y ago

ChatGPT and Alexa are not comparable at all. ChatGPT build a language model on a giant but static corpus. Alexa is trying to give mostly timely answers do work in real time and in response to an active environment.