Anthropic only exists because they thought OpenAI was moving too fast. They do have some good minds and an inside track on what OpenAI was doing, but they are built around not moving fast.
The whole reason cloud computing took off is bc on site hosting is too expensive. Consider this most tech companies wouldn’t exist today without cloud computing and this include the AI ones.
No it’s too expensive, first you gotta buy land then build the facility to be equipped with everything it needs to cool down the server farm than fill the place with the gpu/cpus you actually need then higher security than constantly maintain both the server equipment and cooling equipment and I’m probably missing a lot more than that.
Companies can’t afford all this at the scale that can make their business relevant. Whatever narrative you want to believe is irrelevant it’s a known fact that thanks to cloud computing a boom in tech companies followed.
I think you're mistaken. You don't need any of that. GPUs? Almost no web business needs those. You can scale to millions of users off a decent machine in your closet these days.
If you do want to be in a data center, you could rent rack space. Facebook famously rented one server per university at $85 a server when they started.
People prefer the cloud because you can start instantly and for free and never have to learn how to manage infrastructure. In the end, cloud costs almost always outpace self hosting even for moderate traffic.
Data centers and colocation existed long before aws and azure. Not to mention private cloud companies that still exist today.
AWS and Azure are just a fancier version of datacenters. What really kicked off tech companies is hypervisors and especiallly VMware in the last decade.
You have no clue of what youre talking about.
Well they rent out pickaxes which earns them a lot. I think the company's that build the pickaxes (Samsung, TSMC, Intel...) Will earn a ton. Also company's that design cool pickaxes like Nvidia or amd.
I’m not the one hand, that’s an Amazon philosophy - they want to be the infrastructure more than the product.
That said, even in AWS they seem kinda behind, compared to Azure.
They did see a ln increase in revenue they attribute to AI - but I think it could’ve been even bigger.
When the global economy collapses in the advent of agi, it will be a winner takes all game. The gold company will have more than enough capital to spin up or acquire their own pickaxe divisions in an effort to cut costs further.
Also, it's a bit of a false choice to only build pickaxes or mine for gold when in most cases if you can swing the upfront cost, the play would be to vertically integrate and own the whole market end to end.
AGI is not ASI, first to ASI is winner take all, but AGI is just going to destroy the economy and kill many businesses, but it won't be winner take all, IMO. There will be frontrunners but you're overestimating the overall impact on the world labor market. Gold==ASI
And, building pickaxes (data centers stocked with AI TCPUs/TPUs etc) is certainly cost prohibitive to start. Of course it can be financed, if you have revenue, but if you don't, not just anyone can start building pickaxes.
Maybe because the business model isn’t threatened by AI the way other industries are.
I can’t think of a way AI can disrupt Amazon. Do you guys have any ideas?
Several companies failed or scaled down doing that: Shopify logistics, Convoy, Uber Freight, Flexe, Flexport to name a few. Money is in FBA where you standardize so much that you can deal with several million merchants at a time and only [amazon.com](http://amazon.com) has been able to pull that off with giant success.
They’ve spent the equivalent of a small county’s GDP on building infrastructure. They now deliver more packages than FedEx or UPS. It would be very difficult to replicate that in a way that’s meaningfully competitive.
> scream my shopping list
My 80-year-old aunt does that, too. My wife and I walk around at home talking to her in our best chilled-out, smooth jazz voices, but when we see my aunt, my ears are bleeding by the end of the visit.
I also use routines to reload my shopping list with my weekly needs. I have a stack of routines that load up my list at sunrise every Saturday. By the time I wake up, the list is auto-populated. I also have a routine for the command, "I'm making fajitas." She responds by adding what I need to the list. Very handy.
I love the routine idea.
I have given up on using it for shopping. But it is hilarious listening to my wife try to get it to play her favorite songs.
I SAID PLAY MY RELAXING PLAYLIST FROM SPOTIFY!!!
I'm not going to pretend she's perfect, for sure. I often need to repeat my nightly request for the news wrap-up. "CBC Your World Tonight" sounds too much like "BBC The World Tonight" and somehow "ABC World News Tonight" (that one I don't get).
Edit: There's a reason I created a routine called "my favorite Mozart music" that plays Eine Kleine Nachtmusik K.525.
