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.

this. the culture that makes AWS the gold standard in cloud security (yes, it is still the best in the business despite the one-off embarrassing CapitalOne incident) with a strong emphasis on locking down data, minimizing PII, and saying “no” by default, is the very opposite of what building frontier LLMs is all about, which is really around hoovering up vast amounts of other peoples data and moving fast before the rules catch up.

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

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.

What you are citing appears to me as a business use case of classical machine learning models not necessarily LLMs, and demand forecasting. Frontier AI is clearly not dependent on such data, and has many outside data sources and I'm even sure sensitive AWS data would be of good use as training data, not to mention the legal/contractual obligations AWS has in protecting that data, what am I missing?

| Country | Estimated full-time employees | Broad working range |

|----------------|------------------------------:|--------------------:|

| United States | 850,000 | 750,000–950,000 |

| India | 115,000 | 100,000–125,000 |

| United Kingdom | 68,000 | 55,000–75,000 |

| Canada | 40,000 | 30,000–45,000 |

| Germany | 36,000 | 30,000–40,000 |

| Spain | 27,000 | 23,000–30,000 |

| France | 23,000 | 19,000–25,000 |

| Italy | 17,000 | 14,000–19,000 |

| Poland | 17,000 | 14,000–19,000 |

| Japan | 13,000 | 11,000–16,000 |

| Mexico | 13,000 | 10,000–15,000 |

| Australia | 6,000 | 4,500–8,500 |

| Ireland | 6,000 | 5,500–6,500 |

| Singapore | 2,400 | 2,000–2,500 |

That's a lot of "nobody"

Not an employee, just have a "shit ton" of Amazon stock that has been beating inflation very well. The last few quarters of volatility has allowed me to buy and sell, often fully covering my monthly expenses. I'm very greatful for that. Far from a company "nobody" wants to work for. You have a better performing company than Amazon to recommend that I can use instead? I'm all ears and I'll even give you a kickback for your time!

> I could be wrong because I haven't paid much attention but Amazon has just fast followed everyone else innovation for a awhile so it's in like one ecosystem yeah?

A lot of innovation at AWS is invisible on the outside. They pioneered hyperscale datacenters with publicly accessible capacity, software-defined networks, secure VMs, and so on.

> I'm not trying to be snarky, I just haven't thought about aws as having any innovation for a while and I always figured it was because ruthless companies that churn through people as disposable commodities generally don't do tech innovation.

I worked at AWS before COVID. It was really a varied experience, but it was not _bad_ overall. We prided ourselves on making sure our APIs are solid, stable, and backwards compatible. When we had to make a backwards-incompatible change, we actually contacted every affected customer and ensured that their workflows wouldn't be broken.

Dunno about that, but my experience with AWS is their stuff generally works, the other big 2 doesn't.

Generally speaking, on AWS you can buy compute, storage, network and other basic 'goods' and just like a supermarket where you can get either flour and eggs, a cake mix or a ready-made cake, AWS is willing to serve it to you in various levels of ready-ness, and you can start at the level you want, and build your own layers on top if you don't like AWS's solutions.

And AWS's solutions are generally built like that as well, there's no magic to Lambda or Fargate or EKS, its just they run the same EC2s, but with some proprietary magic that lifts some complexity from your shoulders, at the cost of generally some markup, and loss of some otherwise desirable features.

But the core thing is that AWS's offerings are generally solid, so as AI evolves and companies become more willing to take on more complexity, they will move to lower level services, but not necessarily out of AWS itself.

Nitro?

>I constantly see what they're adopting in their hardware stack.

like pee bottles.

That innovation has also mostly come in via acquisitions.

So it's a good place to work if you're a robot?

Amazon offers good signing bonuses that pay out over two years, so it's very common to peace out right at the 2-year mark when your take-home pay abruptly goes way down and the grind is no longer worth it. That's what I did, and I noticed it almost everywhere: there's a constant revolving door of inexperienced people. I don't understand how they keep it going with so much turnover, but somehow they've built a system that kinda withstands it, except in frontier AI apparently.