8 ms·

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

by 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.
        bluGill 1y ago
        Most by far are working for someone else. They get no stock option, or if they get them they are of minimal value. Their generally get a good 401k (us only) and so can retire well off but would not call themselves rich.
- awesome_dude 1y ago
  Just FTR - it's VERY rare for people to come up with more than one winning idea Once a company gets big off its grand idea, there's little to no chance of it having another big winner, so buying one is best (and its cheaper too, you know it's a good idea, and you don't have to spend so much R&D on it.
- delfinom 1y ago
  Big companies have never built anything new. It goes back decades. before tech companies, it was giants like GE who grew through acquisition after acquisition and eventually imploded from the incompetence blob (which takes a long time to accumulate the damage). The same will happen to the current big tech companies in a few decades.
  - yuliyp 1y ago
    Sure they do. Amazon built AWS well after it was big. Apple built the iPhone. Microsoft built VS Code. just to name a few examples.
- southernplaces7 1y ago
  >you will be acquired. You say this as if it's a coercive given, when you could just as easily say.. Nope, and continue to see how you compete with some agility. It might fail, but most of the big tech companies currently acquiring smaller companies themselves started small with acquisition offers being rejected along the way. Sure, there's selection bias at work there, but there are also many cases of smaller to mid-size companies that also said no to acquisition and still managed to find their successful niche. Being acquired is not a given and neither is failure if you do compete in some way with the megacorps. I see nothing about the current tech landscape that at all distinguishes it from previous landscapes in which smaller companies succeeded AND rejected acquisition.
  - lovich 1y ago
    > You say this as if it's a coercive given, when you could just as easily say.. Nope, and continue to see how you compete with some agility. It’s the same framing as calling offering someone a higher salary as “poaching” like we’re property being stolen by one lord from another. Looking at you Steve Jobs and your anti poaching agreement
  - thinkingtoilet 1y ago
    I wish more people said no. However, the reality is it appears to be a given. If you're offered millions and millions of dollars, most people do not say no. The world is worse for it, but it's the truth.
    - southernplaces7 1y ago
      I think you really need to reconsider the definition of a given. Because most people don't say no to a thing doesn't make it coercive. Whether the world is worse or better for it in this context, I can't be sure (though I lean more towards big corporations eating nearly all competitors as generally dangerous), but we're still talking about voluntary choices in a market where competition still does frequently emerge to overhaul what's established. It's impressive how often people don't notice this even as it happens all around them in ways that directly benefit their daily lives.
bdangubic 1y ago
> We need new, smaller companies with different cultures in this space we need new, smaller companies with different cultures in every space but won’t be getting any in any space, especially not in this one
- jonny_eh 1y ago
  AI is full of new and smaller companies. Both OpenAI and Anthropic are quite new, but growing fast.
  - israrkhan 1y ago
    new ok.. but smaller? that is not true.
    - michaelt 1y ago
      According to Wikipedia, Google has 187,103 employees, Amazon has 1,556,000, and OpenAI has a mere 3,000 employees. So essentially a lifestyle business - but some people do think they have growth potential.
      - israrkhan 1y ago
        In terms of market cap OpenAI (500B valuation) is 5x smaller than Google.
        malfist 1y ago
        Leaving aside the pendatic "you can't be a multiple smaller than another object", 1/5 the valuation of the 5th most valuable company in the world is probably big enough to qualify you as a big company
        not_kurt_godel 1y ago
        > Leaving aside the pendatic "you can't be a multiple smaller than another object" Feel free to not leave this out, it's a pet peeve of mine. Thank you for the moment of catharsis.
jstummbillig 1y ago
If that is how you feel, then the reason for why it currently is the way it is should not give you much comfort. It's not like Amazon can not decide to change things and throw more money at the issue from a different angle in the future.
daft_pink 1y ago
They sponsor your visa. That’s it.
- sieabahlpark 1y ago
  [dead]
ants_everywhere 1y ago
Smaller companies will still be VC backed, which limits the variation you'll see in culture
SilverElfin 1y ago
Yep Amazon should be split up. No reason that AWS, Alexa, satellite internet, their online store, and groceries have to be one company.
- gadflyinyoureye 1y ago
  But is there grounds to say that as a conglomerate they pose a large harm to market health to merit a breakup? For example, few regulators want to break up Mondragon.
mountainriver 1y ago
AWS has now become one of the most hated tools, right next to Jenkins. Amazon is turning into a dinosaur like Cisco or IBM.
- mvdtnz 1y ago
  > AWS has now become one of the most hated tools By whom? Certainly no one I work with. AWS has some sharp edges and frustrations but we couldn't do half of what we do without it.
