OpenAI has ChatGPT, Anthropic has Claude, Google has Gemini. But what does Amazon have?
Not a whole lot, it turns out. Unlike its competitors in the tech megacorp scene, Amazon’s standout AI model — organized under the name “Nova” — is about the farthest thing from a household name. And that’s not likely to change anytime soon, because the ecommerce giant is now gutting its in-house AI labs, Bloomberg reports.
Per the outlet, Amazon is scaling back the ambitions of most of its Nova AI models and reorganizing its AI development teams as part of an effort to narrow its focus on “highest priority” goals, after its power-hungry large language models turned out to be a bust.
Accordingly, the company has put most of its AI models on ice, Amazon insiders told Bloomberg. This includes its text-based Nova models, as well as video- and image-generating models, all of which have been placed in a state of “keep the lights on,” meaning they’re technically still supported, but only receive the bare minimum resources needed to sustain them.
Instead, labor and computing power are being diverted toward a singular “frontier-model effort” led by Pieter Abbeel, director of the Berkeley Robot Learning Lab whose robotics company Covariant was hoovered up by Amazon in 2024. At the time Abbeel joined the tech giant, Covariant’s founders were working on AI models for robots, which lines up pretty well with Amazon’s push to automate everything it possibly can.
News of the shift in Amazon’s strategic focus comes a week after it closed one of its key AI offices in San Francisco, an 80-person site specializing in research on artificial general intelligence, the supposed next-level of AI development where the tech obtains human-level intelligence and reasoning skills.
The boom will end and the bubble will burst. Hopefully at least one of those companies goes under. Hopes it’s Google and Meta.
Google is printing so much stupid money that they can still (almost) pay the AI hype from their earnings. Google will (sadly in my opinion) not go under.
They won’t fail, but they will change eventually. Capitalism demands it.
Youtube ads are now unwatchable, they’re trying to wedge people off adblockers but they’ll end up leaving chrome.
Google AI search results cost a LOT more than their classic search results. That’s not a gain in profit.
Everything they’re doing is WAY more expensive and it’s just in the name of trying to prove to investors that they’re in a growth market. AI will stop being allowed to be considered a growth market.
If Youtube isn’t growing, and Gmail isn’t growing and Search isn’t growing, their valuation will plummet.
All of a sudden you’ll see a LOT of firings and a LOT of cost reduction in places that don’t make money.
Oracle is the one that has “bet the farm” so to speak.
Also led by the biggest ahole of the three
It’s a shame Oracle’s downfall couldn’t have happened a decade ago. Ellison has branched out and bought up a bunch of media companies in recent years and is setting up his (somehow even worse) son as heir to his empire, so even if Oracle dies we’re still stuck with the fuckers for the foreseeable future.
He’s been detested for decades now, I’m sure there’s a cohort of greyhair tech workers that’ve been waiting a long time for his downfall. Hopefully he’s leveraged so badly that when the bill comes due, he’ll have to give that shit up and leave us alone.