redredrobot

8 ms·

31.
by redredrobot 4y ago
There has not been an AI winter in at least a decade, arguably more.
32.
by redredrobot 4y ago
It's a good reference because people are familiar with GPT-3. The paper mostly compares Chinchilla to LaMDA, Jurassic, Gopher, MT-NLG, and GPT-3. In the broader tech industry and even to a certain extent within the AI field, GPT-3 is t
33.
by redredrobot 4y ago
It outperforms the Gopher model
34.
by redredrobot 4y ago
Lol when I said that at an org-level all-hands everyone laughed, but the need for improved PR is very real. But it’s important to remember that there are a ton of extremely happy people at Amazon (or at least AWS, where I worked) they just
35.
by redredrobot 6y ago
At least when the approach works, I think the goal is to not have to have the teams aligned, instead giving them independent mandates that lead to the emergent behavior being what the business needs.
36.
by redredrobot 6y ago
Yeah, that's a fair point.
37.
by redredrobot 6y ago
Well put, I think this is very true.
38.
by redredrobot 6y ago
But I don't really agree. If you are a small team solving a small part of a larger problem and you have done a good job of defining your external interfaces, you can make decisions about how to solve your subproblem quickly and indepen
39.
by redredrobot 6y ago
I worked at Amazon on two-pizza teams. I never thought the two pizza team was about reducing communication, but more allowing faster independent decision making. Once you work on something that is big and complicated enough that it requires
40.
by redredrobot 6y ago
I guess my point is more that as a huge tech company that wants to hire many very good ML researchers, a culture of publishing is necessary
41.
by redredrobot 6y ago
Not to take away from the people who worked hard to shift the culture (which is always hard at a large company), but I saw the same shift happen at Amazon and it came down to a simple fact - it's very hard to recruit and keep the best
42.
by redredrobot 6y ago
I worked in an area where it is really hard to figure out exactly what workloads were being run and where it would have been extremely useful to know even basic things like CPU utilization patterns, network throughput patterns, etc for a sp
43.
by redredrobot 6y ago
What do you mean? Prior to COVID I thought Bezos had his full attention on Blue Origin
44.
by redredrobot 6y ago
Actually if you pay a little attention to Bezos, it's clear that his focus has been outer space at least since he was a college student. IMO Amazon was an opportunity that Bezos saw while Blue Origin is the fulfillment of his lifelong
45.
by redredrobot 6y ago
> Amazon doesn’t invest in greenfield projects that are not customer facing I don't think this is very true, they are just very good at turning around and selling the internal tech. The underlying technology for AWS was developed in
46.
by redredrobot 6y ago
I found that weird. On-call is so central to the technical identity of Amazon that I'm surprised you could get through the hiring process without knowing that you'd be on-call.
47.
by redredrobot 6y ago
Interesting. You're probably right, the experience is different for new grads where the lump sum is really useful.
48.
by redredrobot 6y ago
> I mean in the sense that being customer obsessed should mean you do not evil I think there is a real tension between customer obsession and 'do no evil'. Serving the individual needs of consumers can come at the expense of th
49.
by redredrobot 6y ago
How so? Google is facing employee issues and protests because they sold the 'do no evil' ideal, but the employees don't think some of their projects follow that. I think you would struggle to find an equivalent portion of Ama
50.
by redredrobot 6y ago
I appreciate this being shared, but I have some qualms. I think talking about the Leadership Principles as a 'typical corporate motto' is unfair. Amazon lives their leadership principles far more than the other companies I've
51.
by redredrobot 7y ago
The Charlie Bell ops review meeting (and the various 'make sure you don't embarrass us in front of Charlie' pre-review meetings) is especially critical. It's not just about having the techniques for doing ops well, it&#x
52.
by redredrobot 7y ago
I don't know. I moved from AWS to a <10 person startup and it has a very similar feel.
53.
by redredrobot 7y ago
https://aws.amazon.com/architecture/well-architected/
54.
by redredrobot 7y ago
Making it hard to cross regions is deliberate - I would guess it's a learning from s3 being designed as a global service. And I think if you compared global outages across cloud providers, you would see that strong region isolation has
55.
by redredrobot 7y ago
> a GPU vm with a local SSD on AWS, does not exist I'm pretty sure that's not true. I believe you can get V100s or T4s with local NVMe SSDs.
56.
by redredrobot 7y ago
I don't think your statements about (a) where cloud margins come from and (b) Lambda vs VM cost are correct.
57.
by redredrobot 7y ago
My understanding was that market share is: AWS > Azure > GCP > Alibaba
58.
by redredrobot 7y ago
That's not seriously the real engineering portmortem is it? That looks more like a 'Resolved the issue' update - it is way too shallow and vague. If this was sent out at AWS as a COE (postmortem), it would be ripped apart - i