AWS specifically have really dropped the ball on this.
I interact regularly with AWS to support our needs in MLOps and to some extent GenAI. 3 of the experts we talked to have all left for competitors in the last year.
re:Invent London this year presented nothing new of note on the GenAI front. The year before was full of promise on Bedrock.
Outside of AWS, I still can’t fathom how they haven’t integrated an AI assistant into Alexa yet either
If you are a top AI researcher, there is no good reason to go to Amazon. For what? Pay? Career development? Company prospect? Work-life balance? You get nothing compared to what other companies offer.
And I say, good. We need new, smaller companies with different cultures in this space. We don't want these giant corporations to dominate and control everything.
Yeah Amazon is massively struggling to hire due to the extremely bad reputation of Andy Jasshole and the RTO 5 policy, and this is not exclusive to AI talents, but is the case for every single role. We have had reqs open for a year in my team and nobody wants to join.
Truthfully, I don't think anyone would recommend their acquaintances to join Amazon right now.
That said, Amazon is actually winning the AI war. They're selling shovels (Bedrock) in the gold rush.
No one is looking at this issue correctly. Saying out of the AI "talent war" is a smart move. AI is due to collapse under its own weight.
1) High-quality training data is effectively exhausted. The next 10× scale model would need 10× more tokens than exist.
2) The Chinchilla rule. Hardware gets 2× cheaper every 18 mo, but model budgets rise 4× in that span. Every flagship LLM therefore costs 2× more than the last, while knock-off models appear years later for pennies. Benchmark gains shrink and regulation piles on. Net result: each new dollar on the next big LLM now buys far less payoff. The "wait-and-copy" option is getting cheaper every day.
AI will subvert and destroy Amazon's internal management culture, where status is gatekept by who can write the best 6-page reports to read before the meeting!
Or more likely -- Amazon management knows just how hard writing actually is, how hard to produce something with clarity and signal instead of just common-knowledge cliches, and so they understand that this LLM wave is overhyped. They're letting the other big players do the hard work, and effectively selling LLMs short by abstaining from the race.
The back-loaded vesting schedule is such blatantly cynical bullshit. It shows that they're planning to overwork you, push you to wash out, and undercompensate you for the experience, which is exactly what I've seen happen to a good number of friends. Amazon has become notorious here in Seattle - everyone knows they're a burnout factory. Some people make it through, and they make good money, but you have to really care about money for that to be worth the effort.
I had an Amazon interview loop on the calendar during my recent job search, a couple of months back, but it was difficult to get excited; they think so very highly of themselves, for what they're offering - and I don't just mean the money, but the culture too. They treat you like an interchangeable wage slave, not like a respected professional; it's all hoops to jump through, and procedures to memorize - dance, monkey, dance!
The recruiter was shocked when I cancelled the rest of the interviews, like, aren't you even going to give us a chance? But no: I had received a good offer from an ambitious, well-organized, well-funded AI startup which was excited to have me on board. With that on the table, why would I put up with Amazon? They won't offer better pay, they can't offer a better culture, and they don't have more interesting problems to work on.
They got away with this attitude in the earlier days but it’s really hurting them now. A good chunk of the best talent out there won’t even consider Amazon. Culturally it’s very hard to turn that around now and catch up.
90% of the folks there that I know that were good have left for elsewhere. Of the ones that didn’t most are on H1Bs and basically have no choice but to stay and deal with the toxic environment.
> The company has flagged its unique pay structure, lagging AI reputation, and rigid return-to-office rules as major hurdles.
No mention of reputation for harsh/ruthless/backstabby management practices towards employees (including for tech white collar, not just biz and blue collar)?
Is that not a major factor? Or are they not aware of it? Or is mentioning it politically off-limits? Or is putting it in writing a big PR risk? Or is putting it in writing a big legal risk?
I know Amazon's reputation for treating employees poorly came up in multiple discussions at one university's big-name AI lab, for example. Not only do some people read the news, but people talk, in groups and privately.
from outside looking in i think this is a move i would support if i were in amazon leadership. let the other players pay for the AI movement, pick up the fruits of their labor a couple of years down the line. i dont think amazon's main play is AI anyways, if anything it's to facilitate AI with their complementary platforms in AWS
> Of course, the AI talent war may end up being an expensive and misguided strategy, stoked by hype and investor over-exuberance.
To me, that's a pretty good explanation.
