Amazon Is Gutting Its AI Division After Sustained Failure

villgax

I started seeing so many ads for their SDK strands or something on reddit, so badly wanting tbe community to pick it up

Neywiny

Just occurred to me that Amazon seems interestingly positioned relative to the book sourcing thing. I guess that's still not enough.

Foxhuls

This article was published on July 29th. I’m not saying it may not still be interesting or whatever but I thought that was worth pointing out.

futuraperdita

Anyone that's been in the Amazon offices in the last few years is not likely to have witnessed a culture that fosters lab-grade innovation.

kirykl

Amazon operates by capturing others margin, they’re just waiting for more to develop

ChrisArchitect

Story from July OP; Source: https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-overhauls-ai-strategy... Couple comments then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49082344

nekooooo

their innovation seems to be limited to renaming the forced sidebar on amazon.com every few months and not allowing me to dismiss their useless features.

bob1029

The frontier of AI has gotten so spicy that the delivery risk of pursuing this rabbit is astronomical. Knowing when to quit and use someone else's solution is critical at this scale. If someone started from zero, how long do we think it would take for them to reach the cost/capability front currently provided by gpt-6.1-terra? How long until OAI figures out a way to distill that down again for pennies on the dollar? Apple seems to have this sorted. You won't find them chasing OAI, Google and Anthropic around the playground. https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/company-annou...

mschuster91

It doesn't make too much sense for Amazon to invest too much of their own money into AI. They already sell a lot of the shovels for training and inference and make ample money from that, and there are enough open weight models on the market to make it infeasible to build a large enough moat.

kazinator

I just played with Nova after seeing this submission. I gave it some real problems for which I used Gemini. It markedly "dumb" in comparison, losing sight of facts that I presented in the first prompt of the chat, and other subsequently introduced, and its responses contain repetitions of the same point-form advice. It's like GPT-3 level or something.

kazinator

Original Business Insider article was submitted several months ago: 6 upvotes, 2 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49082344 This isn't a blip on anyone's radar.

Animats

And yet Amazon has Alexa. They have a user base for a smart chatbot. What's Alexa going to run on for hard questions?

idopmstuff

"With urgent questions swirling over whether LLMs can ever usher in a return on investment — let alone AGI" It will always remain weird to me that a publication called Futurism is so outright negative towards our newest technologies.

cmiles8

Anyone that was any good in the AI space has long since fled Amazon/AWS. It’s just a sea of mediocrity on AI. Thus nobody is surprised by this.

pingou

"Instead, labor and computing power are being diverted toward a singular “frontier-model effort”". If true, Amazon is not really gutting its AI division.

shaunxcode

3 cheers for bezos!

wslh

I wonder if the best play now is not to play and wait until the landscape is clear. They are making partnerships now (e.g OpenAI), and investments (e.g. Anthropic).

darkteflon

That oughta fix it. “So… what happened to the previous team?”

elzbardico

AI labs are first research stuff. We see the things that work, but we all know that a lot of stuff in research fails. Nobody publishes their failures. This is something that requires an ethos completely different from how amazon works and the way jeff bezos sees the world.

blobbers

It would seem that they can experience most of the benefit of AI without most of the cost; anthropic is operating at the frontier and shows that even while supplying the best models and token sales to enterprise, they lose massive amounts of money. Amazon makes 60B+ in profit per year, they don't need to tank that by losing it on training AI / selling tokens. There are plenty of open weight models out there for it to use with most of the benefit and very little of the downside.