Amazon Bedrock is probably middlemanning an insane amount of token consumption these days for the same reasons.

Is Bedrock a "middleman?" I believe that they run all inference inside of AWS data centers, on their own infrastructure.

Their new endpoint even promises zero operator access [0]

twoodfin 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Sure, but fundamentally they’re acting as a distributor of someone else’s product in the form of the frontier models. That’s a classic middle-man.

No value judgement. I think this is a fantastic strategy.

wmf 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Weights are worth far more than data centers.

> Weights are worth far more than data centers.

I dunno, hey. After all, I can't distill my competitors datacentres :-)

jimbokun 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Why?

Seems like open weight models keep catching up to state of the art within a few months, at most. Doesn’t seem like much of a moat to me.

	▲	twoodfin 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		If/when open-weight models do catch up (i.e. become the dominant product in demand), Amazon transitions from a middle-man to the supplier with the best economies of scale. Great business either way. You could even draw an analogy to Linux/OSS & the origins of AWS. They started as basically an infra middle-man for other people’s technology. But as the core tech commoditized, they transitioned into selling their own higher level services at scale—like Bedrock.