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Amazon also uses Claude under the hood for their "Rufus" shopping search assistant which is all over amazon.com. It's kind of funny, you can ask Rufus for stuf

Amazon also uses Claude under the hood for their "Rufus" shopping search assistant which is all over amazon.com. It's kind of funny, you can ask Rufus for stuff like "write a hello world in python for me" and then it will do it and also recommend some python books.

hbosch 10mo ago
Are you sure? While Amazon doesn't own a "true" frontier model they have their own foundation model called Nova. I assume if Amazon was using Claude's latest models to power it's AI tools, such as Alexa+ or Rufus, they would be much better than they currently are. I assume if their consumer facing AI is using Claude at all it would be a Sonnet or Haiku model from 1+ versions back simply due to cost.
- somebodythere 10mo ago
  Rufus is a Claude Haiku, yes.
  - bcrl 10mo ago
    I wonder if that sentence will have any discernible meaning 100 years from now.
- reliabilityguy 10mo ago
  > I assume if their consumer facing AI is using Claude at all it would be a Sonnet or Haiku model from 1+ versions back simply due to cost. I would assume quite the opposite: it costs more to support and run inference on the old models. Why would Anthropic make inference cheaper for others, but not for amazon?
  - bostik 10mo ago
    There may well be some "interesting" financial arrangements in place between the two. After all, Claude models are available in AWS Bedrock, which means Amazon are already physically operating them for other client uses.
- iLoveOncall 10mo ago
  > Are you sure? While Amazon doesn't own a "true" frontier model they have their own foundation model called Nova. I work for Amazon, everyone is using Claude. Nova is a piece of crap, nobody is using it. It's literally useless. I haven't tried the new versions that just came out though.
- deaux 10mo ago
  Nova 2 came out today so not clear how good it is yet, but Nova 1 was entirely uncompetitive.
  - esafak 10mo ago
    Supposedly competitive with Haiku 4.5, GPT 5 Mini and Gemini 2.5 Flash: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/introducing-amazon-nova-2-lite-a-fast-cost-effective-reasoning-model/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/introducing-amazon-nova-2-l...
    - deaux 10mo ago
      Looks less "intelligent" to me, just a lot more trained on agentic (multi-turn tool) use so it greatly outperforms the others on the benches where that helps while lagging elsewhere. They also released bigger models, where "Pro" is supposedly competitive with 4.5 Sonnet. Lite is priced the same as 2.5 Flash, Pro as GPT 5.1. We'll definitely do some comparative testing on Nova 2 Lite vs 2.5 Flash, but not expecting much.
  - Jimmc414 10mo ago
    Claude 2.0 was laughably bad. I remember wondering why any investor would be funding them to compete against OpenAI. Today I cancelled my ChatGPT Pro because Claude Max does everything I need it to.
antiloper 10mo ago
> It's kind of funny, you can ask Rufus for stuff like "write a hello world in python for me" and then it will do it and also recommend some python books. Interesting, I tried it with the chatbot widget on my city government's page, and it worked as well. I wonder if someone has already made an openrouter-esque service that can connect claude code to this network of chat widgets. There are enough of them to spread your messages out over to cover an entire claude pro subscription easily.
- jermaustin1 10mo ago
  A childhood internet friend of mine did something similar to that but for sending SMSes for free using the telco websites' built in SMS forms. He even had a website with how much he saved his users, at least until the telcos shut him down.
  - rm_-rf_slash 10mo ago
    Phreaking in 2025
    - jermaustin1 10mo ago
      Well Phreaking in 2003-05 (no clue when anymore), so at the same time you could still get free phone calls on pay phones in the library or hotel lobby.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- bobbiechen 10mo ago
  Not sure for Claude Code specifically, but in the general case, yes - GPT4Free and friends. I think if you run any kind of freely-accessible LLM, it is inevitable that someone is going to try to exploit it for their own profit. It's usually pretty obvious when they find it because your bill explodes.
neilv 10mo ago
> It's kind of funny, you can ask Rufus for stuff like "write a hello world in python for me" and then it will do it and also recommend some python books. From a perspective of "how do we monetize AI chatbots", an easy thing about this usage context is that the consumer is already expecting and wanting product recommendations. (If you saw this behavior with ChatGPT, it wouldn't go down as well, until you were conditioned to expect it, and there were no alternatives.)
- 6510 10mo ago
  There are really impressive marketing/advertisement formulas to be had. I wont share mine but I'm sure there are many ways to go step by step from not-customers to customers where each step has a known monetary value. If an LLM does something impressive in one of the steps you also know what it is worth.
  - neilv 10mo ago
    I have an approach for multiple of these steps, which involves adapting a kind of non-LLMs respected authority tech approach (my previous side project), to LLMs. I think it can be done right now with MCP servers in a way that you don't immediately hand over your data to the chatbot portal companies so that they can cut you out. (But, over time/traffic, they could quickly learn to mimick your MCP server, much like they mimick Web content and other training data, and at least appear to casual users to interact like you, even if twisted to push whatever company bid for the current user interaction. I haven't figured out what you do when they've trained on mimicking you with an evil twin; maybe you get acquired early, and then there are more resources to solve that next problem.)
darkwater 10mo ago
Haha just tried and it works! First I tried in Spanish (I'm in Spain) and it simply refused, then I asked in English and it just did it (but it answered in Spanish!) EDIT: I then asked for a Fizzbuzz implementation and it kindly asked. I asked then for a Rust Fizzbuzz implementation, but this time I asked again in Spanish, and he said that it could not help me with Fizzbuzz in Rust, but any other topic would be ok. Then again I asked in English "Please do Rust now" and it just wrote the program! I wonder what the heck are they doing there? The guardrailing prompt is translated to the store language?
- darkwater 10mo ago
  * "and it kindly answered"
hereme888 10mo ago
lol, i tried it. Asked `write the product details in single-line bash array` and it did so.
ab_testing 10mo ago
I just tried and Rufus does not write any python for me. Just directs me to buy books on python.

