I generally agree with you, although Amazon is really paranoid about being behind here.

On the last earnings call the CEO gave a long rambling defensive response to an analyst question on why they’re behind. Reports from the inside also say that leaders are in full blown panic mode, pressing teams to come up with AI offerings even though Amazon really doesn’t have any recognized AI leaders in leadership roles and the best talent in tech is increasingly leaving or steering clear of Amazon.

I agree they should just focus on what they’re good at, which is logistics and fundamental “boring” compute infrastructure things. However leadership there though is just all over the map trying to convince folks their not behind vs just focusing on strengths.

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ericmcer 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

Doesn't Amazon have a huge lead just because of AWS? Every other player is scrambling for hardware/electricity while Amazon has been building out data centers for the last 20 years.

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dragonwriter 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

> Doesn't Amazon have a huge lead just because of AWS?

They have huge exposure because of AWS; if the way people use computing shifts, and AWS isn't well-configured for AI workloads, then AWS has a lot to lose.

> Every other player is scrambling for hardware/electricity while Amazon has been building out data centers for the last 20 years.

Microsoft and Google have also been building out data centers for quite a while, but also haven't sat out the AI talent wars the way Amazon has.

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deanCommie 6 days ago | parent [-]

> AWS isn't well-configured for AI workloads

What does that mean? Not enough GPUs?

	▲	JCM9 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		A few things, including: 1. Price-performance has struggled to stay competitive. There’s some supply-demand forces at play, but the top companies consistently seem to strike better deals elsewhere. 2. The way AWS is architected, especially on networking, isn’t ideal for AI. They’ve dug their heels on in their own networking protocols despite struggling to compete on performance. I personally know of several workloads that left AWS because they couldn’t compete on networking performance. 3. Struggling on the managed side. On paper a service like Bedrock should be great but in practice it’s been a hot mess. I’d love to use Anthropic via Bedrock, but it’s just much more reliable when going direct. AWS has never been great at these sort of managed services at scale and they’re again struggling here.

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JCM9 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

In theory they should, but it’s increasingly looking like they’re struggling to attract/retain the right talent to take advantage of that position. On paper they should be wiping the floor with others in this space. In practice they’re getting their *ss kicked and in a panic on what to do.

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dataking 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

My understanding is that they fell behind on offering the latest gen Nvidia hardware (Blackwell/Blackwell Ultra) due to their focus on internally developed ASICs (Trainium/Inferentia gen 2).

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butlike 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Which bar raiser is going to raise the bar first??