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 · 3h ago
> 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 · 40m ago
AI is full of new and smaller companies. Both OpenAI and Anthropic are quite new, but growing fast.
__loam · 10m ago
OpenAI and Anthropic are practically subsidiaries of Microsoft and Amazon. Neither would exist without billions in cloud compute credits from their corporate benefactors. Competing in Generative AI requires the kind of resources that are only available to extremely large and established companies. I do not think all the wrapper companies count when most of them are either being bought out by the big guys or have products that are immediately outmoded in the span of months. Maybe you can make the argument for AI art companies, but Stability basically disintegrated after wasting $100m dollars and Mid journey is directly competing with Google and Meta which is not where I would want to be (aside from running a ghoulishly evil company trying to kill artistic expression).
israrkhan · 28m ago
new ok.. but smaller? that is not true.
michaelt · 3m ago
According to Wikipedia, Google has 187,103 employees, Amazon has 1,556,000, and OpenAI has a mere 3,000 employees.
So essentially a lifestyle business - but some people do think they have growth potential.
umeshunni · 12m ago
Both those companies are 2 orders of magnitude smaller than Amazon or Google.
prmph · 1h ago
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.
Isn’t this something like how everything ends up evolving into a crab?
makeitdouble · 7m ago
There's no point in discussing a meme, but carcinisation doesn't occur in that wide of a range, and of course the reverse phenomenon (decarcinisation) is also observed.
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’
miltonlost · 51m ago
Also got to love the linguistic coincidence of Crabs and Cancer and how tech companies grow ever larger (monopolistic) to the detriment of their host (the greater economy/humanity)
jounker · 42m ago
It’s not a linguistic coincidence. The disease is named after the animal.
bee_rider · 21m ago
The coincidence is that all animals evolve in a crab-shaped direction (as the meme goes), and all tech companies evolve in a cancer-shaped direction.
That these two “inevitable endpoint things” would happen to be linguistically closely related was unlikely.
Ygg2 · 44m ago
It's not a coincidence. Cancer means crab, because the earliest known physicians saw tumors and thought they looked like crabs.
nsriv · 53m ago
In the US it seems like every company eventually turns into a bank.
tehjoker · 1h ago
They'll just buy the competition once it seems like it's at a good price. Capitalism leads to concentration.
taneq · 1h ago
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 · 1h ago
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 · 3h ago
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 · 3h ago
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 · 2h ago
Sell out, or get big enough to buy out others.
bluGill · 1h ago
You don'thave to - but that means setteling for a job that earns an okay income. Sell out for millions now - more that your lifetime earnings and use the time and money for - what you want
awesome_dude · 1h ago
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.
ants_everywhere · 28m ago
Smaller companies will still be VC backed, which limits the variation you'll see in culture
mountainriver · 1h ago
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 · 1h ago
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 · 1h ago
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.
wiredpancake · 59m ago
How exactly do you foresee "pre-internet" data sources being the future of AI.
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.
bbarnett · 4m ago
We're certainly not going to get accurate data via the internet, that's for sure.
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.
neilv · 27m ago
I like AWS overall.
(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).)
I would default to a new startup to using 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.
caleblloyd · 1h ago
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.
SalmoShalazar · 4m ago
This is a weird take. I don’t know any developers who hate AWS. It’s the dominant cloud provider for a reason.
zaphirplane · 7m ago
> AWS has now become one of the most hated tools
News to me
anon7000 · 1h ago
Since when? It’s extremely popular
mvdtnz · 1h ago
> 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 · 1h ago
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.
daft_pink · 3h ago
They sponsor your visa. That’s it.
No comments yet
jstummbillig · 3h ago
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.
awesome_dude · 1h ago
The current SoA AI requires massive investment and CPU time (which isn't free)
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)
SilverElfin · 2h ago
Yep Amazon should be split up. No reason that AWS, Alexa, satellite internet, their online store, and groceries have to be one company.
gadflyinyoureye · 1h ago
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.
lizknope · 34m ago
Does Amazon want to be an AI innovator or an AI enabler?
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.
neilv · 3h ago
> 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.
ryandrake · 3h ago
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 · 2h ago
They also produce legions of managers who get fed up working for amazon and leave for greener pastures which they then turn toxic.
neilv · 1h ago
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.)
pinkmuffinere · 58m ago
> 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 · 52m ago
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.
israrkhan · 9m ago
it is a good place for new graduates to solve some challenging engineering problems at scale and learn. Most of the employees do not last more than 2 years. People who stick for longer, admire that type of culture and are made for amazon. Their stock has also performed extremely well.
senderista · 30m ago
I had senior faculty in a top-5 CS program tell me that they steered their students away from AWS because they didn't want them to be miserable.
arduanika · 3h ago
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 · 3h ago
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 · 2h ago
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 · 1h ago
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.
