Posted by ripe 9/1/2025
Of course, the AI talent war may end up being an expensive and misguided strategy, stoked by hype and investor over-exuberance.
AWS has Bedrock to use various AI providers and has bundled the licensing into the price, so they are getting the users without having to develop the actual AI.
They provide the compute, networking etc, and they provide the users to the AI vendors.
Why would they need to develop their own?
My intuition is that the root cause it's their frugal culture (frugal as in cheap). They don't want to start a compensation race.
I and a few others still remember the site fondly, and it had the best UX of any social media service I've used since.
In all of these cases, the problem was losing track of what actually benefits users. AI has that problem really bad now because the infrastructure is expensive and the executive class has been sold on the idea that mass layoffs are just around the corner, and they’re pushing hard to ship before the benefits are there.
*Microsoft enters the conversation
https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/24/23930478/microsoft-ceo-s...
They became nearly irrelevant because of mobile and had to claw their way back. That is not faring well.
They eventually made it out and survived because of cloud and gaming, but it took what many people consider a major transformation of the company.
Don't let your personal bias about AI cloud the way you see the world.
No, I'm not. Bill gates famously missed it (and/or severely underestimated the need for internet on Windows PCs) in 1994/5.
Microsoft completely missed the internet, and had to play catchup throughout 1995-1998.
> They became nearly irrelevant because of mobile and had to claw their way back. That is not faring well.
That never happened. They were in no danger at any time. The historic stock price charts, if you care to look them up, would show that the mobile threat you think there was did not even put a blip on their stock price and/or their revenue.
I mean, their revenue never even blipped.
(1) Internet: Netscape came out in 1994, and the internet tidal wave memo was 1995 and internet explorer came out the same year. Windows was rewritten with a focus on the networking stack, with Windows NT coming out in 1993 before the web boom. The internet's value is based on network effects and while you are right that they weren't first to market, they embraced it quickly and if they hadn't it likely would have been disastrous.
(2) Stock price: if you bought MSFT in October the year the iphone came out in 2007, you would take 6 years to break even. If you bought at the top in 2000 you wouldn't break even until 2016. This is a company that was limping along. During the mobile phone boom you'd have been better off putting your money in treasuries than in MSFT.
Yes they survived and were able to do well later. But my original point still stands: if you were running MSFT and wanted to be successful you would have embraced the internet and mobile. Deliberately sitting out a major technological innovation is not a recipe for success because the risk of ruin is very high. And the risk of becoming IBM is even higher.
Using equity returns to claim a business is limping along is bizarre. They were earning $10B profit per year in the early 2000s with 20%+ profit margins, something most businesses can only dream of doing, even today.
https://www.helgilibrary.com/charts/microsoft-corporation-pr...
If that business is limping along, then pretty much all other businesses are on life support.
at that given point in time, this was not their main businesses and they fared quite well.
microsoft missing the mobile is different, because mobile being a competitor to desktop destroyed microsoft's main business.
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.
I spoke to someone who is there now and when you get your yearly review, now you can choose between mostly cash vs mostly stock for your raise and most people choose mostly cash.
I make the same now as I did when I was at AWS and I much prefer my all cash comp over my less cash + RSUs when I was there.
It would have been what ever it takes where base + prorated signing bonus + RSUs would equal $200K taking into account the 5/15/40/40 RSU schedule.
I don’t understand the complains about it. Amazon pays monthly cash ”sign-on bonus” in the first two years, which is ~ equal to the stock that you get in the years three and four (counting at the grant price). Is this fact not advertized well enough?
(Still, though - why work for people who know they're going to treat you so badly you'll probably have to quit?)
There was no way in hell I was going to sell my house and uproot my life to work for Amazon. Then the recruiter after she kept talking suggests I interview for a “permanently remote” [1] “field by design” role at AWS ProServe. I thought sure why not?
The plan was always to make some money - I made over a quarter million more over 3.5 years than I could have made as an enterprise dev working in Atlanta - put AWS on my resume, gain some industry contacts and move on in four years.
I saw the writing on the wall shortly before my 3 year anniversary. I played the game well enough to get past my next vesting period and get my “bust your ass and try to work through your PIP or receive a $40K+ severance and ‘leave immediately’”.
I didn’t hesitate. I took the severance and already had two job offers lined up and had been waiting on the severance offer.
[1] They forced their “field by design” customer facing roles in the office at the end of last year. I would have left anyway before I ever went back into the office.
Maybe your friend talked about relocation bonus, which you need to pay back if you don’t work long enough.
Perhaps they recently changed their policies? I don't know, but it's not a risk I would want to take. Who would want to work for people who treated their coworkers like that?
