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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 Gravito

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.
  - PartiallyTyped 1y ago
    Huh? That’s quite the assertion. They provide the infrastructure for Anthropic, so if that’s not large scale idk what is.
    - ZeroCool2u 1y ago
      They have to use GCP as well, which is arguably a strong indictment of their experience with AWS. Coincidentally, this aligns with my experience trying to train on AWS.
  - lizknope 1y ago
    I started this part of the thread and mentioned Trainium but the person you replied to gave a link. Follow that and you can see Amazon's chips that they designed. Amazon wants people to move away from Nvidia GPUs and to their own custom chips. https://aws.amazon.com/ai/machine-learning/inferentia/ https://aws.amazon.com/ai/machine-learning/inferentia/ https://aws.amazon.com/ai/machine-learning/trainium/ https://aws.amazon.com/ai/machine-learning/trainium/
    - mips_avatar 1y ago
      TBH I was just going off of that I've heard AWS is a terrible place to get h100 clusters at scale. And for the training I was looking at we didn't really want to consider going off CUDA.
- JCM9 1y ago
  It’s unclear why Swami is put in charge of this stuff. He’s not a recognized leader in the space and hasn’t delivered a coherent strategy. However, per the article Amazon is struggling to hire and retain the best talent and thus it may just be the best they have.
  - code4tee 1y ago
    Who is “Swami?” Although I suppose that’s just making the point that Amazon’s folks aren’t recognized leaders in this space.
justinator 1y ago
Selling pick axes vs. mining for gold yet again!
- dangus 1y ago
  I'm glad this analogy is at the top. I think that some large companies like AWS really should not try to blow money on AI in ways that only make a lot more sense for companies like Meta, Google, and Apple. AWS can't trap you in their AI systems with network effects that the other competitors can. Companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are still incredibly risky investments especially because of the wild capital investments and complete lack of moat. At least when Facebook was making OpenAI's revenue numbers off of 2 billion active users it was trapping people in a social network where there were real negative consequences to leaving. In the world of open source chatbots and VSClone forks there's zero friction to moving on to some other solution. OpenAI is making $12 billion a year off of 700 million users [1], or around $17 per user annually. What other products that have no ad support perform that badly? And that's a company that is signing enterprise contracts with companies like Apple, not just some Spotify-like consumer service. [1] This is almost the exact same user count that Facebook had when it turned its first profit.
  - jsnell 1y ago
    > OpenAI is making $12 billion a year off of 700 million users [1], or around $17 per user annually. What other products that have no ad support perform that badly? That's a bit of a strange spin. Their ARPU is low because they are choosing not to monetize 95% of their users at all, and for now are just providing practically limitless free service. But monetising those free users via ads will pretty obviously be both practical and lucrative. And even if there is no technical moat, they seem to have a very solid mind share moat for consumer apps. It isn't enough for competitors to just catch up. They need to be significantly better to shift consumer habits. (For APIs, I agree there is no moat. Switching is just so easy.)
    - 8n4vidtmkvmk 1y ago
      There does seem to be a mind share mote, but all you have to do is piss off users a little bit when there's a good competitor. See Digg to Reddit exodus.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
Mars008 1y ago
This is not mutually exclusive. They have home made robots and let others sell robots on their website. The same way they want to use AI and have resources to make their own. One way to use is to drive those robots. Another to enhance their web site. Current version sucks. I recently return the item because their bot told it has functionality while in fact it didn't.
- rswail 1y ago
  AWS is very much not the same as Amazon the product selling website. The two are effectively separate businesses with a completely separate customer base.

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.
- PartiallyTyped 1y ago
  Huh? That’s quite the assertion. They provide the infrastructure for Anthropic, so if that’s not large scale idk what is.
  - ZeroCool2u 1y ago
    They have to use GCP as well, which is arguably a strong indictment of their experience with AWS. Coincidentally, this aligns with my experience trying to train on AWS.
- lizknope 1y ago
  I started this part of the thread and mentioned Trainium but the person you replied to gave a link. Follow that and you can see Amazon's chips that they designed. Amazon wants people to move away from Nvidia GPUs and to their own custom chips. https://aws.amazon.com/ai/machine-learning/inferentia/ https://aws.amazon.com/ai/machine-learning/inferentia/ https://aws.amazon.com/ai/machine-learning/trainium/ https://aws.amazon.com/ai/machine-learning/trainium/
  - mips_avatar 1y ago
    TBH I was just going off of that I've heard AWS is a terrible place to get h100 clusters at scale. And for the training I was looking at we didn't really want to consider going off CUDA.
JCM9 1y ago
It’s unclear why Swami is put in charge of this stuff. He’s not a recognized leader in the space and hasn’t delivered a coherent strategy. However, per the article Amazon is struggling to hire and retain the best talent and thus it may just be the best they have.
- code4tee 1y ago
  Who is “Swami?” Although I suppose that’s just making the point that Amazon’s folks aren’t recognized leaders in this space.

justinator 1y ago

Selling pick axes vs. mining for gold yet again!

dangus 1y ago
I'm glad this analogy is at the top. I think that some large companies like AWS really should not try to blow money on AI in ways that only make a lot more sense for companies like Meta, Google, and Apple. AWS can't trap you in their AI systems with network effects that the other competitors can. Companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are still incredibly risky investments especially because of the wild capital investments and complete lack of moat. At least when Facebook was making OpenAI's revenue numbers off of 2 billion active users it was trapping people in a social network where there were real negative consequences to leaving. In the world of open source chatbots and VSClone forks there's zero friction to moving on to some other solution. OpenAI is making $12 billion a year off of 700 million users [1], or around $17 per user annually. What other products that have no ad support perform that badly? And that's a company that is signing enterprise contracts with companies like Apple, not just some Spotify-like consumer service. [1] This is almost the exact same user count that Facebook had when it turned its first profit.
- jsnell 1y ago
  > OpenAI is making $12 billion a year off of 700 million users [1], or around $17 per user annually. What other products that have no ad support perform that badly? That's a bit of a strange spin. Their ARPU is low because they are choosing not to monetize 95% of their users at all, and for now are just providing practically limitless free service. But monetising those free users via ads will pretty obviously be both practical and lucrative. And even if there is no technical moat, they seem to have a very solid mind share moat for consumer apps. It isn't enough for competitors to just catch up. They need to be significantly better to shift consumer habits. (For APIs, I agree there is no moat. Switching is just so easy.)
  - 8n4vidtmkvmk 1y ago
    There does seem to be a mind share mote, but all you have to do is piss off users a little bit when there's a good competitor. See Digg to Reddit exodus.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

Mars008 1y ago

This is not mutually exclusive. They have home made robots and let others sell robots on their website. The same way they want to use AI and have resources to make their own. One way to use is to drive those robots. Another to enhance their web site. Current version sucks. I recently return the item because their bot told it has functionality while in fact it didn't.

rswail 1y ago
AWS is very much not the same as Amazon the product selling website. The two are effectively separate businesses with a completely separate customer base.