alt Hacker NewsAmazon Is Gutting Its AI Division After Sustained Failure
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They have no doubt realized that hosting third party models is far more profitable.
Let someone else take on the research and training costs, and charge a massive premium for your hardware.
> Instead, labor and computing power are being diverted toward a singular “frontier-model effort” led by Pieter Abbeel
Strange headline given that it seems they are actually just refocusing resources to train a frontier model?
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.
Either you are getting the smartest engineers, or offer the most freedom to pursue interesting goals that aren't on the frontier. Amazon has neither so they naturally aren't going anywhere in that domain.
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.
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.
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.
But Amazon has so many Applied Scientists even Applied Science managers. Not sure what they do though.
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.
Just occurred to me that Amazon seems interestingly positioned relative to the book sourcing thing. I guess that's still not enough.
Tomorrow (October 28th) is the 1 year anniversary of being laid off from the Amazon Devices team. Nearly all of the senior people on my team were laid off at the same time as part of the "pivot to AI" strategy. Hurray for "commitment to accessibility".
This outcome for their years of squandered effort honestly doesn't surprise me as, other than the Graviton/Trainium work, the Amazon efforts were scattershot, half-baked and underinvested. Only the Siri team is more pathetic than the Alexa team. Well maybe Co-pilot stands between those two somewhere.
Amazon Nova is their model? I worked for a company that was being pushed into trying to use AWS's "Nova Act" [0], which I guess was their python-based wrapper to do things in Playwright. I didn't think it used Nova the model under the hood though, or maybe it did. Either way, Nova Act was horrible in terms of performance - it was so...damn...slooooow. Much easier to just use Playwright.
I actually think Amazon is very well placed:
- Single point of billing and vendor is still king in enterprise - look at how much of Ant's revenue flows through AWS Marketplace
- With OSS, models may move to a more of an AWS-shaped problem: host with 5 9s, provide the infra and shovels, do it as cheap as possible, fit them neatly into rest of AWS stack. I think this is actually a huge risk to OpenAI and Anthropic, as more commodization gives hyperscalers more advantage
- Still owns a huge chunk of Anthropic and leverage over compute
With this in mind, I'm not sure why they need a frontier model vs. the playbook they did with Linux (i.e. Kimi-K3-AWS-Enterprise-Edition). They are kind of playing both sides right now I guess, but could really stir things up if they wanted to.
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.
far wiser to sell shovels in a gold rush. let the miners take the risk. the shovel seller gets paid either way.
as an amazon shareholder, I applaud this.
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.
> Instead, labor and computing power are being diverted toward a singular “frontier-model effort”
They are just changing their strategy to invest in a single model? It's not like their AI department is in shambles...
> Amazon’s standout AI model — organized under the name “Nova” — is about the farthest thing from a household name.
I have tried asking people if they've ever used an AI product from certain companies, and you only seem to get "no", or surprise that they have any AI products, for some.
"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.
Amazon operates by capturing others margin, they’re just waiting for more to develop
Alexa+ is pretty terrible. It's surprising how no one has beat them in the home device market. Alexa stagnated and died a product death while still being the standard market option for 5+ years. I was hoping LLMs would improve it but I haven't seen any evidence, even after purchasing their new line.
I might try Google's home option again but I'm not a fan of giving Google second chances since they seem to care even less about committing to products.
That oughta fix it.
“So… what happened to the previous team?”
Story from July OP;
Source: https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-overhauls-ai-strategy...
Couple comments then:
so who is going to be picked up by Amazon to replace their AI?
Amazon is not going to pay for AI internally, and sooner or later they will have to add something internal.
I started seeing so many ads for their SDK strands or something on reddit, so badly wanting tbe community to pick it up
"Instead, labor and computing power are being diverted toward a singular “frontier-model effort”".
If true, Amazon is not really gutting its AI division.
When will GPU servers become affordable
3 cheers for bezos!
not a fan of recent AI wave. but if I wanted to be long on it I'd pick robots, drones and AMI (essentially +1 on Yann LeCun). if Amazon were to be refocusing/doubling-down on those areas too I'd respect it
Hard to innovate on AI when you're firefighting 30+ sevs a week.
funny story actually. I was recruiting an engineer from another stressful team. I pitched to him that we have about 4-6 sevs a quarter, and I was worried he would balk.
He said "that's nothing, when I was at Amazon we had 30 Sevs a week" .
I didn't feel so bad .
My impression of Amazon is that it’s a doer and is scrappy and gets things done at scale quickly. I just don’t see them as a place that is at the forefront of research.
Too much backstabbing from legacy employees inside amazon to allow for grassroots innovation. Good work will get stolen or stamped out by coworkers. Vicious employee base intent on collecting their paychecks
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.
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).
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.
Despite it being an old article things for amazon haven't changed:
you want edge inference, from decision to small models.
That's it. It will be 2c, please.
And yet Amazon has Alexa. They have a user base for a smart chatbot. What's Alexa going to run on for hard questions?
Wait so Microsoft gutted their AI Division and Microsoft looks like it did as well from the list of "departments" that are in the approved buyout list. Does this mean they are just going to be resellers of the big models companies going forward?
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Outdated, sensationalist reporting off July 29 numbers that's already useless in the fast pace nature of the AI space. This is endemic of the last 5 years of "journalism".
The title is clickbait - Amazon is redirecting resources toward another major AI project and that does not, by itself, establish an overall "retreat from AI". The last 5 years have been a time of flux and now companies are starting to focus on niches and gaps in the market.
AI takes substantial focus and investment and we are compute constrained - AWS is correctly consolidating and refocusing by scaling back several of its existing Nova projects (Canvas, Reel) and concentrating resources on a new flagship model effort led by Pieter Abbeel.
If the claim is "sustained failure", what failed against which objectives? Technical capabilities? customer adoption? economics? delivery? The article does little to establish any. Consumer name recognition is a weak substitute for evidence about an enterprise model business!
A good report would have included benchmarks, revenue, or profitability evidence supporting the article's broad failure claim - this lazy "vibecoded" report doesn't even come near.
It credits Bloomberg while linking to Business Insider. That is a straightforward sourcing error - a journalism 101 no no.
If this is the new generation of shoddy, sensationalist "reporting", good riddance!
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AI itself is progressing but the users are regressing backwards, be ut companies or us.
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...
The day is approaching when Anthropic and Open AI will reign as the next generation of big tech. I guess it's an unavoidable cycle. Big tech companies, having grown too large, find it difficult to innovate quickly, and new generations emerge to become the new big tech players. What comes after AI?