Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?
450 points by stephenheron 7d ago 620 comments
Ask HN: Did Developers Undermine Their Own Profession?
8 points by rayanboulares 17h ago 16 comments
Amazon has mostly sat out the AI talent war
131 ripe 182 9/1/2025, 7:04:31 PM businessinsider.com ↗
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.
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.
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.
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"
Or ‘why every large public company tends to suck the same ways in the US eventually’
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. :)
That these two “inevitable endpoint things” would happen to be linguistically closely related was unlikely.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
News to me
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.
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.)
I personally don’t ascribe corporate amorality (as opposed to immorality) to all who work for it and thus with narrow exceptions would blacklist someone for working at a company who, e.g., has a CEO I dislike, practices wage suppression, etc.
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”
While they're protected now, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20980557 quotes the one I recall...
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1173367909369802752.html maintains the entire chain of tweets.AWS enables thousands of other companies to run their business. Amazon has designed their own Graviton ARM CPUS and their own Trainium AI chips. You can access these through AWS for your business.
I think Amazon sees AI being used in AWS as a bigger money generator than designing new AI algorithms.
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.
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?
And, despite all the haters, he does understand rocket science pretty well, and rocket economics even better.
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.
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
[0]: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/devices/new-alexa-generativ...
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.
Hmmm... maybe I can install do this through a cheap tablet....
Unless of course this is going to be met with a price hike for Prime...
* 2018: $99 to $119
* 2022: $119 to $139
We should expect a price hike from $139 to $159 in 2026, assuming the trend continues.
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.
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.
oh the irony
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.
By far the best thing currently available.
And no, generic brand safety mishaps are not the same; everyone is not doing this.
Grok has to be more than n-times (2x?) as good as anything else on the market to attain any sort of lead. Falling short of that, people will simply choose alternatives out of brand preference.
This might be the first case of a company having difficulty selling its product, even if it's a superior product, due to its leader being disliked. I'm not aware of any other instances of this.
Maybe if Musk switches to selling B2B and to the US government...
If you piss off half of your possible user base, adoption becomes incredibly difficult. This is why tech and business leaders should stay out of politics.
Things were so much better when Twitter was doing shady things on behalf of the good guys :(
If anything they’ve now pissed off 2/3 of the population at some point or another.
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Robotics
Don't need to train the models to make money hosting them.
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.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/17/amazon-cuts-several-hundred-...
Of course not being able to monetise Alexa has always been a problem, but these and the article's issues are all to do with poor planning and top tier business direction.
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.
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?
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 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.
Truthfully, I don't think anyone would recommend their acquaintances to join Amazon right now.
That said, Amazon is actually winning the AI war. They're selling shovels (Bedrock) in the gold rush.
For senior in-demand talent you are not desperate, and really only desperate people go to work for AWS as they don’t have any better options at a company which respects their employees.
AWS is falling behind even in their most traditional area: renting compute capacity.
For example, I can't easily run models that need GPUs without launching classic EC2 instances. Fargate or Lambda _still_ don't support GPUs. Sagemaker Serverless exists but has some weird limits (like 10GB limit on Docker images).
Fargate and lambda are fundamentally very different from EC2/nitro under the hood, with a very different risk profile in terms of security. The reason you can't run GPU workloads on top of fargate and lambda is because exposing physical 3rd-party hardware to untrusted customer code dramatically increases the startup and shutdown costs (ie: validating that the hardware is still functional, healthy, and hasn't been tampered with in any way). That means scrubbing takes a long time and you can't handle capacity surges as easily as you can with paravirtualized traditional compute workloads.
There are a lot of business-minded non-technical people running AWS, some of which are sure to be loudly complaining about this horrible loss of revenue... which simply lets you know that when push comes to shove, the right voices are still winning inside AWS (eg: the voices that put security above everything else, where it belongs).
> For example, I can't easily run models that need GPUs without launching classic EC2 instances.
Yeah okay, but you can run most entreprise-level models via Bedrock.
I'm no expert, but I'm pretty sure this[0] is what RTO 5 is.
[0] https://www.phoenixcontact.com/en-pc/products/bolt-connectio...
1) High-quality training data is effectively exhausted. The next 10× scale model would need 10× more tokens than exist.
2) The Chinchilla rule. Hardware gets 2× cheaper every 18 mo, but model budgets rise 4× in that span. Every flagship LLM therefore costs 2× more than the last, while knock-off models appear years later for pennies. Benchmark gains shrink and regulation piles on. Net result: each new dollar on the next big LLM now buys far less payoff. The "wait-and-copy" option is getting cheaper every day.
But I agree with the following statement Matt Garman gave recently;
It's because AI usually creates slop, without review these "slop" build up. We don't have infinite context window to solve the slop anyway. (even if we do, the context-rot has been confirmed)Also, on average, Indian non-Tech employees who manages thousands of spreadsheets or manually manages your in-store cameras are much more cheaper than the "tokens" and the NVIDIA GPUs you can throw at the problem, at least for now and a foreseeable future.
I don't think his point was we should hire junior engineers because they're cheap and lean into AI and AI produces slop. His position is not that he wants to cheaply create slop.
He wants to hire people who are cheap and love using AI because he sees that as a better long term strategy than making senior engineers embrace AI late into their career.
No! Really? With RTO? Unbelievable /s