  - mountainriver 1y ago
    https://www.reddit.com/r/csMajors/s/WPI0L2Pzsj https://www.reddit.com/r/csMajors/s/WPI0L2Pzsj
- weego 1y ago
  There's no value in Amazon burning money to 'compete' when there no clear endgame. Right now the competition seems to be who can burn a a hundred billion dollars the fastest. Once a use case and platform has stabilized, they'll provide it via AWS, at which poiny the SME market will eat it up.
  - b112 1y ago
    Not only that, but all the compute spent, and hardware bought, will be worthless in 5 years. Just the training. Training off of the internet! Filled with extremists, made up nuttery, biased bs, dogma, a large portion of the internet is stupids talking to stupids. Just look at all the gibberish scientific papers! If you want a hallucination prone dataset, just train on the Internet. Over the next few years, we'll see training on encyclopedias and other data sources from pre-Internet. And we'll see it done on increasingly cheaper hardware. This tiny branch of computer sciences is decades old, and hasn't even taken off yet. There's plenty of chance for new players.
    - wiredpancake 1y ago
awesome_dude 1y ago
The current SoA AI requires massive investment and CPU time (which isn't free) No matter who is funding that, they are going to be pushing hard for a return (ell, unless they like money going up in smoke)
prmph 1y ago
This. It's weird how most of the top tech companies are all morphing into amorphous blobs that want to get into everything and are indistinguishable from each other.
- Izikiel43 1y ago
  Isn’t this something like how everything ends up evolving into a crab?
  - lazide 1y ago
    Carcinisation [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation], yeah. Or ‘why every large public company tends to suck the same ways in the US eventually’
    - nsriv 1y ago
      In the US it seems like every company eventually turns into a bank.
      - kelvinjps10 1y ago
        This is kind of true I never thought about it until now
      - Spooky23 1y ago
        My father in law was an IRS Revenue Agent. His quip was that about 20-30% of the civilian economy has tax avoidance as a primary business objective. Real estate is probably the greatest example. Since financial engineering is in many ways more essential than the actual business. His best example was a chain hotel. In the majority of cases, a typical hotel is a tax vehicle that happens to rent rooms. So no wonder everything becomes a bank. :)
        lotsofpulp 1y ago
        A typical chain hotel (by which I assume you mean a Marriott/Hyatt/Hilton/IHG/Choice/etc brand) is a franchised “small” business. The franchisee typically pays 10% to 20% royalty to the franchisor (the aforementioned companies). Otherwise, they rent hotel rooms and pay staff to clean them and rent them again. What is the tax play? That the hotel owner can 1031 into bigger and better hotels? Anyone who owns real estate can do that.
maxdo 1y ago
Yeah, they will come, new companies from China, that will eat the market too, with their beautiful 996 work life balance, and we will go back to growing corn. As a bonus you will have a very long vacation. We, the tech, are literally a leftover of the once overwhelming engineering superiority of the west that will shrink in the next 5 years.
screye 1y ago
Amazon and Apple have never had fundamental research groups. Even before LLMs, the top big-tech fundamental labs were FAIR, Google Research and MSR. It has never been in Amazon or Apple's DNA to chase a product that doesn't have clear revenue outcomes (as long as adoption lands). AI is no different. IMO, it's the right decision for Amazon and wrong decision for Apple.
- stingraycharles 1y ago
  Didn’t Amazon invest a total of $8 billion in Anthropic? Seems like a much better choice than trying to do things in-house. Apple, on the other hand, hasn’t even invested in any of the players.
  - DSingularity 1y ago
    That’s an investment that’s going to be a write off.
  - rossdavidh 1y ago
    Was it an investment of actual dollars, or "just" cloud compute credits? Microsoft's investment in OpenAI was over 90% Azure credits, we're told. Which raises the possibility that the whole business is mostly about making your cloud compute business look better than it really is...
    - stingraycharles 1y ago
      Of course it’s probably credits, but it’s still beneficial to both of them — having such huge customers is ideal to stress test your product offering. Also, just yesterday, they appear to have raised $13B from actual investors, so it seems like they’re going to be fine. https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-raises-series-f-at-usd183b-post-money-valuation https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-raises-series-f-at-...
- DrewADesign 1y ago
  They got burned by over-promising Apple Intelligence and then embarking on a so-far failed, rudderless journey to land features regular people actually gave a shit about. I’m no expert, but I reckon the exact right move is concentrating on their actual deliverable products and features and letting everyone else blow their cash on a maybe months-long moat for dubiously useful advances in categories most of their customers wish everyone would stop talking about.
crystal_revenge 1y ago
Even if you’re a mid-tier AI researcher… or even a hobbyist one, I can’t see a good reason to go to Amazon.