The world is crazy with AI right now, but when we see how DeepSeek became a major player at a fraction of the cost, and, according to Google researchers, without making theoretical breakthroughs. It looks foolish to be in this race, especially now that we are seeing diminishing returns. Waiting until things settle, learning from others attempts and designing your system not for top performance but for efficiency and profit seems like a sane strategy.
And it is not like Amazon is out of the AI game, they have what really matters: GPUs. This is a gold rush, and as the saying goes, they are more interested in selling pickaxes that finding gold.
AWS is more focused on making money off the infrastructure than on the application itself. It took same approach with kubernetes and might I say it has been very successful.
Does Amazon want to be an AI innovator or an AI enabler?
AWS enables thousands of other companies to run their business. Amazon has designed their own Graviton ARM CPUS and their own Trainium AI chips. You can access these through AWS for your business.
I think Amazon sees AI being used in AWS as a bigger money generator than designing new AI algorithms.
Well Amazon is mostly guided by pragmatism rather then than hype, so there they are, waiting for the dust to settle to see what directly helps their bottom line.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 70.8 ms ] threadI interact regularly with AWS to support our needs in MLOps and to some extent GenAI. 3 of the experts we talked to have all left for competitors in the last year.
re:Invent London this year presented nothing new of note on the GenAI front. The year before was full of promise on Bedrock.
Outside of AWS, I still can’t fathom how they haven’t integrated an AI assistant into Alexa yet either
And I say, good. We need new, smaller companies with different cultures in this space. We don't want these giant corporations to dominate and control everything.
Truthfully, I don't think anyone would recommend their acquaintances to join Amazon right now.
That said, Amazon is actually winning the AI war. They're selling shovels (Bedrock) in the gold rush.
1) High-quality training data is effectively exhausted. The next 10× scale model would need 10× more tokens than exist.
2) The Chinchilla rule. Hardware gets 2× cheaper every 18 mo, but model budgets rise 4× in that span. Every flagship LLM therefore costs 2× more than the last, while knock-off models appear years later for pennies. Benchmark gains shrink and regulation piles on. Net result: each new dollar on the next big LLM now buys far less payoff. The "wait-and-copy" option is getting cheaper every day.
Or more likely -- Amazon management knows just how hard writing actually is, how hard to produce something with clarity and signal instead of just common-knowledge cliches, and so they understand that this LLM wave is overhyped. They're letting the other big players do the hard work, and effectively selling LLMs short by abstaining from the race.
I had an Amazon interview loop on the calendar during my recent job search, a couple of months back, but it was difficult to get excited; they think so very highly of themselves, for what they're offering - and I don't just mean the money, but the culture too. They treat you like an interchangeable wage slave, not like a respected professional; it's all hoops to jump through, and procedures to memorize - dance, monkey, dance!
The recruiter was shocked when I cancelled the rest of the interviews, like, aren't you even going to give us a chance? But no: I had received a good offer from an ambitious, well-organized, well-funded AI startup which was excited to have me on board. With that on the table, why would I put up with Amazon? They won't offer better pay, they can't offer a better culture, and they don't have more interesting problems to work on.
90% of the folks there that I know that were good have left for elsewhere. Of the ones that didn’t most are on H1Bs and basically have no choice but to stay and deal with the toxic environment.
No mention of reputation for harsh/ruthless/backstabby management practices towards employees (including for tech white collar, not just biz and blue collar)?
Is that not a major factor? Or are they not aware of it? Or is mentioning it politically off-limits? Or is putting it in writing a big PR risk? Or is putting it in writing a big legal risk?
I know Amazon's reputation for treating employees poorly came up in multiple discussions at one university's big-name AI lab, for example. Not only do some people read the news, but people talk, in groups and privately.
No! Really? With RTO? Unbelievable /s
To me, that's a pretty good explanation.
The world is crazy with AI right now, but when we see how DeepSeek became a major player at a fraction of the cost, and, according to Google researchers, without making theoretical breakthroughs. It looks foolish to be in this race, especially now that we are seeing diminishing returns. Waiting until things settle, learning from others attempts and designing your system not for top performance but for efficiency and profit seems like a sane strategy.
And it is not like Amazon is out of the AI game, they have what really matters: GPUs. This is a gold rush, and as the saying goes, they are more interested in selling pickaxes that finding gold.
Don't need to train the models to make money hosting them.
AWS enables thousands of other companies to run their business. Amazon has designed their own Graviton ARM CPUS and their own Trainium AI chips. You can access these through AWS for your business.
I think Amazon sees AI being used in AWS as a bigger money generator than designing new AI algorithms.