Again, this sort of booster content speaks of Generative AI dominance as an inevitability despite mounting data that, and I really hate typing these words, Amazon and Apple are correct in their strategy.

This blog post only really makes sense if you wholesale buy into the concept that Generative AI is going to do everything its most ardent boosters claim it will, on the timeline they say it will, none of which has really bore out as true thus far. For anything less, Apple and Amazon’s strategy of commoditization of models themselves makes sense.

That being said, do I have nitpicks over their respective strategies? You betcha. Amazon is so focused on an Apple-like walled-garden approach for enterprise compute that they run the risk of being caught up in shifting tides of geopolitics and nationalism along with increased attention on cost reductions. Apple, on the other hand, is far too exposed with the iPhone being the center of their ecosystem that a fundamentally new device could easily render them the next Nokia.

Between the two, Apple at least seems to be keen innovating at its own pace and hoovering up competition that hits the true moonshots - not that I expect that strategy to keep working as antitrust scrutiny mounts against Big Tech. AWS, by comparison, is seemingly taking the Microsoft and VMware approach of just adding yet another service icon to the catalog and letting customers figure it out for themselves, which, well, just go ask the old guard of Big Tech how that strategy worked out for them when everyone ran into the public cloud.

Neither strategy has long (or even mid) term viability, but AI almost certainly won’t be the tech that pierces their moat.

You want to hear something crazy? Amazon is the biggest capex spender on AI in the world. Amazon is on track to spend over $155 this year alone on AI build out. They've already spent $100b