Your comment was likely focused on dysfunctional parts of the culture there (and that seems to be how most replies to you interpreted it as well). There's truth to that, sure. But I think respect for data sensitivity and security is also a big part of what makes the culture ill-suited for frontier AI lab work.

When I was at AWS, we had data access locked down very tightly. I was trying to train a model to predict how long various dynamic workloads running on behalf of customers would take. Just getting access to anonymized production data from a DB that my team owned took well over a month and had me compromise heavily on what attributes I could access. I also spent a decent amount of time in meetings with lawyers and compliance folks to explain and justify all our data classifications for PII, retention, access controls, etc. We would review our data policies quite frequently. We needed break-glass procedures to access prod data in our own systems, and it was uncommon to need to resort to that. Even when you broke glass, certain classes of sensitive data would still not be visible to you. On the plus side, We did get quite good at operating and maintaining systems without needing to see sensitive info.

If you contrast that with Meta's disregard for privacy or the way frontier labs disregard the law, it's easy to see why Amazon would struggle in this space.

Amazon chose for itself a reputation as a place that nobody with a choice will work. I'm pleased to see that pay off.

This is a fair take. However, when it comes to warehouse automation/logistics, I constantly see what they're adopting in their hardware stack.

They're a good data point on where the robotics labor frontier is.

This is what I've heard from my friends both there and at Meta. It definitely doesn't carry the prestige it once did. It's more like, "willing to get yelled at, be afraid of being put on a PIP every day, and trying to ensure output outpaces your peers". That's sad, but it's where the industry is at so many places right now.

Anything AI related is going to start needing [month] tags.

> Amazon Is Gutting Its AI Division [July]

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Indeed. I read this news around that time. I thought just now they did second round of AI purge.

I mean, you don't start from zero, you distill everyone else's models....

It's possible for both a new technology to be hugely beneficial in the long run & for early investors to lose a lot of money funding it (if they over-invested / over-paid).

Because anyone can apply any label to anything.

Values drive behavior. Who owns / runs futurism and what are their values?

Journalism / media as activity needs to be sustainable and unfortunately in our current world it's seems very difficult to sustainably remain high integrity. Sometimes it may be greed, but most of the time I think it's survival.

In this case AI is part of what is threatening journalist survivability, so it kind of makes sense.

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I'm not at all close to knowing their internals with books in particular but for most products Amazon has made a significant effort to remove themselves from direct product stocking wherever possible (instead preferring to warehouse other people's stock for efficient shipping). I would guess that they aren't particularly well positioned with publishers at this point... Also, most publishers probably loathe Amazon at this point for all the times Amazon has tried to fleece them w.r.t. Kindle.

Well except for the regular HN anti-AI crowd. Usually the same people that have wished for communism and never ever looked in detail into the 20+ states that failed that way.

Well lately they are capturing their customers' margin for sure.

any to develop?

oof the sidebar on mobile is killing me

The chatbot sidebar seems to also be the only way of accessing certain Amazon features, like the price history. And it seems to be implemented in a particularly silly way - clicking the "price history" button prompts the chatbot to show you the price history, rather than just showing it.

Ublock hides the sidebar from me, but it does still take up the whitespace on the side of the screen. Now it won't remember that I dismissed it and it pops back in on every new screen. I am just used to the screen being narrower now. But it is still annoying.

They could revert to the pre-LLM craze where Alexa was actually able to answer prompts in a reasonable amount of time. Alexa is a glorified egg timer for nearly all users - it's super convenient to use a voice prompt to start/stop timers while cooking and being able to play music on voice demand is kinda alright. It genuinely doesn't need to answer hard questions.

Alexa had already been using other models like Claude depending on the question, and the French version for example uses Mistral.

Basic pre-LLM speech-to-text and a passthrough to duckduckgo would beat their current product, so...