4 ms·

I am very skeptical. Amazon's AI team seems to be the B-players who couldn't find a job at Google, Apple, OpenAI, Facebook, and friends, and things they've del

I am very skeptical. Amazon's AI team seems to be the B-players who couldn't find a job at Google, Apple, OpenAI, Facebook, and friends, and things they've delivered were always less than impressive. Toxic work environment doesn't draw the best people. I use a lot of Amazon services, but their code completion was abysmal compared to co-pilot. Whisper wipes the floor with Amazon Transcribe. Etc. The pricing is also questionable, at $20-$25/user/month. I use generative AI a lot, and my OpenAI API bill is a fraction of that. It's also not well-integrated with the rest of AWS, where I want APIs rather than per-user services. The upside is less than clear.

airstrike 3y ago
> It's also not well-integrated with the rest of AWS To be fair, nothing is well-integrated with the rest of AWS
ldjkfkdsjnv 3y ago
Companies that arent leading in AI: Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, every other tech company Companies that are leading in AI: OpenAI
- glimshe 3y ago
  You forgot Bytedance and the other Chinese companies in the "not leading in AI" list. I always think about what you wrote when I see Yann LeCun criticizing everybody else while failing to present a winning technology. I'm no OpenAI or Sam Altman lover but the truth is that people laughed at Chatbots, and even at AI in general, until ChatGPT appeared.
  - ldjkfkdsjnv 3y ago
    I always laugh at yann LeCun, he's clearly jealous, and potentially out of touch. These naysayers are always wrong
    - zombiwoof 3y ago
      He says just enough to stay semi relevant and to collect his huge paycheck from mark
  - _ea1k 3y ago
    > I always think about what you wrote when I see Yann LeCun criticizing everybody else while failing to present a winning technology. I have similar thoughts in response to a lot of his comments. His criticism is often precise and fair, but it often comes along with an insistence that his "world model" is the one true solution. Maybe that is true? I haven't seen the evidence of it as of yet.
- scarface_74 3y ago
  It doesn’t matter - technology is not a product. All of the companies you name have hundreds of millions of users and they can take whatever technology they have and make more popular products. There are no great products in the pipeline for OpenAI. Microsoft is doing the productization. But if you are even not the best of the best, but the worse of the best, why the hell would you ever want to work for Amazon? Source: former AWS employee (Professional Services). I’m not bitter, it was my 8th out of 9 jobs in almost 30 years of working. I made my money. Learned what I could. Put it on my resume. Got Amazoned with a nice severance package and found a much less stressful job doing the same thing in less than 3 weeks
  - frognumber 3y ago
    The reason to work for Amazon is strictly $$$. Facebook and Apple offer the same $$$, with much less toxicity. If you can't get a job there and need money, Amazon is a rational choice. At my cost-of-living, if I worked for Amazon for about five years, I could retire. In my current job, I get half to a quarter of what I'd make at Amazon, but enjoy life. That's worth it. But if it stops being meaningful and fun, perhaps at some point I might go somewhere where I can pay off my mortgage in two years.
    - scarface_74 3y ago
      I doubt you are making a quarter of what you would make at Amazon. Even I as a standard CRUD developer working in Atlanta was making about 2/3rds of what mid level developers make at AWS and maybe half of what senior developers make. I specialize in enterprise app dev + AWS. The logical place for me to at least have on my resume is AWS Professional Services. It was the quickest , easiest method to get into BigTech. There was no coding interview, it was fully remote and there was a never a return to office mandate. One fortunate thing about AWS is they have a very easy approval process for ProServe consultants to sanitize their work and publish it to the open source AWS organization on GitHub and its MIT licensed. https://github.com/aws-samples https://github.com/aws-samples I open sourced everything and forked it to my private profile. It gave me a nice open source portfolio that I could say was used in real world projects and I was able to use 5 of the 8 projects at my current job. Two of the others were using now deprecated techniques. The pay increase wasn’t that dramatic. It was about a 35% pay difference than what I was being offered pre-Covid. It was about a 20% pay cut to leave and work for a smaller consulting company full time. You would absolutely hate yourself trying to survive at AWS for five years. I knew after the first year I wasn’t going to be able to take more than my initial four year offer and I planned according. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37969302 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37969302 As far as enjoying my life, I would never satisfy my current work life balance for working at any large company. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36767599 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36767599
- frognumber 3y ago
  I'm not quite sure that's fair. OpenAI is ahead, but Google does pretty well, with things ranging from the fancy ML computational photography algorithms in Android to things like Google Translate. Bard is surprisingly not bad. Apple is similar. Facebook has FAIR, which is pretty world-leading, and OPT-175B is not bad. No connection to product, but the core research team does well. Netflix has no real AI, although they were in a leadership position about 15 years ago. Amazon kinda stinks. They have a lot of mediocre researchers. Alexa works pretty well, but by most accounts, consists of a bunch of hardcoded algorithms. Just throw people at the problem. The rest of the stuff is unimpressive as well.
figassis 3y ago
$20/user/month, 10 users minimum
phonon 3y ago
> Whisper wipes the floor with Amazon Transcribe. Which just had a major update. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/machine-learning/amazon-transcribe-announces-a-new-speech-foundation-model-powered-asr-system-that-expands-support-to-over-100-languages/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/machine-learning/amazon-transcr...