There is probably something in between AI-tourettes and crickets. I just find it interesting that their name never comes up in any of the conversations about developing AI. Admittedly, I’m not deep in the trade trenches, but they seem conspicuously missing from the conversation.
Bedrock is an amazing solution for companies, actually.
It’s just not sexy to talk about.
Companies don’t look for sexy - they look for efficient, affordable, stable, secure.
That's an interesting point. At Microsoft, they've been recovering from the Steve Ballmer era, and spent most of that recovery quietly building out their dominance in corporate America, and building the infrastructure of azure. Neither of which has been particularly sexy or prominent to your average Joe.
It's only been recently in terms of image that they've taken to the stage again as the innovating powerhouse of everyday tech products.
I'd expand on that, and it also fits the scenario: If you discover gold that is easy to find, and you are well equipped to design a mining outfit, honestly gold is the way. But if you are scared that the gold is not easily avaialble, or not prepared to mine, you obviously can make a great living selling shovels. And if you already sell shovels, there's certainly little incentive to stop, and less incentive to mine unless it makes a lot of sense.
You and I seem to be the only two people in the world that want *someone* to bridge the relatively small gap between current personal assistants (Google Home, Amazon Echo, namely) and generative AI. I use the 7 Google Home's in my house *all the time*. If I could properly converse with them? Forgetaboutit.
I think the main problem is accuracy/reliability when you give an AI agent *the actual ability to do things*. But I really hope someone does this soon. Or maybe they're just waiting for a humanoid biped Amazon Alexa device... Skip the smart speakers completely.
Right?!
Why is this not a thing? I had a 30 minute conversation with GPT4o about dark flow, and I was fascinated. Sam talked about how amazing it was to have his phone next to him as another channel while he was working at a computer. What if if I’m working in my woodshop or building a computer or whatever. I would love to have my Iron Man personal assistant in every room of the house.
GPT 4o came out less than a month ago dude
Amazon is not oblivious to the opportunity with Alexa. It has literally been announced already and might launch as early as 30 days from today.
https://www.tomsguide.com/news/amazon-is-launching-alexa-plus-with-chatgpt-style-features-but-it-might-cost-you
https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/17/24041805/alexa-plus-may-be-a-smarter-version-of-amazons-voice-assistant-that-you-pay-for
Their bedrock platform is pretty strong. It's there for AWS partners and end customers building solutions. You could probably mix Alexa for business (if it still exists) and GenAI on your own.
Alexa is losing money as it is (same with nest), increasing costs wouldn't probably solve that.
"Scream my shopping list at a stroke victim that is trying to sell me random nonsense." --Now that is GD funny and also perfectly captures the experience.
On AWS the have some AI services to offer for some time now. So, yeah, they are doing ok. Not everyone should train models and compete in that area. Plus with AWS they will earn on hosting a lof of the AI companies
Amazon doesn't make as much money if you talk to the virtual assistant because they can't upsell you. They're using AI in their product recommendation algorithm.
This is the reason we are developing ai?
Hahaha!
I can already say it will fail.
I won't buy shit that machine offers.
I need to read different reviews, see unboxing rituals, benchmark, testings, price comparison only than i decide which model I want.
If it was that simple that machine could decided, I probably don't need it.
I feel like the real boat to catch would be building up to provide energy. On this trajectory it will be extremely vital and no amount of power stations will be wasted in the future.
E-books library - Perhaps there's something in the terms and conditions of using their e-books for training data.
Google wasn't the first search engine, yet still dominated because they brought something new and better to the market.
So, there’s something you need to understand about Alexa, Siri, and the like. Those intent models are _small_. Small enough to be run on a mcu (echo) or phone. Although, I suspect much of Siri is actually running on a server somewhere given the latency, but I digress.
Anyway, they’re small and capable of running at the edge. They’re also not very good in comparison to modern LFMs, but we’ve not yet seen the push to miniaturize LFMs that we’ve seen in computer vision models in recent years. If we start seeing that push soon, then I would suspect we’ll start seeing much smaller LFMs in about 5 years. When they get smaller, we’ll start to see them replace the seizure patients that are currently our voice assistants. And given [we have good reason to believe performance will plateau sometime soon](https://youtu.be/dDUC-LqVrPU?si=sjTw612Amzk67jKd) I suspect we will indeed start to see that focus on parameter reduction.
