Amazon has mostly sat out the AI talent war
136 comments
·September 1, 2025rs186
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.
bdangubic
> We need new, smaller companies with different cultures in this space
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
jonny_eh
AI is full of new and smaller companies. Both OpenAI and Anthropic are quite new, but growing fast.
prmph
This. It's weird how most of the top tech companies are all morphing into amorphous blobs that want to get into everything and are indistinguishable from each other.
epolanski
Stakeholders expect (and price assets for) endless growth.
Izikiel43
Isn’t this something like how everything ends up evolving into a crab?
lazide
Carcinisation [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation], yeah.
Or ‘why every large public company tends to suck the same ways in the US eventually’
tehjoker
They'll just buy the competition once it seems like it's at a good price. Capitalism leads to concentration.
taneq
That’s what happens when you print trillions of dollars. Suddenly investors have too much Monopoly money and they want to spend it on something, anything, that might not make as much of a loss as holding cash during the subsequent inflation.
maxdo
Yeah, they will come, new companies from China, that will eat the market too, with their beautiful 996 work life balance, and we will go back to growing corn.
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.
thinkingtoilet
The problem is that when you start that smaller company and it gets successful, you will be acquired. Big companies rarely build things anymore.
worldsayshi
It makes some sense to sell out if you're building a product that will at best acquire a tiny sliver of the market, which almost all companies will. But there's at least a few AI companies, like Anthropic, that could potentially balloon towards becoming a Big Tech company. So it makes sense for them to not sell out for the time being.
newsclues
Sell out, or get big enough to buy out others.
awesome_dude
Just FTR - it's VERY rare for people to come up with more than one winning idea
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.
mountainriver
AWS has now become one of the most hated tools, right next to Jenkins.
Amazon is turning into a dinosaur like Cisco or IBM.
weego
There's no value in Amazon burning money to 'compete' when there no clear endgame. Right now the competition seems to be who can burn a a hundred billion dollars the fastest.
Once a use case and platform has stabilized, they'll provide it via AWS, at which poiny the SME market will eat it up.
bbarnett
Not only that, but all the compute spent, and hardware bought, will be worthless in 5 years.
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.
caleblloyd
I still like AWS all these years later. It’s trusted in the enterprise and you can empower people to do what they need to themselves with IAM. And it’s pretty reliable.
anon7000
Since when? It’s extremely popular
mvdtnz
> AWS has now become one of the most hated tools
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.
pandemic_region
huh how did Jenkins all of a sudden get into this discussion? And why the hate, it was king of CI for over a decade and for good reason.
nimchimpsky
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jstummbillig
If that is how you feel, then the reason for why it currently is the way it is should not give you much comfort. It's not like Amazon can not decide to change things and throw more money at the issue from a different angle in the future.
SilverElfin
Yep Amazon should be split up. No reason that AWS, Alexa, satellite internet, their online store, and groceries have to be one company.
gadflyinyoureye
But is there grounds to say that as a conglomerate they pose a large harm to market health to merit a breakup? For example, few regulators want to break up Mondragon.
neilv
> 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.
pinkmuffinere
> unique pay structure
As an ex-Amazonian, I hate seeing this corporate euphemism. We would be reminded yearly that compensation at Amazon was “peculiar”, when really it was just relatively low for FAANG. I would have preferred frank honesty, which I think would look like “we pay relatively low wages, for relatively good engineers, and the difference makes more money”
9tA3xlwgfGlab
Interesting, one would think that would mean easier interviews and whatnot so as to allow for greater number of applicants and churn, but it is not what I have heard about it.
ryandrake
After reading so many horror stories (whether actually true or not), my mind now just associates working at Amazon with mostly negatives: They're going to ride you like a horse and beat you up, for below-average compensation, and then if you want to claw your way up, it's a Game Of Thrones style slugfest with few winners. The opposite of "Rest and Vest." If this is exaggerated, they sure aren't doing any PR work to deny it or counter this negative reputation.
pydry
They also produce legions of managers who get fed up working for amazon and leave for greener pastures which they then turn toxic.
neilv
I've bumped into a lot of execs who say they don't want to hire ICs or managers (usually only one or the other) coming from specific big-name companies, and will instruct external and internal recruiters/HR and hiring managers about that.
Not big-name companies in general, but specific companies among them.
It seems to be about belief of culture taint risk (e.g., the way engineering is done, or the misaligned careerism or sharp-elbowedness that's promoted by the company). Though there's also sometimes a belief that particular large companies hire lots of people who aren't good (only, apparently, at LeetCode interviews).