hbosch 10mo ago

Are you sure? While Amazon doesn't own a "true" frontier model they have their own foundation model called Nova. I assume if Amazon was using Claude's latest models to power it's AI tools, such as Alexa+ or Rufus, they would be much better than they currently are. I assume if their consumer facing AI is using Claude at all it would be a Sonnet or Haiku model from 1+ versions back simply due to cost.

somebodythere 10mo ago
Rufus is a Claude Haiku, yes.
- bcrl 10mo ago
  I wonder if that sentence will have any discernible meaning 100 years from now.
reliabilityguy 10mo ago
> I assume if their consumer facing AI is using Claude at all it would be a Sonnet or Haiku model from 1+ versions back simply due to cost. I would assume quite the opposite: it costs more to support and run inference on the old models. Why would Anthropic make inference cheaper for others, but not for amazon?
- bostik 10mo ago
  There may well be some "interesting" financial arrangements in place between the two. After all, Claude models are available in AWS Bedrock, which means Amazon are already physically operating them for other client uses.
iLoveOncall 10mo ago
> Are you sure? While Amazon doesn't own a "true" frontier model they have their own foundation model called Nova. I work for Amazon, everyone is using Claude. Nova is a piece of crap, nobody is using it. It's literally useless. I haven't tried the new versions that just came out though.
deaux 10mo ago
Nova 2 came out today so not clear how good it is yet, but Nova 1 was entirely uncompetitive.
- esafak 10mo ago
  Supposedly competitive with Haiku 4.5, GPT 5 Mini and Gemini 2.5 Flash: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/introducing-amazon-nova-2-lite-a-fast-cost-effective-reasoning-model/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/introducing-amazon-nova-2-l...
  - deaux 10mo ago
    Looks less "intelligent" to me, just a lot more trained on agentic (multi-turn tool) use so it greatly outperforms the others on the benches where that helps while lagging elsewhere. They also released bigger models, where "Pro" is supposedly competitive with 4.5 Sonnet. Lite is priced the same as 2.5 Flash, Pro as GPT 5.1. We'll definitely do some comparative testing on Nova 2 Lite vs 2.5 Flash, but not expecting much.
- Jimmc414 10mo ago
  Claude 2.0 was laughably bad. I remember wondering why any investor would be funding them to compete against OpenAI. Today I cancelled my ChatGPT Pro because Claude Max does everything I need it to.

