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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
[0] https://nova.amazon.com/act
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.
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.
It will always remain weird to me that a publication called Futurism is so outright negative towards our newest technologies.
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...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49082344
This isn't a blip on anyone's radar.
“So… what happened to the previous team?”
If true, Amazon is not really gutting its AI division.
Source: https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-overhauls-ai-strategy...
Couple comments then:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49082344