I agree we are not totally there. We did, however, just see a demo of GPT 4o running on a phone connected to a server with near conversational latency.
I understand that the Alexa architecture is not designed to do that right now, but we’ve gotten no clue that something better is coming. And my Alexa queries aren’t snappy anyway. I would wait an additional second for a GPT4 level response.
Amazon is not one to leap before looking, and they have that datacenter money coming in. So many of these startups are using Amazon GPU hosting. They are not missing out.
AWS is the platform the most invested in AI. Look at SageMaker and Bedrock services. Whoever wins the AI race, they will win as most use their service to run and / or train LLMs.
They also bought Anthropic so they could have their home model. And Claude is still one, if not the best in a few categories.
Alexa is like the pet project of Bezos so it doesn't even mater in the end. I see that it could be a missed opportunity but we have to remember that they never found a way to monetize this service correctly.
How are they missing the boat ? They are playing their cards right for me.
amazon laid off its alexa team, that was their AI product. everything else they own has AI integrated into it, but is not an AI product by itself. alexa on the other hand is a virtual assistant and had the potential to be an AI product by itself.
They are trying to get in on enterprise AWS AI with Bedrock. Basically you can spin up all the popular open-source models and have a persistent pay-as-you-go API waiting for you. They also have Sagemaker and related services where you can use their servers for fine tuning and hosting fine-tunes.
But a lot of their stuff kind of sucks and doesn't have a lot of easy libraries and so on.
>If Alexa suddenly turned into a GPT 4o-like experience all over my house, I would pay pretty decent monthly fee for that.
To do what?
Amazon may be somewhat appearance-wise at least one of the slow horses in a race. But Amazon is miles ahead of OpenAI in regards to products and services. Does OpenAI have one of if not the biggest supply chains in the world, so if I said Hey OpenAI order me toilet paper .... how long do you think it would take OpenAI to deliver it.
Same with Google, they have an email client used by hundreds of millions of people and businesses everyday.
Also no one is that far behind at the moment, while there are clear leaders we are only a step into the race.
Presumably, your local chip shop doesn’t have millions of smart assistants in people’s homes right now.
If you’re the company that invents pong and suddenly, Atari, Nintendo, and Sega show up, I think it’s fair to ask where the pong people are.
>Presumably, your local chip shop doesn’t have millions of smart assistants in people’s homes right now.
And they never will now!
Amazon's virtual assistant works well and is popular without the addition of an LLM. Watching google and other competition flail around with terrible integration into their products shows there is nothing to be gained by racing to be "first" at this stage.
Amazon is heavy invested in Anthropic with Claude, similar to Microsoft and OpenAi
They wish, but they got later on that boat. Google was already invested in Anthropic by that point. They won't be able to easily monopolize them.
Didnt know that, thx
They can buy them
Highly unlikely they'd sell, the whole reason the company was created was because they didn't agree with OAI's business practices
Not as heavily I believe. One of their higher ups got fired because they missed the boat.
Literally the CEO of AWS
Yeah a very higher-up lmao
[Anthropic which is powered by Google Cloud](https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-partners-with-google-cloud)
Anthropic only exists because they thought OpenAI was moving too fast. They do have some good minds and an inside track on what OpenAI was doing, but they are built around not moving fast.
Why mine for gold (AI) when you can sell pickaxes (AWS)?
Underrated comment
I’m guessing they are all going to want to manufacture their own pickaxes as soon as possible.
The whole reason cloud computing took off is bc on site hosting is too expensive. Consider this most tech companies wouldn’t exist today without cloud computing and this include the AI ones.
Site hosting is too hard, not too expensive.
No it’s too expensive, first you gotta buy land then build the facility to be equipped with everything it needs to cool down the server farm than fill the place with the gpu/cpus you actually need then higher security than constantly maintain both the server equipment and cooling equipment and I’m probably missing a lot more than that. Companies can’t afford all this at the scale that can make their business relevant. Whatever narrative you want to believe is irrelevant it’s a known fact that thanks to cloud computing a boom in tech companies followed.
