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by iugtmkbdfil834 8 days ago
I feel obligated to ask: Is Jassy competent enough to argue for or against on anything here?

I am willing to accept he has chops with AWS ( or at least hope he understands what he manages ), but my recent encounters with executive class and AI left me kinda depressed in terms of what they are trying to project and what they, clearly, don't know.
2 comments
Insanity 8 days ago
He has smart people working for him whom he can rely on.
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nijave 7 days ago
He might be able to rely on them, but can they rely on him? It's fully possible he consults them then completely misses or butchers the message (really I have no idea, I know very little about him)
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Root_Denied 7 days ago
Competent underlings just means that delegation works to make him look better, it doesn't make him or his actions any smarter or more effective.
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cmiles8 7 days ago
AWS isn’t broadly seen as credible in AI beyond commodity compute, but they are a shareholder here.

Jassy missed the boat on LLMs quite badly and the only real angle he had left was to use Amazon’s cashflow to buy stakes and buy business for Trainium.

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SilverElfin 7 days ago
Did they miss it or are they careful to over invest, especially too early? Maybe their early bets in Anthropic were sized correctly since they’re making more money than all the other big tech investors in frontier labs.
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swaits 7 days ago
They missed it badly. Mostly under Jassy’s reign.

Look at it like this. They had millions of voice interface devices already sitting in some large percentage of (at least US) households.

And they squandered it. Extremely late to the LLM game. Even today the Alexa interface is ridiculously bad.

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cmiles8 7 days ago
Well keep in mind that the “investments” were broadly buying business. We give you a bunch of money, you use that money to buy our stuff.

Yes the equity has book value on the way up, but keep in mind when the bubble pops (or even just cools) Amazon will have to book markdowns from the balance sheet that will tank earnings. Thats a story that’s flying below the radar at the moment.

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SilverElfin 7 days ago
Doesn’t it still mean they have made better investment choices than the other big tech companies? I guess I don’t see why they missed a boat here. Also the models may be as much a commodity as compute.
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