[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.