My favorite science fiction threat is an AI able to hallucinate an OS so well any hardware rectangle could be used.
arduanika · 3h ago
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 · 2h ago
Who knows what’s going on in that mad man’s mind!
mensetmanusman · 2h ago
Elon, like everyone, is smart at some things and dumb at others. When you realize that about the world, it will help you learn from the smart sides of folks.
lawlessone · 1h ago
what's Elon smart at though? so i can learn..
decimalenough · 1h ago
Reality distortion. Financial shenanigans. Hiring people who can execute.
And, despite all the haters, he does understand rocket science pretty well, and rocket economics even better.
llbbdd · 2h ago
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.
newsclues · 2h ago
Twitter and Tesla have two interesting datasets for AI.
flyinglizard · 1h ago
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 · 1h ago
Assuming most people will want more AI in Android, doesn't seem so popular shoehorned into Windows 11.
flyinglizard · 1h ago
It has much better utility in a phone (accessibility to camera and photos, various sensors, contacts, chats, smart home, payment methods...) than on a PC.
I can imagine an AI that's more proactive, I don't go to ask a question but it helps me manage my day effectively and get more information where its useful.
riknos314 · 1h ago
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 · 51m ago
There's also dogfooding though
HuwFulcher · 4h ago
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 · 1h ago
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 · 3h ago
There's Alexa+ [0] which uses generative AI but it's planned to be a paid option at $20/mo.
> 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 · 2h ago
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 · 3h ago
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...
wccrawford · 3h ago
That's what happened with Prime TV, and I absolutely expect it for the AI, too. And it might finally mean I cancel my Prime membership.
x2tyfi · 3h ago
Amazon Prime’s price hikes have a predictable cadence:
* 2014: $79 to $99
* 2018: $99 to $119
* 2022: $119 to $139
We should expect a price hike from $139 to $159 in 2026, assuming the trend continues.
echelon · 2h ago
Meanwhile, Google Fiber has been the same price for 15 years. At least according to the billboard outside my window.
ls612 · 1h ago
It works out for them because bandwidth gets cheaper over time but inflation eats away at that. $70 today is like $50 back in 2010 when GFiber first launched.
serial_dev · 3h ago
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 · 1h ago
> 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 $200 computer, with an 8" monitor and everything, that can't even understand "set a timer for 10 minutes" on its own.
seviu · 3h ago
and despite all this, I would pay 240$ a year so that Siri can reliably do what Alexa does today
oh the irony
ghaff · 1h ago
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.
bboygravity · 3h ago
Just pay 0 USD and use Grok app for free?
By far the best thing currently available.
kentm · 1h ago
Mechahitler, the South African genocide debacle, explicitly checking Elons Twitter feed, “You get your news from infowars” system prompts, etc have basically made Grok not a real option for me. I do not want to use a product that is specifically being engineered to be a right wing disinformation machine.
And no, generic brand safety mishaps are not the same; everyone is not doing this.
echelon · 2h ago
I'm predicting that Grok fails simply due to half (?) the software engineering populating not wanting to use anything Musk has developed.
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.
transcriptase · 1h ago
Versus pre-Elon, when Twitter was saying out of politics and not pissing off their userbase by banning wrongthink and quietly censoring on behalf of White House staff and law enforcement.
Things were so much better when Twitter was doing shady things on behalf of the good guys :(
felixgallo · 1h ago
None of that actually happened.
HuwFulcher · 3h ago
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
iLoveOncall · 3h ago
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.
kotaKat · 3h ago
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 · 2h ago
They bought a company that did warehouse robots called kiva before that
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.
42lux · 2h ago
They still have no serverless inference.
mv4 · 3h ago
Isn't "Alexa+" doing this? (I have not signed up)
liquidpele · 3h ago
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 · 3h ago
> 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.
randmeerkat · 5m ago
That’s because LLMs are just snake oil… Look at what a flop ChatGPT 5 was. If someone manages to actually make something useful, Amazon has a stake in Anthropic. Otherwise why should they waste their money while competitors bankrupt themselves at scale over a hype cycle.
Well Amazon is mostly guided by pragmatism rather then than hype, so there they are, waiting for the dust to settle to see what directly helps their bottom line.
tough · 1h ago
Isnt amazon basically Anthropic's HW partner very much like OpenAI has microsoft ?
NewJazz · 1h ago
Not only that, I understand they are an investor.
giardini · 3h ago
Sounds like a winning strategy and a money saver to boot.
pm90 · 3h ago
Exactly! Just build capacity, let other companies duke it out; ultimately they will all likely use AWS for their products anyway.
marssaxman · 3h ago
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.
throwboy2047 · 2h ago
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 · 1h ago
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.
sophia01 · 42m ago
> 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?
pawelos · 3h ago
> 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 · 3h ago
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 · 2h ago
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.
marssaxman · 2h ago
Glad they've fixed that.
