21 ms·

Amazon has mostly sat out the AI talent war

363 points by ripe 1y ago

https://archive.ph/ed8WJ https://archive.ph/ed8WJ

HuwFulcher 1y ago
Web archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20250901163205/https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-ai-talent-wars-internal-document-2025-8 https://web.archive.org/web/20250901163205/https://www.busin...
HuwFulcher 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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-generative-artificial-intelligence https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/devices/new-alexa-generativ...
  - HuwFulcher 1y ago
    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
  - serial_dev 1y ago
    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.
    - bboygravity 1y ago
      Just pay 0 USD and use Grok app for free? By far the best thing currently available.
      - echelon 1y ago
        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.
        transcriptase 1y ago
        [flagged]
        felixgallo 1y ago
        None of that actually happened.
        inquirerGeneral 1y ago
        Literally documented proof.
        felixgallo 1y ago
        Literally not. Elon Musk even published the infamous algorithm which he had claimed silenced and censored right wing voices. The only thing the algorithm did that was odd was that it had a special case written into it to boost Elon Musk. You can go look it up.
  - iLoveOncall 1y ago
    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.
  - spanishgum 1y ago
    > 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 1y ago
      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 1y ago
        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 1y ago
        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 1y ago
        Meanwhile, Google Fiber has been the same price for 15 years. At least according to the billboard outside my window.
        ls612 1y ago
        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 1y ago
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - israrkhan 1y ago
    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.
- kotaKat 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    They bought a company that did warehouse robots called kiva before that https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Robotics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Robotics
- mv4 1y ago
  Isn't "Alexa+" doing this? (I have not signed up)
- liquidpele 1y ago
  Didnt they basically can most of Alexa a few years ago? I think they realized asking a device questions doesn’t generate profit.
  - redditor98654 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      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.
- BoredPositron 1y ago
  They still have no serverless inference.
  - zmmmmm 1y ago
    Bedrock is not usable for that?
    - BoredPositron 1y ago
      Not for custom models.
  - OliverGuy 1y ago
    SageMaker have serverless inference endpoints
    - BoredPositron 1y ago
      Only if the pipe is defined if you bring your own pipe sage maker offers nothing.
- el_benhameen 1y ago
  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.
- Jordan-117 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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.
- bee_rider 1y ago
  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.
  - snoman 1y ago
    The former. Basically: build, train, test, deploy, monitor, repeat for ML algos.
  - HuwFulcher 1y ago
    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
    - coredog64 1y ago
      All AWS documentation is awful.
rs186 1y ago
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.
- thinkingtoilet 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      Sell out, or get big enough to buy out others.
      - bluGill 1y ago
        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 1y ago
        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.
Mallowram 1y ago
[dead]
giardini 1y ago
Sounds like a winning strategy and a money saver to boot.
- pm90 1y ago
  Exactly! Just build capacity, let other companies duke it out; ultimately they will all likely use AWS for their products anyway.
iLoveOncall 1y ago
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.
- philipallstar 1y ago
  > 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-connection-terminal-block-rto-5-3049521 https://www.phoenixcontact.com/en-pc/products/bolt-connectio...
  - spanishgum 1y ago
    RTO 5 is "return to office, 5 days a week"
    - mensetmanusman 1y ago
      RTO 996 where it at
  - almostgotcaught 1y ago
    [flagged]
- __turbobrew__ 1y ago
  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.
- cyberax 1y ago
indigodaddy 1y ago
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?
willmadden 1y ago
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.
- liquidpele 1y ago
  I agree but it doesn’t seem to be intentional on their part.
- pvtmert 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    > 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.
arduanika 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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 ?)
  - arduanika 1y ago
    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?
    - hugedickfounder 1y ago
      [dead]
    - 4dregress 1y ago
      Who knows what’s going on in that mad man’s mind!
      - 1y ago
HardCodedBias 1y ago
[flagged]
marssaxman 1y ago
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.
- pawelos 1y ago
  > 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 1y ago
    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.
    - pawelos 1y ago
      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.
neilv 1y ago
> 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 1y ago
  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.
  - pydry 1y ago
    They also produce legions of managers who get fed up working for amazon and leave for greener pastures which they then turn toxic.
    - neilv 1y ago
      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.)
kbar13 1y ago
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
lvl155 1y ago
AWS dropped the ball but they didn’t really try. Apple OTOH…
- mensetmanusman 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      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.
