HN

Need help?
<- Back
Amazon Is Gutting Its AI Division After Sustained Failure

Amazon Is Gutting Its AI Division After Sustained Failure

dpflan

Comments (119)

  • newsicanuse
    But Amazon has so many Applied Scientists even Applied Science managers. Not sure what they do though.
  • atleastoptimal
    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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • yaoke259
    > 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...
  • 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=49082344This isn't a blip on anyone's radar.
  • etothet
    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.[0] https://nova.amazon.com/act
  • 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.
  • Neywiny
    Just occurred to me that Amazon seems interestingly positioned relative to the book sourcing thing. I guess that's still not enough.
  • nitwit005
    > 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • jdw64
    When will GPU servers become affordable
  • kirykl
    Amazon operates by capturing others margin, they’re just waiting for more to develop
  • darkteflon
    That oughta fix it.“So… what happened to the previous team?”
  • grd_dev
    AI itself is progressing but the users are regressing backwards, be ut companies or us.
  • ChrisArchitect
  • 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.
  • syngrog66
    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
  • anon
    undefined
  • 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.
  • villgax
    I started seeing so many ads for their SDK strands or something on reddit, so badly wanting tbe community to pick it up
  • shaunxcode
    3 cheers for bezos!
  • dyauspitr
    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.
  • llmslave
    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
  • 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.
  • _bobm
    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.
  • 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).
  • tonymet
    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 .
  • 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.
  • 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?
  • christkv
    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?
  • lnkdinsuxs
    [dead]
  • nderdweik
    [dead]
  • 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...