The full payment that requires pro-rates is even worse. They expect you to pay it fully back. (ie. with the deducted taxes included!)
I bet it is possible to profit from a such scheme if Amazon is able to declare that as a reversed-transaction (similar to VAT-refunds) at the end of the fiscal year.
1. Relocation package a. Lump-sum (7k EUR): You get certain amount of money, and you deal with your own move yourself. (Albeit with some reimbursement possible for the initial trips) b. "Other" (I don't remember the name): More supportive option, good if you have family & furniture to move. They essentially pay everything for you. c. Important: The 7k EUR was subject to the tax, hence I got taxed at 55% (EU) due to having no tax residency at the moment (obviously). Nobody ever mentions this. But the re-payment is with the tax-included, ie. you are expected to pay 7k back! 2. Sign-on bonus: This splits into 2-year period a. 1st year: 50% of the total bonus, transferred to your bank account on your first work day. b. 2nd year: Each month, you get 1/12 of the remaining 50%, essentially something like ~4.18% each month on the second year. c. The 50%/50% ratio may depend on the team/role/location, I heard some of the L4s joined to the team got split of 40%/60% (ie less in the first year) for reasons unbeknownst to me.
Conditions are pretty simple, if you leave (for any reason), you must repay monthly-pro-rated amount that you haven't worked given the total period is 24-months. ie. In Luxembourg, probation is 6-months. (Until) at the end of the probation, Amazon can just fire you for no reason. In this case, since the 2nd year sign-on hasn't vested yet, nothing to pay from that, but you must pay 1/4th of your "relocation expenses" and full half of (ie untaxed full amount divided by 2) sign-on bonus you receive on your first day. (ie. 25% of the total sign-on bonus)
Firstly, I know someone (a Greek national) who left Amazon during his 12th Month. Amazon demanded total of 4k+ euros from the guy, citing he hasn't finished his 12th month, hence the first half of his relocation bonus plus the 1-month of pro-rated sign-on bonus, before tax. As far as I know, it was more or less equivalent to his monthly gross salary, and he paid in installments.
Secondly, I heard someone joined from non-EU country in 2023, and essentially got laid off. But because she was in probation and obviously worker rights are much stricter in EU, Amazon just declared her as a probation-failed case instead of layoff. (She also got laid off within last 2 weeks of her 6-months long probation). Since she only got the residence permit recently, not having more than a few months (when unemployed as a 3rd-country national), plus Amazon demanded money to be paid back. As far as I know she contacted an labour lawyer and they basically advised her to go back and not to pay anything back as it becomes an international matter. And the costs/fees for such is much higher than what would Amazon get it back, hence she did what was suggested. Although it obviously burns the bridges but in this case, Amazon started the fire first...
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As a result, the practices applied here falls no short of what you can hear from the news. As the company has no heart or soul, people are just numbers in a balance-sheet...
Source: I worked at AWS from 2020-2023.
I don't understand this. A friend was recently offered an insane pay package from Amazon (compared to another big-tech). The way I saw it, the Amazon pay package was more attractive than the alternative because of the back-loaded vesting schedule.
Basically they pay you out in cash for the first two years, then after that you have an option to keep working there. If the stock price goes down in the first two years, you got your guaranteed cash -- no risk (and it would be a good time to interview again). If the stock price goes up, you now have basically an option on extra exposure in the form of staying longer with highly valued RSUs, and now getting some high proportion of your pay in RSUs.
It just seems straight up better? If you want the stock instead of fungible cash, just buy it on the open market?
Oh, and if the stock actually goes up more than 15%, then regardless of your performance you won't get a raise because you've already exceeded band penetration.
"Search is broken. If I search for wwvb watch, I get shown tons of watches which are definitely NOT WWVB."
"What browser are you using? Could you try Chrome?"
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.
we need new, smaller companies with different cultures in every space but won’t be getting any in any space, especially not in this one
So essentially a lifestyle business - but some people do think they have growth potential.
Feel free to not leave this out, it's a pet peeve of mine. Thank you for the moment of catharsis.
People are so careful when writing anonymous HN comments and so careless in choosing where to invest their own money and the money of funds of which they are the professional manager
Of course, a lot of money invested in Google was invested at a much lower price; if everyone sold all at once you'd have a hard time finding 2.5T of new money to buy all those shares. We could argue about if "not selling" is the same as "choosing again at the new price" every day... but... Google's not the interesting case here anyway.
For a young company in a hot industry like OpenAI total market cap is even less relevant since so much of the company simply isn't liquid anyway and the numbers come from far fewer instances of purchases than for an established public one.
If Google's market cap were $25 trillion, practically nobody would buy Google stock (and practically everyone who already held the stock would immediately sell) because most investors do not believe that Google can ever pay enough dividends or buy back enough stock to justify such a high valuation.