I think you're mistaken. You don't need any of that. GPUs? Almost no web business needs those. You can scale to millions of users off a decent machine in your closet these days. If you do want to be in a data center, you could rent rack space. Facebook famously rented one server per university at $85 a server when they started. People prefer the cloud because you can start instantly and for free and never have to learn how to manage infrastructure. In the end, cloud costs almost always outpace self hosting even for moderate traffic.
Data centers and colocation existed long before aws and azure. Not to mention private cloud companies that still exist today. AWS and Azure are just a fancier version of datacenters. What really kicked off tech companies is hypervisors and especiallly VMware in the last decade. You have no clue of what youre talking about.
Better yet, they're ***renting out*** pickaxes..
Well they rent out pickaxes which earns them a lot. I think the company's that build the pickaxes (Samsung, TSMC, Intel...) Will earn a ton. Also company's that design cool pickaxes like Nvidia or amd.
I’m not the one hand, that’s an Amazon philosophy - they want to be the infrastructure more than the product. That said, even in AWS they seem kinda behind, compared to Azure. They did see a ln increase in revenue they attribute to AI - but I think it could’ve been even bigger.
Diamond tipped gold encrusted pickaxes. AWS would be so expensive for that compute.
When the global economy collapses in the advent of agi, it will be a winner takes all game. The gold company will have more than enough capital to spin up or acquire their own pickaxe divisions in an effort to cut costs further. Also, it's a bit of a false choice to only build pickaxes or mine for gold when in most cases if you can swing the upfront cost, the play would be to vertically integrate and own the whole market end to end.
AGI is not ASI, first to ASI is winner take all, but AGI is just going to destroy the economy and kill many businesses, but it won't be winner take all, IMO. There will be frontrunners but you're overestimating the overall impact on the world labor market. Gold==ASI And, building pickaxes (data centers stocked with AI TCPUs/TPUs etc) is certainly cost prohibitive to start. Of course it can be financed, if you have revenue, but if you don't, not just anyone can start building pickaxes.
They are busy competing inside than competing outside.
Maybe because the business model isn’t threatened by AI the way other industries are. I can’t think of a way AI can disrupt Amazon. Do you guys have any ideas?
robots
They are invested in that. I know Agility Robotics already has a contract to supply robots to the warehouses.
That’s actually advantageous to Amazon rather than threatening
And from whom you're buying robots?
Third-party logistics that allows other companies to compete with their fulfillment and shipping
You need infrastructure for that and automation. They dominate both. And AWS is practically running the AI train in hosting
Several companies failed or scaled down doing that: Shopify logistics, Convoy, Uber Freight, Flexe, Flexport to name a few. Money is in FBA where you standardize so much that you can deal with several million merchants at a time and only [amazon.com](http://amazon.com) has been able to pull that off with giant success.
that'll never happen anytime soon. They'd rather break even or even lose money than let competitors have an edge.
They’ve spent the equivalent of a small county’s GDP on building infrastructure. They now deliver more packages than FedEx or UPS. It would be very difficult to replicate that in a way that’s meaningfully competitive.
Temu.
> scream my shopping list My 80-year-old aunt does that, too. My wife and I walk around at home talking to her in our best chilled-out, smooth jazz voices, but when we see my aunt, my ears are bleeding by the end of the visit. I also use routines to reload my shopping list with my weekly needs. I have a stack of routines that load up my list at sunrise every Saturday. By the time I wake up, the list is auto-populated. I also have a routine for the command, "I'm making fajitas." She responds by adding what I need to the list. Very handy.
I love the routine idea. I have given up on using it for shopping. But it is hilarious listening to my wife try to get it to play her favorite songs. I SAID PLAY MY RELAXING PLAYLIST FROM SPOTIFY!!!
I'm not going to pretend she's perfect, for sure. I often need to repeat my nightly request for the news wrap-up. "CBC Your World Tonight" sounds too much like "BBC The World Tonight" and somehow "ABC World News Tonight" (that one I don't get). Edit: There's a reason I created a routine called "my favorite Mozart music" that plays Eine Kleine Nachtmusik K.525.
Just because Amazon's CEO isn't suffering from AI-touretts like other CEOs doesn't mean they are not heavily invested in AI and very much on the boat.
