[panabee]

Amazon is a retailer and strives to offer choice, whether of books or compute services.

AWS is the golden goose. If Amazon doesn't tie up Anthropic, AWS customers who need a SOTA LLM will spend on Azure or GCP.

Think of Anthropic as the "premium" brand -- say, the Duracell of LLMs.

Nova is Amazon's march toward a house brand, Amazon Basics if you will, that minimizes the need for Duracell and slashes cost for customers.

Not to mention the potential benefits of improving Alexa, which has inexcusably languished despite popularizing AI services.

:Edited for readability

[coredog64]

Minor nit: These days I think Ads has taken over as the golden goose, but that doesn’t diminish the contributions of AWS.

[jazzyjackson]

Is that why Amazon's product search is terrible? Because it's more profitable for them when I scroll through 5 pages of junk than if I can navigate immediately to the thing I want?

[wkat4242]

Yes because the sellers of that junk pay them to put it there. And most people give up and buy some of that. If it didn't work they wouldn't do it.

Cory Doctorow covered this specific phenomenon in his great article that coined the term enshittification.