Posted by ripe 9/1/2025
Don't really agree here, yes they screw you financially on cross-AZ bandwidth, but all of their popular services are built to work well across availability zones.
Most people don't need access to a low level consensus service like Paxos, instead they will be using one of amazons managed database services, or s3, that provides higher level abstractions, and automatically manages consensus behind the scenes.
Amazon though, sells physical goods and access to physical servers. Whatever is going on with AI, Amazon will profit from without having to burn its own money in advancing SOTA.
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.
Amazon I think just hasn't understood how to cohesively integrate AI into their offerings. Meanwhile they're selling shovels to the prospectors with AWS.
I guess both of these understand the Ai moat is not very large, and don't buy into AGI dreams.
The most effective way to get an LLM to control a computer right now is to just give it a unix terminal because it's already a text-based environment where programs are expected to be highly interoperable.
What I'm saying is that you don't need to stop everything to redesign around AI, just allow for a decent level of interoperability that iOS (and largely android) doesn't currently have.
The mobile app development model is oriented around packaging somewhat useful software (that could usually be a web app) with malware and selling it for $0.99, necessitating a ton of sandboxing and preventing this type of interoperability in the first place. I would say focus on the semantic HTML aspect of the web and design some way for LLMs to interact with websites in an open-ended way.
How do you explain the Elon keiretsu, though? Tesla and SpaceX are pretty tethered to the physical world, and in theory should have visibility into the same discrepancies that Apple sees. So why is Elon pushing so hard to develop Grok? Is it just ideology for him, or what?
He makes lots of unnecessary major and cringy mistakes in both engineering and business too, but his net on both counts is astounding.
And while he may overuse it for PR, he has put himself at great financial risk when pushing through major capability developments and business hurdles. His rewards were earned.
But the sick picture of the richest person in the world, spamming stupidity, and harming countless numbers of people's lives in order to prop up his juvenile ego is hard to look past for many. For good reason.
He is a strong mix of both extremes of capability/impact spectrum, not just one.
And, despite all the haters, he does understand rocket science pretty well, and rocket economics even better.
> Shotwell had lunch with a co-worker who had just joined the then-startup company SpaceX. They walked by the cubicle of CEO Elon Musk. “I said, ‘Oh, Elon, nice to meet you. You really need a new business developer,’” Shotwell recalls. “It just popped out. I was bad. It was very rude.” Or just bold enough to capture Musk’s attention. He called her later that day in 2002 and recruited her to be vice president of business development, his seventh employee.
Can you imagine something like that working today?
Why should they need to develop their own models?