A company's market cap is a collective estimate of how much money the company will to return to investors in the future. When the company is publicly-traded in an open informational regime such as the US, this collective estimate is usually quite "accurate" in the sense that it is very difficult for any single analyst or single team of analysts to improve on the estimate.
An investor can make a big bet on a small company, yes, but the market cap of a company is more than just an indication of how much money has been bet on the company: it also mean that every investor (big or small) who still holds the stock believes that the expected amount of money that company will return to shareholders exceeds the market cap: if there were a holder of Google stock that did not believe that, he would convert the shares into treasury bills or cash in the bank.
OpenAI has 500B valuation, Anthropic has more than 60B.
It has never been in Amazon or Apple's DNA to chase a product that doesn't have clear revenue outcomes (as long as adoption lands). AI is no different.
IMO, it's the right decision for Amazon and wrong decision for Apple.
Their other problem is they value designers and product managers more than engineers (especially top tier AI engineers).
Both problems are basically the death knell of any hope for Apple to have good AI, but combined? It’s never gonna happen. Which is sad because Apple’s on-device hardware is quite good.
Apple, on the other hand, hasn’t even invested in any of the players.
Also, just yesterday, they appear to have raised $13B from actual investors, so it seems like they’re going to be fine.
https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-raises-series-f-at-...
Or ‘why every large public company tends to suck the same ways in the US eventually’
That these two “inevitable endpoint things” would happen to be linguistically closely related was unlikely.
Since financial engineering is in many ways more essential than the actual business. His best example was a chain hotel. In the majority of cases, a typical hotel is a tax vehicle that happens to rent rooms. So no wonder everything becomes a bank. :)
The franchisee typically pays 10% to 20% royalty to the franchisor (the aforementioned companies). Otherwise, they rent hotel rooms and pay staff to clean them and rent them again.
What is the tax play? That the hotel owner can 1031 into bigger and better hotels? Anyone who owns real estate can do that.
Hotel owner (aka franchisee) puts in capital in a specific way under license, gets help operating it, in exchange for the 10-20% licensing fee paid back to the main corporation.
In many cases, the owner/operator is nearly turnkey, and it’s an effective way of setting up a defacto managed business investment, almost like a LP. Many of the franchised hotels are actually owned/operated by LPs setup for the purpose.
Also in many of these cases, the franchiser provides contacts for financing, may directly facilitate/recruit Capital, and may even provide loans to the franchisee directly.
For most of these larger hotels, the actual act of renting out rooms, etc. is pretty much all automated/managed through the central system anyway, and the majority of the operating costs are structured in such a way as to minimize tax liability.
Is it clearer now?
> a typical hotel is a tax vehicle that happens to rent rooms.
>In many cases, the owner/operator is nearly turnkey,
What does this even mean? Hotels can be turnkey, which in industry terminology means that everything is working sufficiently well such that you can start renting rooms immediately. An owner/operator being turnkey makes no sense.
> setting up a defacto managed business investment
Also makes no sense.
>Also in many of these cases, the franchiser provides contacts for financing, may directly facilitate/recruit Capital, and may even provide loans to the franchisee directly.
Even if true, what does this have to do with taxes?
>For most of these larger hotels, the actual act of renting out rooms, etc. is pretty much all automated/managed through the central system anyway,
No, the actual out of renting out rooms involves housekeepers, maintenance staff, guest service agents, cooks, and management making sure rooms are clean and habitable. Reserving a hotel room is mostly automated, but even that requires a person to manage conflicts of reservations (e.g. unexpectedly needing to extend a stay causing overbooking, changing room types, room locations, etc.)
>and the majority of the operating costs are structured in such a way as to minimize tax liability.
Who doesn't structure their operating costs to minimize their tax liability? If you file married joint instead of married separate or head of household, are you "structuring" your operating costs as a way to minimize tax liability?
The question of how a hotel is used to gain an tax advantage that would otherwise be unavailable remains unanswered.
And how is a hotel a mix of different asset types?
What does GPs and LPs have anything to do with using a hotel to gain a special tax advantage that is not available to any other commercial real estate?
How stocks and bonds come into play is beyond me, unless I am being trolled.
But to summarize, zero evidence of how a hotel is a “tax vehicle”, nor any clarification on what a tax vehicle even is, nor why any other business wouldn’t be able to use the same strategy (if it even exists).
Do some basic reading so you can ask informed questions from the answers you have already been given, instead of insisting someone is an idiot when they point out you are not asking useful questions.
And frankly, no one owes you these answers.
As far as I understand, becoming a bank is inviting a ton of overhead with little profit potential.