gtirloni 1y ago
> "GenAI hiring faces challenges like location No! Really? With RTO? Unbelievable /s
jp0001 1y ago
Eh, looks at my aws bedrock bill, I think they are doing alright.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
GuB-42 1y ago
> 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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
    You mean something like Kiro? https://kiro.dev/ https://kiro.dev/
tinyhouse 1y ago
They invested $8B in Anthropic so they will be OK.
la64710 1y ago
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.
lr4444lr 1y ago
Why would they? I hear their main revenue is in AWS and AdTech. Assuming this is true, why would they need bleeding edge AI?
tough 1y ago
Isnt amazon basically Anthropic's HW partner very much like OpenAI has microsoft ?
- NewJazz 1y ago
  Not only that, I understand they are an investor.
riknos314 1y ago
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 1y ago
  There's also dogfooding though
lizknope 1y ago
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.
- DoesntMatter22 1y ago
  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
  - coredog64 1y ago
    I can make a case: Building their own models like Nova and Titan allow them to build up expertise in how to solve hyperscaler problems. Think of it like Aurora, where they have a generally solved problem (RDBMS) but it needs to be modified to work with the existing low-level primitives. Yes, it can be done in the open, but if I'm AWS, I probably want to jealously guard anything that could be a key differentiator.
- PartiallyTyped 1y ago
  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-mistral-ai-commit-to-democratizing-generative-ai-with-a-strengthened-collaboration/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/machine-learning/aws-and-mistra...
  - mips_avatar 1y ago
    I don't know what democratizing AI means, AWS doesn't have the GPU infrastructure to host inference or training on a large scale.
Isamu 1y ago
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.
randmeerkat 1y ago
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.
phendrenad2 1y ago
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 1y ago
  but in practice the firms that missed major technological advances like the internet or mobile did not fare well.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - lelanthran 1y ago
    > 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 1y ago
      https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-is-still-paying-for-its-mobile-mistakes-10-years-later/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-is-still-paying-for-... https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/24/23930478/microsoft-ceo-satya-nadella-mobile-windows-phone https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/24/23930478/microsoft-ceo-s...
      - lelanthran 1y ago
        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 1y ago
        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.
SillyUsername 1y ago
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-jobs-in-alexa-division.html 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.
shagie 1y ago
I am reminded of the Uncomfortable Amazon Truths ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20980025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20980025 ) by Corey Quinn. While they're protected now, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20980557 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. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1173367909369802752.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1173367909369802752.html maintains the entire chain of tweets.
- chillee 1y ago
  Clearly not true anymore given OpenAI and Anthropic's revenue growth.
  - shagie 1y ago
    Revenue... yes. Profit is still an open question. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/08/chatgpt-gpt-5-openai-altman-loss.html 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.
    - jquery 1y ago
      >Revenue... yes. Profit is still an open question. could have said the same thing about most FAANG companies at one point or another.
      - jcranmer 1y ago
        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.
nickpsecurity 1y ago
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.
WatchDog 1y ago
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?
purplezooey 1y ago
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.
WatchDog 1y ago
> 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 1y ago
  Unless it’s documentDB in which case it manages it front of the scene by just freezing the entire db for minutes on end
mannyv 1y ago
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.
bane 1y ago
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?
- amy_petrik 1y ago
  it's also a "moneyball" situation - hire hyper expensive AI stars or get 10-fold? 100-fold? cheaper smart AI folk sans star power
- boplicity 1y ago
  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.
  - mrits 1y ago
    Not exactly going out on a limb here by predicting hardware manufacturers are going to make money on AI
    - boplicity 1y ago
      True, but I'm arguing that it won't be nearly as profitable to be on the software end.
  - somenameforme 1y ago
    More cynically, the way to get rich during a gold rush is to sell shovels.
nerderloo 1y ago
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.
eachro 1y ago
Didn't Amazon aquihire Adept Labs?
laughing_man 1y ago
Amazon doesn't need people with particular credentials on the org chart to bring in VC money. They already have plenty.
geodel 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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.
    - awill 1y ago
      Agree. It would be really messy if they were paying AI engineers multiple time more than regular engineers.
JCM9 1y ago
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.
hopelite 1y ago
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.
whatever1 1y ago
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.
- karterk 1y ago
  > 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.
  - jorisboris 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      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.