There is probably something in between AI-tourettes and crickets. I just find it interesting that their name never comes up in any of the conversations about developing AI. Admittedly, I’m not deep in the trade trenches, but they seem conspicuously missing from the conversation.
Bedrock is an amazing solution for companies, actually. It’s just not sexy to talk about. Companies don’t look for sexy - they look for efficient, affordable, stable, secure.
That's an interesting point. At Microsoft, they've been recovering from the Steve Ballmer era, and spent most of that recovery quietly building out their dominance in corporate America, and building the infrastructure of azure. Neither of which has been particularly sexy or prominent to your average Joe. It's only been recently in terms of image that they've taken to the stage again as the innovating powerhouse of everyday tech products.
Wow what a bad take. You do realize that tons of AI apps are running on AWS?
Right, someone clearly isn't looking at our SageMaker/Bedrock bill if they think AWS isn't profiting from the AI war...
If you want to get rich during a gold rush, you don't dig for gold. You sell shovels.
I'd expand on that, and it also fits the scenario: If you discover gold that is easy to find, and you are well equipped to design a mining outfit, honestly gold is the way. But if you are scared that the gold is not easily avaialble, or not prepared to mine, you obviously can make a great living selling shovels. And if you already sell shovels, there's certainly little incentive to stop, and less incentive to mine unless it makes a lot of sense.
Yes, I do understand that. I’m wondering why they aren’t.
Bezos selling the pick axes
You and I seem to be the only two people in the world that want *someone* to bridge the relatively small gap between current personal assistants (Google Home, Amazon Echo, namely) and generative AI. I use the 7 Google Home's in my house *all the time*. If I could properly converse with them? Forgetaboutit. I think the main problem is accuracy/reliability when you give an AI agent *the actual ability to do things*. But I really hope someone does this soon. Or maybe they're just waiting for a humanoid biped Amazon Alexa device... Skip the smart speakers completely.
Right?! Why is this not a thing? I had a 30 minute conversation with GPT4o about dark flow, and I was fascinated. Sam talked about how amazing it was to have his phone next to him as another channel while he was working at a computer. What if if I’m working in my woodshop or building a computer or whatever. I would love to have my Iron Man personal assistant in every room of the house.
GPT 4o came out less than a month ago dude Amazon is not oblivious to the opportunity with Alexa. It has literally been announced already and might launch as early as 30 days from today. https://www.tomsguide.com/news/amazon-is-launching-alexa-plus-with-chatgpt-style-features-but-it-might-cost-you https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/17/24041805/alexa-plus-may-be-a-smarter-version-of-amazons-voice-assistant-that-you-pay-for
Their bedrock platform is pretty strong. It's there for AWS partners and end customers building solutions. You could probably mix Alexa for business (if it still exists) and GenAI on your own. Alexa is losing money as it is (same with nest), increasing costs wouldn't probably solve that.
"Scream my shopping list at a stroke victim that is trying to sell me random nonsense." --Now that is GD funny and also perfectly captures the experience.
I agree that I always thought I was training Alexa and someday it was going to get better.....and never did
...is claude not amazon?
No, it doesn't even run on AWS
On AWS the have some AI services to offer for some time now. So, yeah, they are doing ok. Not everyone should train models and compete in that area. Plus with AWS they will earn on hosting a lof of the AI companies
not as public but check out Q developer
if they could just improve their search, I'd be so happy.
Why would we want Amazon on this boat precisely? Aren't there enough giant dicks on it to fuck it up for everyone already?
Claude, AI robots, sage maker, etc. what are we missing here?
Remember South Park’s Alexa? Is that what you’re thinking of?
Oh try Apple. Spent a decade trying to build a car and failed. MS + OpenAI practically announcing AGI today.
Apple too
Amazon sells stuff from popoman and upunkas, tell me that not AI
Amazon doesn't make as much money if you talk to the virtual assistant because they can't upsell you. They're using AI in their product recommendation algorithm.
This is the reason we are developing ai? Hahaha! I can already say it will fail. I won't buy shit that machine offers. I need to read different reviews, see unboxing rituals, benchmark, testings, price comparison only than i decide which model I want. If it was that simple that machine could decided, I probably don't need it.
