[JCM9]

This headline is getting old and the story isn’t sticking with folks. They will do layoffs but because core business units are struggling and AWS has turned into a mess of disconnected services that are falling behind peers and they’re trying to clean up that bloated mess… not beside of “AI.”

Amazon is also way behind tech peers on AI. These sorts of puff PR pieces don’t do much to shake that reality.

[zdragnar]

It definitely has the "thought leader" vibe that most fluff pieces from C level types have.

[supertrope]

The AI craze has shown that most businesses leaders blindly follow buzzwords.

[crop_rotation]

> Amazon is also way behind tech peers on AI. These sorts of puff PR pieces don’t do much to shake that reality.

What tech peers is Amazon way behind on AI? Neither MSFT nor AAPL have their own models. FB has no path to model monetization. GOOG is unique but that's it, and AWS might be able to better capitalize on AWS enterprise customers. Amazon was way behind yes but at this point they are positioned well enough to execute.

[jdgoesmarching]

“Behind on AI” isn’t exclusive to models. Azure is raking in money on OpenAI compute and has an entire product line built out in Copilot. I’m not going to argue for the quality of those offerings, but it’s clearly positioned much better for the street than Amazon is.

Google you’ve already covered, and Apple despite its faults has been designing and producing AI-targeted hardware for a decade and has a much clearer story for integrating AI into its lineup.

AWS has a scattered mess of Q-branded services and a consistent track record of shipping garbage enterprise apps like Workmail, Chime, Workdocs, Cognito, and arguably Quicksight. Bedrock APIs are frequently behind in features from their parent vendors, and Bedrock as a whole isn’t better than thousands of LLM management platforms that have already sprung up.

I’ll never fully bet against Amazon as the far and away cloud market leader, but their existing AI position is flimsy and their increasingly hostile position towards their workforce reeks of desperation.

[mips_avatar]

I think the bear case for Azure is they're now just a GPU service provider for OpenAI. This is a business, but it's not a great business. None of their AI products are industry leaders, and nobody would pick copilot if given a choice. Microsoft can't reuse their Teams bundling strategy because the unit costs of copilot are so high. Like for real where is the actually functional powerpoint or excel agent? It's not coming because these products are so sclerotic that there's no interface inside of these codebases for a current gen AI agent to use and provide customer value. Microsoft made it's bed by chasing the next shiny object and having a culture of crushing individual employee agency years ago. Executives might think that layoffs can instill innovation through fear and grind, but that is so misguided.

[readthenotes1]

Anthropic is way behind? That might surprise a few people.

https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/amazon-cons...

[JCM9]

Amazon is just one of many investors in Anthropic.

[paulddraper]

Comment was about $AMZN

Fraction of that is Anthropic investment.

[NitpickLawyer]

> and the story isn’t sticking with folks.

This take is getting old, and the story won't stick with folks till their desk is in a cardboard box...

Out of all the faangs, amz is the best positioned to remove staff and agentify the work they were doing. First, amz constantly churns the lower x%. They've been doing this for years now. They know what to count and who to fire. Second, amz has had everyone write a story about everything they do, day in, day out for years now. Change a lightbulb? Not without a story. Guess what you need for training LLMs? Yup, stories.

There are plenty of people writing stories and coordinating the writing of other stories. Those people will be the first out. It's never the top nor the bottom.