Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out(adventuresinoss.com) |
Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out(adventuresinoss.com) |
This enforced adoption of immature GenAI reminds me of Milo Minderbinder trying to make people eat cotton in Catch 22, because he had inadvertently obtained a huge amount of it.
And things only got better post-Industrial Revolution when labor organized and forced the issue.
There's no guarantee that will work again if labor has reduced leverage due to AI reducing their value.
I think in one way or another this all works itself out, but I'm not convinced it won't be a very painful (and possibly violent) transition to whatever comes next.
Has that changed, or is it the non-AWS part of Amazon?
I bet as the managers publicly nodded in praise for his heroic act, their hands were already typing his name to be sent to HR for “get this guy out of here on any excuse you can” note. (In reality it would be a nonverbal hint of sorts. Nothing to leave any trace discoverable by lawsuit)
And this is not a dink on the ai tooling itself but on the organizationan processes that provide the context in which the AI code generation is being used.
Bad processes will always produce bad low quality outcomes regardless of tbe technology.
If any of you young'uns read this, that is not how we had to do provisioning before cloud.
VMs already existed before AWS came out. You could already provision a new server usually in minutes and rent it month to month.
In fact, all the existing VM server companies had to start calling themselves cloud companies because pointy haired bosses couldn't understand what cloud meant.
AWS has been this way for a lot longer than GenAI, since the basic infrastructure products were built out early on. But when I read this line about throwing things out there quickly, I also think of Google and even Anthropic. Google has a long list of products that got created and killed, as part of their internal politics and promotion culture. Anthropic is currently rushing vibe coded slop all the time to try and win over OpenAI and set up their IPO.
Maybe all the rich high funding companies can afford to this and maybe it is the right thing for them to do. They can afford to make big mistakes without hurting their stability. A true startup or smaller company can’t - they would shutdown because one big investment that fails is enough to destroy the whole company.
> To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it’s going to work, it’s not an experiment. Most large organizations embrace the idea of invention, but are not willing to suffer the string of failed experiments necessary to get there. Outsized returns often come from betting against conventional wisdom, and conventional wisdom is usually right. Given a ten percent chance of a 100 times payoff, you should take that bet every time. But you’re still going to be wrong nine times out of ten. We all know that if you swing for the fences, you’re going to strike out a lot, but you’re also going to hit some home runs. The difference between baseball and business, however, is that baseball has a truncated outcome distribution. When you swing, no matter how well you connect with the ball, the most runs you can get is four. In business, every once in a while, when you step up to the plate, you can score 1,000 runs. This long-tailed distribution of returns is why it’s important to be bold. Big winners pay for so many experiments.”
Both are following the same strategy. Amazon has a $2.86 trillion market cap. That's the equivalent of 143,000 $20 million Series A startups. Companies like Amazon and Google are basically an integrated herd of cash cows plus a VC portfolio.