Which is the core premise of a bank, even if the business doesn’t say ‘Bank’ on the side of the building.
The two strategies for plants are to grow super tall to absorb the sun, or super wide (and small) to.... absorb the sun.
Tall needs wood or other 'strong' polymer to support height. Short and wide is perhaps weak from an individual level but far more efficient.
And trees and grass respectively have such genetic diversity that it's clear that none of these damn plants are of the same genetic line.
Trees, on the other hand, are a growth habit, exhibited by species in a wide variety of plant families, even grasses (e.g palm trees).
It's a fun image, but just as Facebook isn't becoming Apple, and Amazon won't become OpenAI, evolution phenomenons are more complex than "everything becomes X"
It was common in the post wwii era in America and its Asian allies like Korea with its chaebols and Japan with its somethings I can’t remember the name of. The Asian countries forms were normally based around a single family, we’ll need more time with the current US form to see if they are also dynastic
We are all addicted to growth - everyone is chasing the hockey stick curve which means a business that provides a stable business and grows modestly is seen as a failure in some parts
As a bonus you will have a very long vacation.
We, the tech, are literally a leftover of the once overwhelming engineering superiority of the west that will shrink in the next 5 years.
Once a company gets big off its grand idea, there's little to no chance of it having another big winner, so buying one is best (and its cheaper too, you know it's a good idea, and you don't have to spend so much R&D on it.
I argue it is both understandable (autonomy is a healthy thing) and also damages the culture at large.
You say this as if it's a coercive given, when you could just as easily say.. Nope, and continue to see how you compete with some agility. It might fail, but most of the big tech companies currently acquiring smaller companies themselves started small with acquisition offers being rejected along the way. Sure, there's selection bias at work there, but there are also many cases of smaller to mid-size companies that also said no to acquisition and still managed to find their successful niche.
Being acquired is not a given and neither is failure if you do compete in some way with the megacorps.
I see nothing about the current tech landscape that at all distinguishes it from previous landscapes in which smaller companies succeeded AND rejected acquisition.
It’s the same framing as calling offering someone a higher salary as “poaching” like we’re property being stolen by one lord from another.
Looking at you Steve Jobs and your anti poaching agreement
No matter who is funding that, they are going to be pushing hard for a return (ell, unless they like money going up in smoke)
Amazon is turning into a dinosaur like Cisco or IBM.
Once a use case and platform has stabilized, they'll provide it via AWS, at which poiny the SME market will eat it up.
Just the training. Training off of the internet! Filled with extremists, made up nuttery, biased bs, dogma, a large portion of the internet is stupids talking to stupids.
Just look at all the gibberish scientific papers!
If you want a hallucination prone dataset, just train on the Internet.
Over the next few years, we'll see training on encyclopedias and other data sources from pre-Internet. And we'll see it done on increasingly cheaper hardware.
This tiny branch of computer sciences is decades old, and hasn't even taken off yet. There's plenty of chance for new players.
We already train on these encyclopedias, we've trained models on massive percentages of entire published book content.
None of this will be helpful either, it will be outdated and won't have modern findings, understandings. Nor will it help me diagnose a Windows Server 2019 and a DHCP issue or similar.
Just taking a look at python. How often does the AI know it's python 2.7 vs 3? You may think all the headers say /usr/bin/python3, but they don't. And code snippets don't.
How many coders have read something, then realised it wasn't applicable to their version of the language? My point is, we need to train with certainty, not with random gibberish off the net. We need curated data, to a degree, and even SO isn't curated enough.
And of course, that's even with good data, just not categorized enough.
So one way is to create realms of trust. Some data trusted more deeply, others less so. And we need more categorization of data, and yes, that reduces model complexity and therefore some capabilities.
But we keep aiming for that complexity, without caring about where the data comes from.
And this is where I think smaller companies will come in. The big boys are focusing in brute force. We need subtle.
(Though I'm pretty familiar with some of the concepts, I know some things to avoid (e.g., "push this button to set up a very expensive global enterprise scale observability platform of numerous complicated services, because you asked about a very simple turn-key syslog service"), and I'm expecting the occasional configuration headache (and, lately, configuration wizard bugs).)
For a new startup, I'd use AWS for all serving and hosting purposes by default, iff you have someone who can avoid pitfalls, and handle problems.
If you don't have such a technical person, maybe start off with managed Kubernetes service with high-level UI, at AWS or one of the other cloud providers, and try not to make too big a mess (which might slow you down, or take you down) before you can afford to hire specialists to make sure it keeps working for you.
By whom? Certainly no one I work with. AWS has some sharp edges and frustrations but we couldn't do half of what we do without it.
It's the same as saying buying electricity from a network is worse than having your own generators.
News to me