AWS isn’t broadly seen as credible in AI beyond commodity compute, but they are a shareholder here.
Jassy missed the boat on LLMs quite badly and the only real angle he had left was to use Amazon’s cashflow to buy stakes and buy business for Trainium.
Did they miss it or are they careful to over invest, especially too early? Maybe their early bets in Anthropic were sized correctly since they’re making more money than all the other big tech investors in frontier labs.
They missed it badly. Mostly under Jassy’s reign.
Look at it like this. They had millions of voice interface devices already sitting in some large percentage of (at least US) households.
And they squandered it. Extremely late to the LLM game. Even today the Alexa interface is ridiculously bad.
Well keep in mind that the “investments” were broadly buying business. We give you a bunch of money, you use that money to buy our stuff.
Yes the equity has book value on the way up, but keep in mind when the bubble pops (or even just cools) Amazon will have to book markdowns from the balance sheet that will tank earnings. Thats a story that’s flying below the radar at the moment.
Doesn’t it still mean they have made better investment choices than the other big tech companies? I guess I don’t see why they missed a boat here. Also the models may be as much a commodity as compute.