  - matusp 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      > 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 https://www.rundata.co.za/blog/index.html?the-ai-value-chain )
renewiltord 1y ago
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.
EGreg 1y ago
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”?
drake99 1y ago
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.
jacquesm 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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.
  - spiderfarmer 1y ago
    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.
  - elorant 1y ago
    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.
jaydeegee 1y ago
They are in the shovel sales business in this gold rush.
- fuckaj 1y ago
  [dead]
whimsicalism 1y ago
Amazon would have a lot of trouble competing for top talent due to their reputation.
hiddencost 1y ago
Um, Amazon has invested $8B in Anthropic. I think they learned some hard lessons from Alexa.
windex 1y ago
It's probably trying to figure out what it can sell at a large margin.
twiker_s32 1y ago
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.
rswail 1y ago
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?
gherard5555 1y ago
I've been having great success with bottles (https://usebottles.com/ https://usebottles.com/). The fact that you can have multiple tweakable prefix helps a lot.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
duxup 1y ago
Is there any reason to think that you can't just show up late and do your thing after everyone clears a path?
somat 1y ago
Isn't amazon the metaphorical guy selling shovels at the gold rush.
fergie 1y ago
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.
ThinkBeat 1y ago
I am sure that Amazon is making big piles of money proving hardware to run AI compute and related infrastructure products.
segfault99 1y ago
Apple: Hold my beer!
JCM9 1y ago
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.
johnklos 1y ago
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?"
Traster 1y ago
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.
- physhster 1y ago
  So does Pichai... Every time there is something new, he forces Google to pivot, upending everything without much to show for it.
  - BoredPositron 1y ago
    When did Google ever pivot?
    - ethbr1 1y ago
      Social. User-facing AI.
      - earth2mars 1y ago
        Social: YouTube User facing AI: Gemini, Google photos, NotebookLM and plenty of products.
    - chubot 1y ago
      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
atomicnature 1y ago
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.
NoblePublius 1y ago
Why would Amazon want to invest in AI, which would help their customers find what they want to buy, when they make all their profit from showing their customers what they don’t want to buy with monetized search?
draw_down 1y ago
[dead]
shadowtree 1y ago
The Nova line of models, the AWS LLMs, are horrible. So yeah, figures.
janalsncm 1y ago
As far as I understand it, Anthropic is effectively “Amazon AI” similar to how OpenAI is “Microsoft AI”. So they are not sitting it out, they’re very involved.
ssharp 1y ago
> But actually, Amazon, Apple etc aren't natural homes for this, they don't need to burn money to chase it. Why wouldn't consumer AI be a natural home for Apple? Apple is constantly under blast for being slow to AI but if you look at the current state of AI, it feels like something Apple would never release -- the quality just isn't there. I don't necessarily think Apple only dipping their toes into AI is that poor of a decision right now. They still have the ability to blow the roof off the market with agents and device integration whenever the tech is far enough along to be trustworthy to the average consumer.
- dukeyukey 1y ago
  Apple's natural home is hardware, and the consume software integrated with that hardware. Off the top of my head I can't think of any "hard" software created by Apple, it's all about the UX and the integrations. So unless Apple thinks it can outcompete it's BigTech competitors in something it historically hasn't done much of, best leave it to them.
  - acdha 1y ago
    > Off the top of my head I can't think of any "hard" software created by Apple, it's all about the UX and the integrations. This sounds like you’re either unfamiliar with what software they make or underestimate the complexity of things like a modern operating system. For example, most people would consider Swift hard, or the various Core frameworks, or things like designing a new modern file system and doing in place migrations on billion devices, etc.
exabrial 1y ago
The also wisely sat out of the Crypto and NFT hype cycles
smm11 1y ago
My head hurts reading a lot of this AI-like drivel. All I see is a bunch of options for better search engines here. That said, with all this crap feeding off itself, it's not going to get any better. My bet is on Apple's upcoming announcement.
elcapitan 1y ago
There's a special place in Metaverse for people who don't jump on the latest hype train.
KronisLV 1y ago
> Amazon is exploring ways to allow for more "location-flexible" roles, the document added. If only the technology existed to do work remotely, what a shame.
- arccy 1y ago
  if it existed, amazon doesn't have it... (rip chime)
farceSpherule 1y ago
Zuckerberg has to rush into every new fad with billions of dollars because he was a one trick pony with FaceBook. Metaverse will never be FaceBook.
LarsDu88 1y ago
AI directly threatens and can enhance revenue for companies like Google and Meta, so it makes sense for them to invest in those areas. It's relevant for user segmentation, ad targeting, content creation/user engagement, and even search. LLMs are fantastically powerful search and discovery tools. Amazon though, sells physical goods and access to physical servers. Whatever is going on with AI, Amazon will profit from without having to burn its own money in advancing SOTA.
OhMeadhbh 1y ago
Meh. Amazon's strategy is to hire grad students and PhD's from UoW to come and work for them for two years before they go back to academia.
alfiedotwtf 1y ago
“Never interrupt your opponent while he is in the middle of making a mistake” — Shang Tsung
sharadov 1y ago
Amazon is in the business of providing picks and shovels for LLMs. Why should they need to develop their own models?
foxyv 1y ago
I think Amazon is definitely adopting the philosophy of selling shovels to gold miners.
haileyLlyod3 1y ago
[dead]

