Time to integrate LLM into existing home assistant >= Time to build home assistant from scratch using LLM.
They lost it in a very simple way:
Research Scientists and Managers refusing to let their importance be impacted. Existing NLP paradigms preserved at all costs, conservative technical decision making. Building something that can be delivered in 4 months, as opposed to long term technical vision. The people running the important NLP orgs in Alexa have been there since alexa started. There is no fresh air, just constant pushing for feature upon feature. No room for bottom up innovation, road maps are built and then delegated to worker bee coders.
I have first hand knowledge, that in Alexa right now, there are year long+ initiatives to productionalize ML models that are completely obsolete compared to GPT-4. Models that are still being figured out, are already borderline worthless.
The only moat is the number of devices already in peoples homes. A startup armed with a ChatGPT model could take down alexa very quickly if they could distribute speakers to homes.
Lets not forget the panic and the existential crises of careers built on old NLP knowledge, in both academia and industry. It turns out the solution to NLP is just "scale". All of the complicated heuristics for getting old school NLP solutions to work will be thrown away