alt Hacker News> 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.
Replies
I guess Amazon can also probably afford to wait until somebody comes up with an application for AI that is, like, something Amazon can actually sell or use…
Customer service bots? Maybe. Coding bots? I bet they use some internally. Their customers don’t really need them, or if the customer does, the customer can run it on their side.
AI is huge, it’s just not the only thing happening in tech right now. I say this as an MLE but it seems really unbalanced that LLMs have gotten trillions in investment when other groundbreaking innovations like battery improvements or fusion power or gene therapy have gotten substantially less attention.
Disagree re: DeepSeek theoretical breakthroughs, MLA and GRPO are pretty good and paved the way for others e.g. Kimi K2 uses MLA for a 1T MoE.