363 points by ripe 1y ago

https://archive.ph/ed8WJ https://archive.ph/ed8WJ

Web archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20250901163205/https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-ai-talent-wars-internal-document-2025-8 https://web.archive.org/web/20250901163205/https://www.busin...

HuwFulcher 1y ago

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 1y ago
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-generative-artificial-intelligence https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/devices/new-alexa-generativ...
- HuwFulcher 1y ago
  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
- serial_dev 1y ago
  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.
  - bboygravity 1y ago
    Just pay 0 USD and use Grok app for free? By far the best thing currently available.
    - echelon 1y ago
      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.
      - transcriptase 1y ago
        [flagged]
        felixgallo 1y ago
        None of that actually happened.
        inquirerGeneral 1y ago
        Literally documented proof.
        felixgallo 1y ago
        Literally not. Elon Musk even published the infamous algorithm which he had claimed silenced and censored right wing voices. The only thing the algorithm did that was odd was that it had a special case written into it to boost Elon Musk. You can go look it up.
- iLoveOncall 1y ago
  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.
- spanishgum 1y ago
  > 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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      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 1y ago
        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 1y ago
        Meanwhile, Google Fiber has been the same price for 15 years. At least according to the billboard outside my window.
        ls612 1y ago
        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 1y ago
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- israrkhan 1y ago
  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.
kotaKat 1y ago
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 1y ago
  They bought a company that did warehouse robots called kiva before that https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Robotics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Robotics
mv4 1y ago
Isn't "Alexa+" doing this? (I have not signed up)
liquidpele 1y ago
Didnt they basically can most of Alexa a few years ago? I think they realized asking a device questions doesn’t generate profit.
- redditor98654 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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.
BoredPositron 1y ago
They still have no serverless inference.
- zmmmmm 1y ago
  Bedrock is not usable for that?
  - BoredPositron 1y ago
    Not for custom models.
- OliverGuy 1y ago
  SageMaker have serverless inference endpoints
  - BoredPositron 1y ago
    Only if the pipe is defined if you bring your own pipe sage maker offers nothing.
el_benhameen 1y ago
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.
Jordan-117 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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.
bee_rider 1y ago
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.
- snoman 1y ago
  The former. Basically: build, train, test, deploy, monitor, repeat for ML algos.
- HuwFulcher 1y ago
  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
  - coredog64 1y ago
    All AWS documentation is awful.

rs186 1y ago

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.

thinkingtoilet 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    Sell out, or get big enough to buy out others.
    - bluGill 1y ago
      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 1y ago
        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.

Mallowram 1y ago

[dead]

giardini 1y ago

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

pm90 1y ago
Exactly! Just build capacity, let other companies duke it out; ultimately they will all likely use AWS for their products anyway.

iLoveOncall 1y ago

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.

philipallstar 1y ago
> 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-connection-terminal-block-rto-5-3049521 https://www.phoenixcontact.com/en-pc/products/bolt-connectio...
- spanishgum 1y ago
  RTO 5 is "return to office, 5 days a week"
  - mensetmanusman 1y ago
    RTO 996 where it at
- almostgotcaught 1y ago
  [flagged]
__turbobrew__ 1y ago
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.
cyberax 1y ago

indigodaddy 1y ago

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?

willmadden 1y ago

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.

liquidpele 1y ago
I agree but it doesn’t seem to be intentional on their part.
pvtmert 1y ago
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 1y ago
  > 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.

arduanika 1y ago

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 1y ago
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 ?)
- arduanika 1y ago
  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?
  - hugedickfounder 1y ago
    [dead]
  - 4dregress 1y ago
    Who knows what’s going on in that mad man’s mind!
    - 1y ago

HardCodedBias 1y ago

[flagged]

marssaxman 1y ago

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.

pawelos 1y ago
> 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 1y ago
  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.
  - pawelos 1y ago
    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.

