Your comment was likely focused on dysfunctional parts of the culture there (and that seems to be how most replies to you interpreted it as well). There's truth to that, sure. But I think respect for data sensitivity and security is also a big part of what makes the culture ill-suited for frontier AI lab work.

When I was at AWS, we had data access locked down very tightly. I was trying to train a model to predict how long various dynamic workloads running on behalf of customers would take. Just getting access to anonymized production data from a DB that my team owned took well over a month and had me compromise heavily on what attributes I could access. I also spent a decent amount of time in meetings with lawyers and compliance folks to explain and justify all our data classifications for PII, retention, access controls, etc. We would review our data policies quite frequently. We needed break-glass procedures to access prod data in our own systems, and it was uncommon to need to resort to that. Even when you broke glass, certain classes of sensitive data would still not be visible to you. On the plus side, We did get quite good at operating and maintaining systems without needing to see sensitive info.

If you contrast that with Meta's disregard for privacy or the way frontier labs disregard the law, it's easy to see why Amazon would struggle in this space.

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JohnMakin 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I read your comment as “amazon acts too responsibly to be a frontier lab,” and that worries me. That they even bothered to do all that stuff is good. That others don’t is bad.

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bilalq 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I did indeed mean it that way, but I agree with you. It sucks, but it's just the unfortunate reality of the world. Many of the most disruptive and successful startups made it there by ignoring legal or moral limitations.

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rkagerer 30 minutes ago | parent [-]

Frankly reading your comments was a relief. I'd rather they take my privacy (and security) seriously. I don't need or want any AI features or technology from Amazon, thanks very much.

	▲	22c 10 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Amazon has a history of fostering off-shoot companies that are given more freedom to innovate[1][2]. Keeping AI development in-house under Bedrock was probably their mistake. There's a big difference between running AI and developing new AI models. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annapurna_Labs [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Lab126

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torginus 30 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Their core selling point is customer trust that their product works as advertised.

From my interactions with them, is that they really care about customer success, and everything including AI is a means to an end to them.

I think building a cool product with undefined reliability and capabilities, then selling fantasies about what it will possibly be able to do down the line isn't really what they do - or what their customers are paying for.

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andai 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Incentives can produce locally rational and globally harmful behavior. (See also: "Moloch", although I'm less of a fan of the concept lately since it focuses exclusively on the harmful aspects of emergent systems, deleting the neutral and positive ones in the process.)

A relevant metaphor is the nuclear arms race. Nobody wants a world full of nukes pointed at each other, but if the other guy is gonna do it...

The argument in this case is, we can't slow down, because China certainly won't, and do you want those guys to build the machine God first? So it's "rational" to maximize p(accidental_skynet).

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Arbortheus 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If the people that do stuff well fail, what does that leave us with?

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piva00 2 hours ago | parent [-]

With the need to enact political change so incentives align for the benefit of society at large.

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Refreeze5224 2 hours ago | parent [-]

This indeed. Economic democracy is as important as political democracy.

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realo 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Careful there... people who cannot even describe or define what communism is will tag you as a communist.

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lnkdinsuxs an hour ago | parent [-]

what is communism and are there verifiable reports of it accomplishing what it promises?

	▲	Refreeze5224 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Where is there verifiable proof that capitalism is not rule by the rich and powerful?

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lnkdinsuxs an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> That they even bothered to do all that stuff is good. That others don’t is bad

good and bad isn't what Meta and AWS is running with. If AWS trains willy nilly on user data like Meta does, AWS is toast. AWS is already taking a huge risk by now using their own take of AWS FDEs competing against their established ecosystem of consulting companies that used to recommend all 583 of AWS products to host a static webpage. Turning of more customers by training on their data is too much of a risk. That's the "good" - a risk analysis.

Meta doesn't care if you stop using Facebook, Whatsapp etc. Frankly, if you are embedded in the Facebook, Whatsapp ecosystem, you don't have a way out as a normie. Even if you are technically capable, good luck publishing your custom Mattermost build for iOS.

Meta has a significant amount of investment in hardware, originally due to Metaverse. The way to monetize that investment is inference and training. That's a do or die decision for Meta. Meta isn't releasing open-weight models because they are "good".

Meta is releasing open-weight models for the same reason Alibaba, NVIDIA or IBM does. Or Google releases Gemma.

There's no "good" or "bad" - the moment Alibaba, NVIDIA, IBM or Google's objective functions change, "Do no evil" will quickly morph into "Do as much evil as necessary without the costs of getting caught exceeding E(outcome)"

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sheepscreek 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That explains a lot. They are anti “move fast and break things” which is great news for enterprises or anyone seeking stability but terrible for innovation.

I don’t condone the use of pirated content for training. But anything that was bought is above the board as far as I’m concerned. Can let the lawyers fight out the minutia and inevitable licensing specifics after the fact (book publishers are hawks).

Fun fact, did you know that every library in the world has an independent contract with every major book publisher?

In cases I am familiar with, they added a condition that a physical book can only be lent X times. After that, the library must purchase a new copy (even if the original copy is in pristine condition). Yeah, hawks.

	▲	djtango an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Seems like what you would get if you were customer-centric and building a cloud platform for enterprise and govt to trust which was all set up pre-AI

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everfrustrated 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

There's a reason companies tend to prefer to acquire over in-house. This is part of the calculus.