from Hacker News

Amazon blew Alexa's shot to dominate AI, according to employees (2024)

by williamstein on 2/8/25, 6:06 PM with 57 comments

• by quanto on 2/8/25, 8:31 PM

  Amazon Lab126's Alexa team had following cross-related issues:

  1. terrible tech stack. Absolutely poorly maintained pipeline

  2. generally unenthused employees

  3. office politicking and broken culture

  4. unbelievable amount of penny-pinching and poor budgeting

  I had a colleague within the Alexa team calling the place some sort of purgatory for people who couldn't join elsewhere. Another colleague went to Google Brain (when it was not as prestigious) and told me it was not the money that made him leave. Individually, they may have been good engineers and researchers, but the team was broken.

  What is surprising is not that Alexa failed. What is surprising is that it managed to even build a half-decent product that was, at a point, a leading AI product and platform.

• by lolinder on 2/8/25, 7:27 PM

  > Overall, the former employees paint a picture of a company desperately behind its Big Tech rivals Google, Microsoft, and Meta in the race to launch AI chatbots and agents, and floundering in its efforts to catch up.

  I obviously don't have any inside information, but this is a weird take to me from the outside.

  Google has butchered Assistant since the advent of LLMs. My Google Home devices have lost basically all of their functionality, but in the meantime the new Gemini "replacement" is still by all accounts a disaster.

  Microsoft has gone through all the right motions to satisfy investors—they've pushed their Copilot button onto new keyboards, pushed their Copilot tech into all their cloud products, and started selling "AI-ready" stickers on laptops. But from the consumer perspective, the reception has been not just mixed but overwhelmingly terrible! No one asked for these features, and no one wants them.

  Meta, meanwhile, has released Llama, for which we're all grateful, but in terms of products what do they really have to offer? A much-maligned AI-powered fake social media feed?

  None of the pre-existing giants are performing particularly well at actually "winning" the AI assistant space. Out of the three named, only Microsoft has any claim to serious mindshare, and that only through their relationship with OpenAI.

• by unsnap_biceps on 2/8/25, 6:43 PM

  I keep waiting for Amazon to admit defeat and partner with OpenIA or someone else to upgrade Alexa. That said, it also appears that the majority of folks just don't care about having a voice activated assistant. Most people just don't use their Alexa beyond "Play music" or "What's the weather today". I'm unsure if a smarter AI would help in any real way.

• by prng2021 on 2/8/25, 7:02 PM

  How would a smarter Alexa allow them to “dominate AI”? What even is the vision here that would allow domination over competitors like Google and allow a massive boost in profits? It all seems like a giant waste of time for them.

• by acc_297 on 2/8/25, 7:40 PM

  I think we have seen there isn’t a huge incentive to be the firm exploring the cutting edge of this tech when you can save big by waiting for other firms to spend billions on dead ends and incrementally larger models which at any point can be distilled by a competitor for 1/10th the price of the final training run. I imagine we’ll start to see that model structure and weights are very easy targets of low grade corporate espionage. A company with Amazon’s resources should be able to catch up in under a year if they poach the right talent.

• by asynchronousx on 2/8/25, 8:06 PM

  It seems to be that they’re doubling down on Anthropic/AI for commercial use, at least anecdotally from my friends at AWS. Not sure what Amazon proper is looking to do with it in the consumer space, or if it’ll have any real impact.

• by 4ndrewl on 2/8/25, 6:52 PM

  To what end? Alexa is a huge financial failure that cost the company billions. This will only increase costs and not increase the ROI.

• by thedougd on 2/8/25, 7:20 PM

  It's not too late. Google and Apple have not released improved AI based home voice assistants.

  I'm expecting it to be available any day now, included with a paid subscription to Prime+ (new), Google One, and Apple One.

• by meltyness on 2/8/25, 8:35 PM

  The one that had the gaffe about surreptitiously providing employee access to customer data? Yeah, yikes.

• by rickdg on 2/8/25, 8:54 PM

  Nah, Google was number one, they just dropped the ball as they always do.

• by kouru225 on 2/8/25, 9:36 PM

  Give ownership of the company to the workers?

• by ChrisArchitect on 2/8/25, 7:30 PM

  (2024)

• by _giorgio_ on 2/8/25, 6:27 PM

  mirror:

  https://archive.is/JJsuW

  Alexa's answer are so embarassing that I always talk to it in whisper mode.