airstrike 3y ago

> It's also not well-integrated with the rest of AWS To be fair, nothing is well-integrated with the rest of AWS

ldjkfkdsjnv 3y ago

Companies that arent leading in AI: Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, every other tech company Companies that are leading in AI: OpenAI

glimshe 3y ago
You forgot Bytedance and the other Chinese companies in the "not leading in AI" list. I always think about what you wrote when I see Yann LeCun criticizing everybody else while failing to present a winning technology. I'm no OpenAI or Sam Altman lover but the truth is that people laughed at Chatbots, and even at AI in general, until ChatGPT appeared.
- ldjkfkdsjnv 3y ago
  I always laugh at yann LeCun, he's clearly jealous, and potentially out of touch. These naysayers are always wrong
  - zombiwoof 3y ago
    He says just enough to stay semi relevant and to collect his huge paycheck from mark
- _ea1k 3y ago
  > I always think about what you wrote when I see Yann LeCun criticizing everybody else while failing to present a winning technology. I have similar thoughts in response to a lot of his comments. His criticism is often precise and fair, but it often comes along with an insistence that his "world model" is the one true solution. Maybe that is true? I haven't seen the evidence of it as of yet.
scarface_74 3y ago
It doesn’t matter - technology is not a product. All of the companies you name have hundreds of millions of users and they can take whatever technology they have and make more popular products. There are no great products in the pipeline for OpenAI. Microsoft is doing the productization. But if you are even not the best of the best, but the worse of the best, why the hell would you ever want to work for Amazon? Source: former AWS employee (Professional Services). I’m not bitter, it was my 8th out of 9 jobs in almost 30 years of working. I made my money. Learned what I could. Put it on my resume. Got Amazoned with a nice severance package and found a much less stressful job doing the same thing in less than 3 weeks
- frognumber 3y ago
  The reason to work for Amazon is strictly $$$. Facebook and Apple offer the same $$$, with much less toxicity. If you can't get a job there and need money, Amazon is a rational choice. At my cost-of-living, if I worked for Amazon for about five years, I could retire. In my current job, I get half to a quarter of what I'd make at Amazon, but enjoy life. That's worth it. But if it stops being meaningful and fun, perhaps at some point I might go somewhere where I can pay off my mortgage in two years.
  - scarface_74 3y ago
    I doubt you are making a quarter of what you would make at Amazon. Even I as a standard CRUD developer working in Atlanta was making about 2/3rds of what mid level developers make at AWS and maybe half of what senior developers make. I specialize in enterprise app dev + AWS. The logical place for me to at least have on my resume is AWS Professional Services. It was the quickest , easiest method to get into BigTech. There was no coding interview, it was fully remote and there was a never a return to office mandate. One fortunate thing about AWS is they have a very easy approval process for ProServe consultants to sanitize their work and publish it to the open source AWS organization on GitHub and its MIT licensed. https://github.com/aws-samples https://github.com/aws-samples I open sourced everything and forked it to my private profile. It gave me a nice open source portfolio that I could say was used in real world projects and I was able to use 5 of the 8 projects at my current job. Two of the others were using now deprecated techniques. The pay increase wasn’t that dramatic. It was about a 35% pay difference than what I was being offered pre-Covid. It was about a 20% pay cut to leave and work for a smaller consulting company full time. You would absolutely hate yourself trying to survive at AWS for five years. I knew after the first year I wasn’t going to be able to take more than my initial four year offer and I planned according. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37969302 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37969302 As far as enjoying my life, I would never satisfy my current work life balance for working at any large company. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36767599 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36767599
frognumber 3y ago
I'm not quite sure that's fair. OpenAI is ahead, but Google does pretty well, with things ranging from the fancy ML computational photography algorithms in Android to things like Google Translate. Bard is surprisingly not bad. Apple is similar. Facebook has FAIR, which is pretty world-leading, and OPT-175B is not bad. No connection to product, but the core research team does well. Netflix has no real AI, although they were in a leadership position about 15 years ago. Amazon kinda stinks. They have a lot of mediocre researchers. Alexa works pretty well, but by most accounts, consists of a bunch of hardcoded algorithms. Just throw people at the problem. The rest of the stuff is unimpressive as well.

figassis 3y ago

$20/user/month, 10 users minimum

phonon 3y ago

> Whisper wipes the floor with Amazon Transcribe. Which just had a major update. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/machine-learning/amazon-transcribe-announces-a-new-speech-foundation-model-powered-asr-system-that-expands-support-to-over-100-languages/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/machine-learning/amazon-transcr...