neilv 1y ago

> 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 1y ago
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.
- pydry 1y ago
  They also produce legions of managers who get fed up working for amazon and leave for greener pastures which they then turn toxic.
  - neilv 1y ago
    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.)

kbar13 1y ago

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

lvl155 1y ago

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

mensetmanusman 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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.

gtirloni 1y ago

> "GenAI hiring faces challenges like location No! Really? With RTO? Unbelievable /s

jp0001 1y ago

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

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

GuB-42 1y ago

> 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 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  You mean something like Kiro? https://kiro.dev/ https://kiro.dev/

tinyhouse 1y ago

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

la64710 1y ago

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.

lr4444lr 1y ago

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

tough 1y ago

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

NewJazz 1y ago
Not only that, I understand they are an investor.

riknos314 1y ago

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 1y ago
There's also dogfooding though

lizknope 1y ago

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.

DoesntMatter22 1y ago
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
- coredog64 1y ago
  I can make a case: Building their own models like Nova and Titan allow them to build up expertise in how to solve hyperscaler problems. Think of it like Aurora, where they have a generally solved problem (RDBMS) but it needs to be modified to work with the existing low-level primitives. Yes, it can be done in the open, but if I'm AWS, I probably want to jealously guard anything that could be a key differentiator.
PartiallyTyped 1y ago
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-mistral-ai-commit-to-democratizing-generative-ai-with-a-strengthened-collaboration/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/machine-learning/aws-and-mistra...
- mips_avatar 1y ago
  I don't know what democratizing AI means, AWS doesn't have the GPU infrastructure to host inference or training on a large scale.

Isamu 1y ago

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.

randmeerkat 1y ago

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.

phendrenad2 1y ago

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 1y ago
but in practice the firms that missed major technological advances like the internet or mobile did not fare well.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- lelanthran 1y ago
  > 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 1y ago
    https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-is-still-paying-for-its-mobile-mistakes-10-years-later/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-is-still-paying-for-... https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/24/23930478/microsoft-ceo-satya-nadella-mobile-windows-phone https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/24/23930478/microsoft-ceo-s...
    - lelanthran 1y ago
      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 1y ago
        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.

SillyUsername 1y ago

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-jobs-in-alexa-division.html 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.

shagie 1y ago

I am reminded of the Uncomfortable Amazon Truths ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20980025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20980025 ) by Corey Quinn. While they're protected now, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20980557 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. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1173367909369802752.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1173367909369802752.html maintains the entire chain of tweets.

chillee 1y ago
Clearly not true anymore given OpenAI and Anthropic's revenue growth.
- shagie 1y ago
  Revenue... yes. Profit is still an open question. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/08/chatgpt-gpt-5-openai-altman-loss.html 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.
  - jquery 1y ago
    >Revenue... yes. Profit is still an open question. could have said the same thing about most FAANG companies at one point or another.
    - jcranmer 1y ago
      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.

nickpsecurity 1y ago

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.

WatchDog 1y ago

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?

purplezooey 1y ago

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.

WatchDog 1y ago

> 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 1y ago
Unless it’s documentDB in which case it manages it front of the scene by just freezing the entire db for minutes on end

mannyv 1y ago

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.

bane 1y ago

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?

amy_petrik 1y ago
it's also a "moneyball" situation - hire hyper expensive AI stars or get 10-fold? 100-fold? cheaper smart AI folk sans star power
boplicity 1y ago
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.
- mrits 1y ago
  Not exactly going out on a limb here by predicting hardware manufacturers are going to make money on AI
  - boplicity 1y ago
    True, but I'm arguing that it won't be nearly as profitable to be on the software end.
- somenameforme 1y ago
  More cynically, the way to get rich during a gold rush is to sell shovels.

nerderloo 1y ago

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.

eachro 1y ago

Didn't Amazon aquihire Adept Labs?

laughing_man 1y ago

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

geodel 1y ago

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 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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.
  - awill 1y ago
    Agree. It would be really messy if they were paying AI engineers multiple time more than regular engineers.

JCM9 1y ago

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.

hopelite 1y ago

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.

whatever1 1y ago

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.

karterk 1y ago
> 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.
- jorisboris 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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.
- matusp 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    > 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 https://www.rundata.co.za/blog/index.html?the-ai-value-chain )

renewiltord 1y ago

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.