by rs186 1y ago

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.
      - bluGill 1y ago
        Most by far are working for someone else. They get no stock option, or if they get them they are of minimal value. Their generally get a good 401k (us only) and so can retire well off but would not call themselves rich.
awesome_dude 1y ago
Just FTR - it's VERY rare for people to come up with more than one winning idea Once a company gets big off its grand idea, there's little to no chance of it having another big winner, so buying one is best (and its cheaper too, you know it's a good idea, and you don't have to spend so much R&D on it.
delfinom 1y ago
Big companies have never built anything new. It goes back decades. before tech companies, it was giants like GE who grew through acquisition after acquisition and eventually imploded from the incompetence blob (which takes a long time to accumulate the damage). The same will happen to the current big tech companies in a few decades.
- yuliyp 1y ago
  Sure they do. Amazon built AWS well after it was big. Apple built the iPhone. Microsoft built VS Code. just to name a few examples.
southernplaces7 1y ago
>you will be acquired. You say this as if it's a coercive given, when you could just as easily say.. Nope, and continue to see how you compete with some agility. It might fail, but most of the big tech companies currently acquiring smaller companies themselves started small with acquisition offers being rejected along the way. Sure, there's selection bias at work there, but there are also many cases of smaller to mid-size companies that also said no to acquisition and still managed to find their successful niche. Being acquired is not a given and neither is failure if you do compete in some way with the megacorps. I see nothing about the current tech landscape that at all distinguishes it from previous landscapes in which smaller companies succeeded AND rejected acquisition.
- lovich 1y ago
  > You say this as if it's a coercive given, when you could just as easily say.. Nope, and continue to see how you compete with some agility. It’s the same framing as calling offering someone a higher salary as “poaching” like we’re property being stolen by one lord from another. Looking at you Steve Jobs and your anti poaching agreement
- thinkingtoilet 1y ago
  I wish more people said no. However, the reality is it appears to be a given. If you're offered millions and millions of dollars, most people do not say no. The world is worse for it, but it's the truth.
  - southernplaces7 1y ago
    I think you really need to reconsider the definition of a given. Because most people don't say no to a thing doesn't make it coercive. Whether the world is worse or better for it in this context, I can't be sure (though I lean more towards big corporations eating nearly all competitors as generally dangerous), but we're still talking about voluntary choices in a market where competition still does frequently emerge to overhaul what's established. It's impressive how often people don't notice this even as it happens all around them in ways that directly benefit their daily lives.

bdangubic 1y ago

> We need new, smaller companies with different cultures in this space we need new, smaller companies with different cultures in every space but won’t be getting any in any space, especially not in this one

jonny_eh 1y ago
AI is full of new and smaller companies. Both OpenAI and Anthropic are quite new, but growing fast.
- israrkhan 1y ago
  new ok.. but smaller? that is not true.
  - michaelt 1y ago
    According to Wikipedia, Google has 187,103 employees, Amazon has 1,556,000, and OpenAI has a mere 3,000 employees. So essentially a lifestyle business - but some people do think they have growth potential.
    - israrkhan 1y ago
      In terms of market cap OpenAI (500B valuation) is 5x smaller than Google.
      - malfist 1y ago
        Leaving aside the pendatic "you can't be a multiple smaller than another object", 1/5 the valuation of the 5th most valuable company in the world is probably big enough to qualify you as a big company
      - not_kurt_godel 1y ago
        > Leaving aside the pendatic "you can't be a multiple smaller than another object" Feel free to not leave this out, it's a pet peeve of mine. Thank you for the moment of catharsis.

jstummbillig 1y ago

If that is how you feel, then the reason for why it currently is the way it is should not give you much comfort. It's not like Amazon can not decide to change things and throw more money at the issue from a different angle in the future.

daft_pink 1y ago

They sponsor your visa. That’s it.

sieabahlpark 1y ago
[dead]

ants_everywhere 1y ago

Smaller companies will still be VC backed, which limits the variation you'll see in culture

SilverElfin 1y ago

Yep Amazon should be split up. No reason that AWS, Alexa, satellite internet, their online store, and groceries have to be one company.

gadflyinyoureye 1y ago
But is there grounds to say that as a conglomerate they pose a large harm to market health to merit a breakup? For example, few regulators want to break up Mondragon.

mountainriver 1y ago

AWS has now become one of the most hated tools, right next to Jenkins. Amazon is turning into a dinosaur like Cisco or IBM.