I'm a bit sympathetic to those theories, though I personally don't rule out any individual. I think, say, all the FAANGs do also have individual people who are capable and well-intentioned, and haven't been permanently branded with whatever problematic culture of the company they're at.
(Though there was a time when I thought a person wouldn't have gone to one particular social media company unless they were either a sociopath or completely unaware of news in the real world, but it's more nuanced now. And there's currently an aggressively pro-fascism company that AFAICT never should've seemed like a good idea to anyone who wasn't evil or oblivious, though, I have to remember that they like to hire "impressionable children", and we now have tech track undergrads who haven't had time for anything but STEM classes and LeetCode since early teens, so they might be forgiven. I was recently considering denylisting anyone who'd gone to a different tech company, which had a well-known decades-long history of chronic underhandedness, but then I saw that a colleague who'd majorly helped me out once had finally gone there. Which is another lesson to myself not to generalize in ways unfair to the individual.)
riknos314
Amazon seems to be taking the "When Everybody Is Digging for Gold, It’s Good To Be in the Pick and Shovel Business" approach here.
Don't need to train the models to make money hosting them.
frollogaston
There's also dogfooding though
arduanika
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.
anon191928
I think Amazon and Apple see who is doing the "work" in commerce and manufacturing and they know and realize that some non deterministic AI is not a big threat. Sure it creates nice text, video or image but that is not "work" for these small company eating giants. They know that work counts with real goods moving in the real world, energy moving and robots that can actually act with certainity (99,999% time like internet, web as a tech ?)
mediaman
Interesting theory, but Amazon uses tons of stochastic methods (including deep reinforcement learning) throughout the business, including warehouse inventory management. "Determinism" is not some north star that operations people always adhere to, because the physical world is deeply stochastic and pretending it isn't does not make for a successful operations career.
DenisM
There’s Gaussian and fractal randomness. Fraud and transportation losses are Gaussian, for example - they average out to known values. An empowered LLM can wreck absolute havoc, and if it’s not empowered there’s no reason to spend $100b on training it.
mensetmanusman
My favorite science fiction threat is an AI able to hallucinate an OS so well any hardware rectangle could be used.
arduanika
A reasonable theory. Apple does hardware and supply chains, and sees how far there is to go. Nvidia does hardware too, but it's profiting hugely from the AI boom and has no reason to push back.
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?
4dregress
Who knows what’s going on in that mad man’s mind!
llbbdd
IMO Grok is the downstream consumer result of internal investment in AI at Twitter. One of the first things Elon did after buying was put all the useful APIs behind a paywall, which would be a reasonable first step if you bought it in part for the enormous training data the platform generates every day and wanted to limit competitors' access to it. Grok is then mostly just a way to get feedback on the tech.
Rover222
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hugedickfounder
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flyinglizard
I think Apple is just sitting idly and waiting for AI to mature to "just works" level without all the potential legal and PR minefields. It's too wild and unpredictable of an experience for their buttoned down, bland and inclusive corporate image. Apple may soon find itself producing very capable but dumb bricks if they don't catch up. Google can and will go all out on AI in Android at some point.
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.
pram
Assuming most people will want more AI in Android, doesn't seem so popular shoehorned into Windows 11.
HuwFulcher
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
Jordan-117
They basically have with Alexa+. It's slightly more limited than ChatGPT, but it sounds much more realistic than stock Alexa and blows it out of the water in terms of smarts. The old model was basically a Siri-like "set timers and check the weather with specific commands," plus some hit-or-miss skills you had to install separately. But the new one gives much more of a sense of understanding your question and can carry on conversations with contextual responses. I've been pretty impressed with it, and the nature of the Echo device makes it much easier to query at will than having to open the ChatGPT app and switch to voice mode.
jackwilsdon
There's Alexa+ [0] which uses generative AI but it's planned to be a paid option at $20/mo.
[0]: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/devices/new-alexa-generativ...
spanishgum
> Alexa+ costs $19.99 per month, but all Amazon Prime members will get it for free.
I'm curious if non prime members make up a big market for Alexa. I rarely use my smart devices for anything beyond lights, music, and occasional Q&A, and certainly can't see myself paying 20$/month for it.
wenc
If ChatGPT's Advanced Voice Mode could be served through an always-on device like Alexa, I'd pay for it.
