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It’s fascinating that Amazon is investing heavily in Anthropic while simultaneously competing with them.

panabee 2y ago
Amazon is a retailer and strives to offer choice, whether of books or compute services. AWS is the golden goose. If Amazon doesn't tie up Anthropic, AWS customers who need a SOTA LLM will spend on Azure or GCP. Think of Anthropic as the "premium" brand -- say, the Duracell of LLMs. Nova is Amazon's march toward a house brand, Amazon Basics if you will, that minimizes the need for Duracell and slashes cost for customers. Not to mention the potential benefits of improving Alexa, which has inexcusably languished despite popularizing AI services. :Edited for readability
- coredog64 2y ago
  Minor nit: These days I think Ads has taken over as the golden goose, but that doesn’t diminish the contributions of AWS.
  - jazzyjackson 2y ago
    Is that why Amazon's product search is terrible? Because it's more profitable for them when I scroll through 5 pages of junk than if I can navigate immediately to the thing I want?
    - wkat4242 2y ago
      Yes because the sellers of that junk pay them to put it there. And most people give up and buy some of that. If it didn't work they wouldn't do it. Cory Doctorow covered this specific phenomenon in his great article that coined the term enshittification.
dotBen 2y ago
It’s fascinating that Amazon Web Services have so many overlapping and competing services to achieve the same objective. Efficiency/small footprint was never their approach :D For example, look how many different types of database they offer (many achieve the same objective but different instantiation) https://aws.amazon.com/products/?aws-products-all.sort-by=item.additionalFields.productNameLowercase&aws-products-all.sort-order=asc&awsf.re%3AInvent=*all&awsf.Free%20Tier%20Type=*all&awsf.tech-category=tech-category%23databases https://aws.amazon.com/products/?aws-products-all.sort-by=it...
- bushbaba 2y ago
  To quote, “right tool for right job”.
- UltraSane 2y ago
  Soon AWS is going to need an LLM just to recommend what service a customer should use.
  - htrp 2y ago
    Let me tell you about Amazon Q
- Jfurrrio2 2y ago
  They are not competing those are offerings. "AWS has many offerings" is a completly different thing than saying they compete against each other.
donavanm 2y ago
As others said the product isnt the model, its the API based token usage. Happily selling whatever model you need, with easy integrations from the rest of your aws stack, is the entire point.

Amazon is a retailer and strives to offer choice, whether of books or compute services. AWS is the golden goose. If Amazon doesn't tie up Anthropic, AWS customers who need a SOTA LLM will spend on Azure or GCP. Think of Anthropic as the "premium" brand -- say, the Duracell of LLMs. Nova is Amazon's march toward a house brand, Amazon Basics if you will, that minimizes the need for Duracell and slashes cost for customers. Not to mention the potential benefits of improving Alexa, which has inexcusably languished despite popularizing AI services. :Edited for readability

coredog64 2y ago
Minor nit: These days I think Ads has taken over as the golden goose, but that doesn’t diminish the contributions of AWS.
- jazzyjackson 2y ago
  Is that why Amazon's product search is terrible? Because it's more profitable for them when I scroll through 5 pages of junk than if I can navigate immediately to the thing I want?
  - wkat4242 2y ago
    Yes because the sellers of that junk pay them to put it there. And most people give up and buy some of that. If it didn't work they wouldn't do it. Cory Doctorow covered this specific phenomenon in his great article that coined the term enshittification.

dotBen 2y ago

It’s fascinating that Amazon Web Services have so many overlapping and competing services to achieve the same objective. Efficiency/small footprint was never their approach :D For example, look how many different types of database they offer (many achieve the same objective but different instantiation) https://aws.amazon.com/products/?aws-products-all.sort-by=item.additionalFields.productNameLowercase&aws-products-all.sort-order=asc&awsf.re%3AInvent=*all&awsf.Free%20Tier%20Type=*all&awsf.tech-category=tech-category%23databases https://aws.amazon.com/products/?aws-products-all.sort-by=it...

bushbaba 2y ago
To quote, “right tool for right job”.
UltraSane 2y ago
Soon AWS is going to need an LLM just to recommend what service a customer should use.
- htrp 2y ago
  Let me tell you about Amazon Q
Jfurrrio2 2y ago
They are not competing those are offerings. "AWS has many offerings" is a completly different thing than saying they compete against each other.

donavanm 2y ago

As others said the product isnt the model, its the API based token usage. Happily selling whatever model you need, with easy integrations from the rest of your aws stack, is the entire point.