mvdtnz 1y ago
> AWS has now become one of the most hated tools By whom? Certainly no one I work with. AWS has some sharp edges and frustrations but we couldn't do half of what we do without it.
- mountainriver 1y ago
  https://www.reddit.com/r/csMajors/s/WPI0L2Pzsj https://www.reddit.com/r/csMajors/s/WPI0L2Pzsj
weego 1y ago
There's no value in Amazon burning money to 'compete' when there no clear endgame. Right now the competition seems to be who can burn a a hundred billion dollars the fastest. Once a use case and platform has stabilized, they'll provide it via AWS, at which poiny the SME market will eat it up.
- b112 1y ago
  Not only that, but all the compute spent, and hardware bought, will be worthless in 5 years. Just the training. Training off of the internet! Filled with extremists, made up nuttery, biased bs, dogma, a large portion of the internet is stupids talking to stupids. Just look at all the gibberish scientific papers! If you want a hallucination prone dataset, just train on the Internet. Over the next few years, we'll see training on encyclopedias and other data sources from pre-Internet. And we'll see it done on increasingly cheaper hardware. This tiny branch of computer sciences is decades old, and hasn't even taken off yet. There's plenty of chance for new players.
  - wiredpancake 1y ago

awesome_dude 1y ago

The current SoA AI requires massive investment and CPU time (which isn't free) No matter who is funding that, they are going to be pushing hard for a return (ell, unless they like money going up in smoke)

prmph 1y ago

This. It's weird how most of the top tech companies are all morphing into amorphous blobs that want to get into everything and are indistinguishable from each other.

Izikiel43 1y ago
Isn’t this something like how everything ends up evolving into a crab?
- lazide 1y ago
  Carcinisation [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation], yeah. Or ‘why every large public company tends to suck the same ways in the US eventually’
  - nsriv 1y ago
    In the US it seems like every company eventually turns into a bank.
    - kelvinjps10 1y ago
      This is kind of true I never thought about it until now
    - Spooky23 1y ago
      My father in law was an IRS Revenue Agent. His quip was that about 20-30% of the civilian economy has tax avoidance as a primary business objective. Real estate is probably the greatest example. Since financial engineering is in many ways more essential than the actual business. His best example was a chain hotel. In the majority of cases, a typical hotel is a tax vehicle that happens to rent rooms. So no wonder everything becomes a bank. :)
      - lotsofpulp 1y ago
        A typical chain hotel (by which I assume you mean a Marriott/Hyatt/Hilton/IHG/Choice/etc brand) is a franchised “small” business. The franchisee typically pays 10% to 20% royalty to the franchisor (the aforementioned companies). Otherwise, they rent hotel rooms and pay staff to clean them and rent them again. What is the tax play? That the hotel owner can 1031 into bigger and better hotels? Anyone who owns real estate can do that.

maxdo 1y ago

Yeah, they will come, new companies from China, that will eat the market too, with their beautiful 996 work life balance, and we will go back to growing corn. As a bonus you will have a very long vacation. We, the tech, are literally a leftover of the once overwhelming engineering superiority of the west that will shrink in the next 5 years.

screye 1y ago

Amazon and Apple have never had fundamental research groups. Even before LLMs, the top big-tech fundamental labs were FAIR, Google Research and MSR. It has never been in Amazon or Apple's DNA to chase a product that doesn't have clear revenue outcomes (as long as adoption lands). AI is no different. IMO, it's the right decision for Amazon and wrong decision for Apple.

stingraycharles 1y ago
Didn’t Amazon invest a total of $8 billion in Anthropic? Seems like a much better choice than trying to do things in-house. Apple, on the other hand, hasn’t even invested in any of the players.
- DSingularity 1y ago
  That’s an investment that’s going to be a write off.
- rossdavidh 1y ago
  Was it an investment of actual dollars, or "just" cloud compute credits? Microsoft's investment in OpenAI was over 90% Azure credits, we're told. Which raises the possibility that the whole business is mostly about making your cloud compute business look better than it really is...
  - stingraycharles 1y ago
    Of course it’s probably credits, but it’s still beneficial to both of them — having such huge customers is ideal to stress test your product offering. Also, just yesterday, they appear to have raised $13B from actual investors, so it seems like they’re going to be fine. https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-raises-series-f-at-usd183b-post-money-valuation https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-raises-series-f-at-...
DrewADesign 1y ago
They got burned by over-promising Apple Intelligence and then embarking on a so-far failed, rudderless journey to land features regular people actually gave a shit about. I’m no expert, but I reckon the exact right move is concentrating on their actual deliverable products and features and letting everyone else blow their cash on a maybe months-long moat for dubiously useful advances in categories most of their customers wish everyone would stop talking about.

crystal_revenge 1y ago

Even if you’re a mid-tier AI researcher… or even a hobbyist one, I can’t see a good reason to go to Amazon.