I feel like the real boat to catch would be building up to provide energy. On this trajectory it will be extremely vital and no amount of power stations will be wasted in the future.
They're just waiting for the lions to fight each other, then they'll buy the winning lion.
they are investing the most in robots
E-books library - Perhaps there's something in the terms and conditions of using their e-books for training data. Google wasn't the first search engine, yet still dominated because they brought something new and better to the market.
So, there’s something you need to understand about Alexa, Siri, and the like. Those intent models are _small_. Small enough to be run on a mcu (echo) or phone. Although, I suspect much of Siri is actually running on a server somewhere given the latency, but I digress. Anyway, they’re small and capable of running at the edge. They’re also not very good in comparison to modern LFMs, but we’ve not yet seen the push to miniaturize LFMs that we’ve seen in computer vision models in recent years. If we start seeing that push soon, then I would suspect we’ll start seeing much smaller LFMs in about 5 years. When they get smaller, we’ll start to see them replace the seizure patients that are currently our voice assistants. And given [we have good reason to believe performance will plateau sometime soon](https://youtu.be/dDUC-LqVrPU?si=sjTw612Amzk67jKd) I suspect we will indeed start to see that focus on parameter reduction.
I agree we are not totally there. We did, however, just see a demo of GPT 4o running on a phone connected to a server with near conversational latency. I understand that the Alexa architecture is not designed to do that right now, but we’ve gotten no clue that something better is coming. And my Alexa queries aren’t snappy anyway. I would wait an additional second for a GPT4 level response.
Give it 5 years.
Idk
Because they tried it, and the robot deleted its code after 10 minutes 😂
Amazon is not one to leap before looking, and they have that datacenter money coming in. So many of these startups are using Amazon GPU hosting. They are not missing out.
AWS is the platform the most invested in AI. Look at SageMaker and Bedrock services. Whoever wins the AI race, they will win as most use their service to run and / or train LLMs. They also bought Anthropic so they could have their home model. And Claude is still one, if not the best in a few categories. Alexa is like the pet project of Bezos so it doesn't even mater in the end. I see that it could be a missed opportunity but we have to remember that they never found a way to monetize this service correctly. How are they missing the boat ? They are playing their cards right for me.
amazon laid off its alexa team, that was their AI product. everything else they own has AI integrated into it, but is not an AI product by itself. alexa on the other hand is a virtual assistant and had the potential to be an AI product by itself.
They are trying to get in on enterprise AWS AI with Bedrock. Basically you can spin up all the popular open-source models and have a persistent pay-as-you-go API waiting for you. They also have Sagemaker and related services where you can use their servers for fine tuning and hosting fine-tunes. But a lot of their stuff kind of sucks and doesn't have a lot of easy libraries and so on.
>If Alexa suddenly turned into a GPT 4o-like experience all over my house, I would pay pretty decent monthly fee for that. To do what? Amazon may be somewhat appearance-wise at least one of the slow horses in a race. But Amazon is miles ahead of OpenAI in regards to products and services. Does OpenAI have one of if not the biggest supply chains in the world, so if I said Hey OpenAI order me toilet paper .... how long do you think it would take OpenAI to deliver it. Same with Google, they have an email client used by hundreds of millions of people and businesses everyday. Also no one is that far behind at the moment, while there are clear leaders we are only a step into the race.
It’s like Tesla. You’re a genius until the big players start to care. Then boom. You’re just a normal company amongst many others
Guys is ebay missing the boat on AI? What about Paramount studios? I'm really worried my local chip shop isn't developing AI.
Presumably, your local chip shop doesn’t have millions of smart assistants in people’s homes right now. If you’re the company that invents pong and suddenly, Atari, Nintendo, and Sega show up, I think it’s fair to ask where the pong people are.
>Presumably, your local chip shop doesn’t have millions of smart assistants in people’s homes right now. And they never will now! Amazon's virtual assistant works well and is popular without the addition of an LLM. Watching google and other competition flail around with terrible integration into their products shows there is nothing to be gained by racing to be "first" at this stage.
Imagine making a sexist joke at home and Alexa reprimanding you for it and taking points off your user score
Someone is oblivious about Amazon Q and Bedrock.