EGreg 1y ago

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”?

drake99 1y ago

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.

jacquesm 1y ago

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 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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.
- spiderfarmer 1y ago
  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.
- elorant 1y ago
  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.

jaydeegee 1y ago

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

fuckaj 1y ago
[dead]

whimsicalism 1y ago

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

hiddencost 1y ago

Um, Amazon has invested $8B in Anthropic. I think they learned some hard lessons from Alexa.

windex 1y ago

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

twiker_s32 1y ago

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.

rswail 1y ago

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?

gherard5555 1y ago

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

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

duxup 1y ago

Is there any reason to think that you can't just show up late and do your thing after everyone clears a path?

somat 1y ago

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

fergie 1y ago

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.

ThinkBeat 1y ago

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

segfault99 1y ago

Apple: Hold my beer!

JCM9 1y ago

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.

johnklos 1y ago

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?"

Traster 1y ago

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.

physhster 1y ago
So does Pichai... Every time there is something new, he forces Google to pivot, upending everything without much to show for it.
- BoredPositron 1y ago
  When did Google ever pivot?
  - ethbr1 1y ago
    Social. User-facing AI.
    - earth2mars 1y ago
      Social: YouTube User facing AI: Gemini, Google photos, NotebookLM and plenty of products.
  - chubot 1y ago
    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

atomicnature 1y ago

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.

NoblePublius 1y ago

Why would Amazon want to invest in AI, which would help their customers find what they want to buy, when they make all their profit from showing their customers what they don’t want to buy with monetized search?

draw_down 1y ago

[dead]

shadowtree 1y ago

The Nova line of models, the AWS LLMs, are horrible. So yeah, figures.

janalsncm 1y ago

As far as I understand it, Anthropic is effectively “Amazon AI” similar to how OpenAI is “Microsoft AI”. So they are not sitting it out, they’re very involved.

ssharp 1y ago

> But actually, Amazon, Apple etc aren't natural homes for this, they don't need to burn money to chase it. Why wouldn't consumer AI be a natural home for Apple? Apple is constantly under blast for being slow to AI but if you look at the current state of AI, it feels like something Apple would never release -- the quality just isn't there. I don't necessarily think Apple only dipping their toes into AI is that poor of a decision right now. They still have the ability to blow the roof off the market with agents and device integration whenever the tech is far enough along to be trustworthy to the average consumer.

dukeyukey 1y ago
Apple's natural home is hardware, and the consume software integrated with that hardware. Off the top of my head I can't think of any "hard" software created by Apple, it's all about the UX and the integrations. So unless Apple thinks it can outcompete it's BigTech competitors in something it historically hasn't done much of, best leave it to them.
- acdha 1y ago
  > Off the top of my head I can't think of any "hard" software created by Apple, it's all about the UX and the integrations. This sounds like you’re either unfamiliar with what software they make or underestimate the complexity of things like a modern operating system. For example, most people would consider Swift hard, or the various Core frameworks, or things like designing a new modern file system and doing in place migrations on billion devices, etc.

exabrial 1y ago

The also wisely sat out of the Crypto and NFT hype cycles

smm11 1y ago

My head hurts reading a lot of this AI-like drivel. All I see is a bunch of options for better search engines here. That said, with all this crap feeding off itself, it's not going to get any better. My bet is on Apple's upcoming announcement.

elcapitan 1y ago

There's a special place in Metaverse for people who don't jump on the latest hype train.

KronisLV 1y ago

> Amazon is exploring ways to allow for more "location-flexible" roles, the document added. If only the technology existed to do work remotely, what a shame.

arccy 1y ago
if it existed, amazon doesn't have it... (rip chime)

farceSpherule 1y ago

Zuckerberg has to rush into every new fad with billions of dollars because he was a one trick pony with FaceBook. Metaverse will never be FaceBook.

LarsDu88 1y ago

AI directly threatens and can enhance revenue for companies like Google and Meta, so it makes sense for them to invest in those areas. It's relevant for user segmentation, ad targeting, content creation/user engagement, and even search. LLMs are fantastically powerful search and discovery tools. Amazon though, sells physical goods and access to physical servers. Whatever is going on with AI, Amazon will profit from without having to burn its own money in advancing SOTA.

OhMeadhbh 1y ago

Meh. Amazon's strategy is to hire grad students and PhD's from UoW to come and work for them for two years before they go back to academia.

alfiedotwtf 1y ago

“Never interrupt your opponent while he is in the middle of making a mistake” — Shang Tsung

sharadov 1y ago

Amazon is in the business of providing picks and shovels for LLMs. Why should they need to develop their own models?

foxyv 1y ago

I think Amazon is definitely adopting the philosophy of selling shovels to gold miners.

haileyLlyod3 1y ago

[dead]