Hmmm... maybe I can install do this through a cheap tablet....
vitus
I'm curious why anyone would pay $19.99/month for Alexa+ rather than just buy a Prime membership (which is $14.99/month).
Unless of course this is going to be met with a price hike for Prime...
serial_dev
Alexa consistently fails with the simplest of questions.
Only thing it can do is set a timer, turn off a light and play music.
It is still nice, but it’s so frustrating when a question pops into my mind, and I accidentally ask Alexa just to get reminded yet again how useless it is for everything but the most basic tasks.
And no, I won’t pay 240 dollars a year so that I can get a proper response to my random questions that I realistically have only about once a week.
WaltPurvis
> Only thing it can do is set a timer, turn off a light
And it can't even do that without an Internet connection. As someone who experiences annoyingly frequent outages, it never ceases to boggle my mind that I have a $200 computer, with an 8" monitor and everything, that can't even understand "set a timer for 10 minutes" on its own.
ghaff
Alexa has pretty much zero value for me.
Being able to just order something with zero shipping has a ton of value. I could drive down the street but it would still be an hour at the end of the day.
Video streaming has some value but there are a lot of options.
seviu
and despite all this, I would pay 240$ a year so that Siri can reliably do what Alexa does today
oh the irony
bboygravity
Just pay 0 USD and use Grok app for free?
By far the best thing currently available.
HuwFulcher
Yes have seen about that. It’s crazy to me that they still haven’t released it. Really think it could save a dying product
null
iLoveOncall
It will be free if you have a Prime subscription (which means nobody will ever pay for it given Prime is cheaper and you get much more included).
But the project is pretty much dead, it was supposed to launch in February or March and is still not anywhere close to being out.
el_benhameen
Having briefly interacted with AWS Q out of curiosity, I can see why they haven’t pushed much out publicly. Aside from giving someone a chuckle when they decided to call its suggestions “Q Tips”, it’s functionally useless.
kotaKat
They all but abandoned Astro, their home robot. My suspicion (and information I've heard internally) all but points at them only using Astro as a testbed for self-navigating warehouse robotics, and now that they got what they wanted out of it, the Vesta team basically got thrown to the wolves.
newsclues
They bought a company that did warehouse robots called kiva before that
42lux
They still have no serverless inference.
mv4
Isn't "Alexa+" doing this? (I have not signed up)
liquidpele
Didnt they basically can most of Alexa a few years ago? I think they realized asking a device questions doesn’t generate profit.
GuB-42
> 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.
giardini
Sounds like a winning strategy and a money saver to boot.
pm90
Exactly! Just build capacity, let other companies duke it out; ultimately they will all likely use AWS for their products anyway.
marssaxman
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.
sophia01
> The back-loaded vesting schedule is such blatantly cynical bullshit.
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?
throwboy2047
The problem with working at places where you care that much about money is having to work with people who only care about money.
andy99
This is a serious challenge in relation to hiring also. If you want to pay for good talent, and so are prepared to pay good money, how do you avoid people who are there for the money.
pawelos
> The back-loaded vesting schedule is such blatantly cynical bullshit;
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?
marssaxman
The "sign-on bonus" comes with serious strings attached. A good friend of mine got royally screwed when he mistook that bonus for real money, then got pushed to the point of burnout and had to leave; Amazon demanded a lot of the money back, but he didn't have it anymore.
stormbeard
I worked at Amazon in 2021 and rage-quit after 9 months. The sign-on bonus I received was paid out monthly, so I didn't have to pay anything back. If it's large enough, they pay it monthly because they know it's very likely you won't make it to the 2nd year.
pawelos
Sign-on bonus is prorated and payed monthly, you definitely don’t need to pay back anything (source: I worked at Amazon).
Maybe your friend talked about relocation bonus, which you need to pay back if you don’t work long enough.
scarface_74
Amazon does not demand your pro rated cash sign on bonus back that you get every pay period for the first two years.
Source: I worked at AWS from 2020-2023.
scarface_74
This is an uninformed take. Yes the RSU is backloaded. But during the first two years, you get a large monthly cash sign up bonuses so that assuming the stock stays flat, over the four years, your total comp stays flat. If the stock increases your comp goes up.
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.
tough
Isnt amazon basically Anthropic's HW partner very much like OpenAI has microsoft ?
NewJazz
Not only that, I understand they are an investor.
lr4444lr
Why would they? I hear their main revenue is in AWS and AdTech. Assuming this is true, why would they need bleeding edge AI?
kbar13
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
https://archive.ph/ed8WJ