(Still, though - why work for people who know they're going to treat you so badly you'll probably have to quit?)
ghaff · 1h ago
Amazon doesn't seem to work out for a lot of people. I've tended to have long term jobs and probably wouldn't have been tempted to give them a shot.
scarface_74 · 1h ago
Well for me, I was already 46 when a recruiter from Amazon Retail reached out to me about an SDE (software development) position at Amazon Retail. They said it would require relocation after COVID (this was April 2020). I knew about Amazon’s reputation from both stories and my best friend who had worked as an L6 in the finance department.
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.
pawelos · 3h ago
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.
marssaxman · 2h ago
My friend is a native-born Seattleite, so no, it was definitely not a relocation bonus.
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?
pawelos · 2h ago
Alright, I did some quick research and it seems that they do sometimes pay full first year of sign-on bonus, which you need to repay (prorated). I didn’t see that that during my time at Amazon.
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.
stormbeard · 2h ago
IIRC they pay it out monthly if the bonus is large enough.
pvtmert · 21m ago
I joined in 2022 from a different location, there were 2 kinds of comp in terms of bonues, each split into 2 other;
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...
---
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...
scarface_74 · 1h ago
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.
marssaxman · 1h ago
Glad to hear they fixed this broken policy.
scarface_74 · 1h ago
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.
kbar13 · 3h ago
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
lvl155 · 3h ago
AWS dropped the ball but they didn’t really try. Apple OTOH…
mensetmanusman · 2h ago
Apple finance took over and scoffed at their engineers wanting to spend $10B on AI hardware, so they bought back stocks instead because Buffet understands that.
coliveira · 54m ago
MS, Google, and Meta are spending hundreds of billions on AI, however their stocks are growing by the same amount. This doesn't seem like a crazy spending when looking at this, and better than just buying stock back and doing exactly nothing like Apple is doing.
lr4444lr · 1h ago
Why would they? I hear their main revenue is in AWS and AdTech. Assuming this is true, why would they need bleeding edge AI?
tinyhouse · 2h ago
They invested $8B in Anthropic so they will be OK.
la64710 · 2h ago
AWS is more focused on making money off the infrastructure than on the application itself. It took same approach with kubernetes and might I say it has been very successful.
willmadden · 3h ago
No one is looking at this issue correctly. Saying out of the AI "talent war" is a smart move. AI is due to collapse under its own weight.
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.
pvtmert · 6m ago
I usually do not agree with the Amazon leadership (well, recently they haven't been "Right A lot"!)
But I agree with the following statement Matt Garman gave recently;
Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman said that using AI tools in place of junior employees was "one of the dumbest things I've ever heard" because these employees are "the least expensive" and "the most leaned into your AI tools."
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.
liquidpele · 3h ago
I agree but it doesn’t seem to be intentional on their part.
iLoveOncall · 3h ago
Yeah Amazon is massively struggling to hire due to the extremely bad reputation of Andy Jasshole and the RTO 5 policy, and this is not exclusive to AI talents, but is the case for every single role. We have had reqs open for a year in my team and nobody wants to join.
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.
__turbobrew__ · 3h ago
I have had multiple recruiter reachouts from AWS who obviously read my resume and are interested in short cutting me into a senior role at AWS doing interesting things, but at this point AWS reputation is so bad I don’t even entertain such offers.
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.
coliveira · 52m ago
Amazon having trouble to hire I think it is a well deserved result. I hope they never hire great talent again. Lately I heard they're looking for contract hires, which seems to fit their cheapness and lack of ability to attract talent.
alkonaut · 3h ago
It's not like it had a good reputation earlier either (as a company, perhaps less problematic as an employer). But if I was offered multiple FAANG positions because I had some really attractive skill set, then I'd want a _lot_ more to work at Meta or Amazon than Netflix or Google, just based on my view of the corporate evilness. It's probably completely unfounded, but the fact I have that feeling just shows they haven't taken care of their brand.
cyberax · 3h ago
Bedrock? It's like a vibe-coded "router" app. It really doesn't provide anything that is not provided by countless other companies.
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).
internetter · 1h ago
AWS doesn't need to do anything innovative and the enterprises still come. Every product AWS sells has a similar offering from a competitor. But businesses stick with amazon because its all in one. They get bills from one company, trust their security with one company, ect. The only thing that matters to AWS is its reputation.
iLoveOncall · 3h ago
Bedrock is not at all a router. They do provide a routing capability now, but at its core it's a wrapper around models so you can interact with any model with the same unique API.
> 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.
philipallstar · 3h ago
> the RTO 5 policy
I'm no expert, but I'm pretty sure this[0] is what RTO 5 is.
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.
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’
That these two “inevitable endpoint things” would happen to be linguistically closely related was unlikely.
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.
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.
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).)
I would default to a new startup to using 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.
News to me
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.
No comments yet
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)
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.
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.)
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”
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.
Don't need to train the models to make money hosting them.
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 :(
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
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.
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...
---
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.
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.
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).
> 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...
No! Really? With RTO? Unbelievable /s