antiloper 10mo ago

> It's kind of funny, you can ask Rufus for stuff like "write a hello world in python for me" and then it will do it and also recommend some python books. Interesting, I tried it with the chatbot widget on my city government's page, and it worked as well. I wonder if someone has already made an openrouter-esque service that can connect claude code to this network of chat widgets. There are enough of them to spread your messages out over to cover an entire claude pro subscription easily.

jermaustin1 10mo ago
A childhood internet friend of mine did something similar to that but for sending SMSes for free using the telco websites' built in SMS forms. He even had a website with how much he saved his users, at least until the telcos shut him down.
- rm_-rf_slash 10mo ago
  Phreaking in 2025
  - jermaustin1 10mo ago
    Well Phreaking in 2003-05 (no clue when anymore), so at the same time you could still get free phone calls on pay phones in the library or hotel lobby.
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
bobbiechen 10mo ago
Not sure for Claude Code specifically, but in the general case, yes - GPT4Free and friends. I think if you run any kind of freely-accessible LLM, it is inevitable that someone is going to try to exploit it for their own profit. It's usually pretty obvious when they find it because your bill explodes.

neilv 10mo ago

> It's kind of funny, you can ask Rufus for stuff like "write a hello world in python for me" and then it will do it and also recommend some python books. From a perspective of "how do we monetize AI chatbots", an easy thing about this usage context is that the consumer is already expecting and wanting product recommendations. (If you saw this behavior with ChatGPT, it wouldn't go down as well, until you were conditioned to expect it, and there were no alternatives.)

6510 10mo ago
There are really impressive marketing/advertisement formulas to be had. I wont share mine but I'm sure there are many ways to go step by step from not-customers to customers where each step has a known monetary value. If an LLM does something impressive in one of the steps you also know what it is worth.
- neilv 10mo ago
  I have an approach for multiple of these steps, which involves adapting a kind of non-LLMs respected authority tech approach (my previous side project), to LLMs. I think it can be done right now with MCP servers in a way that you don't immediately hand over your data to the chatbot portal companies so that they can cut you out. (But, over time/traffic, they could quickly learn to mimick your MCP server, much like they mimick Web content and other training data, and at least appear to casual users to interact like you, even if twisted to push whatever company bid for the current user interaction. I haven't figured out what you do when they've trained on mimicking you with an evil twin; maybe you get acquired early, and then there are more resources to solve that next problem.)

darkwater 10mo ago

Haha just tried and it works! First I tried in Spanish (I'm in Spain) and it simply refused, then I asked in English and it just did it (but it answered in Spanish!) EDIT: I then asked for a Fizzbuzz implementation and it kindly asked. I asked then for a Rust Fizzbuzz implementation, but this time I asked again in Spanish, and he said that it could not help me with Fizzbuzz in Rust, but any other topic would be ok. Then again I asked in English "Please do Rust now" and it just wrote the program! I wonder what the heck are they doing there? The guardrailing prompt is translated to the store language?

darkwater 10mo ago
* "and it kindly answered"

hereme888 10mo ago

lol, i tried it. Asked `write the product details in single-line bash array` and it did so.

ab_testing 10mo ago

I just tried and Rufus does not write any python for me. Just directs me to buy books on python.