Amazon tells employees it isn’t falling behind on AI
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
I haven't ever associated Amazon with advanced ML research, or even a basic aptitude at using "AI" (heavy air quotes) to make their products better. I guess there is Alexa but that is largely a failure for anything other than basic tasks. It is def better than Siri but Siri must be a meme at this point because as I've said in a previous comment, it is beyond terrible.
I used to buy items from Amazon and I still get pages and pages of suggestions from these one off purchases that are so irrelevant, I think a 3rd year CS undergrad (if that) could write a better recommendations engine if given a user purchase history API and a product catalog API and legit nothing else
it got strong 'lady doth protest' energy
They will probably be the first to have mostly automated warehouses for general goods. So a lot of robotics and computer vision. Not as flashy as the new wave of generative models, but getting the robotics and models reliable enough for production will be valuable.
There is "AI" and then there is the AI we have today.
Alexa is in the same class as Watson when it comes to intelligence. You can reproduce most of its effects using old techniques on cheap hardware. NLP and statistical classification is incredibly powerful if you throw enough resources at it. These approaches are also mostly deterministic and easy to incrementally improve (to a limit - i.e. they can't generate arbitrary output).
LLMs are like enriching uranium by comparison. Unless someone at the top thought 'damn we need one of those things soon' a few years ago, there would not likely be much progress to talk about today.
It was a nonstick top-entry cat litter box. I don't own a cat. I've never owned a cat.
Seems that every big tech company is getting LLM FOMO. Some companies (like Google) rightly have this FOMO because would directly impact their business, but I just don't see that with Amazon.
“I need a gift for a five year old girl who likes bugs. Can you recommend some?”
“My 2012 Kia Sportage needs a roof rack, what are the best options?”
“I need to return the shirt I just bought, what do I do?”
“My package was marked as delivered but I didn’t receive it.”
“How do I turn on kids mode on my new Fire TV?”
“I want to give Prime to my grandmother, how do I do that?”
“I bought some shoes a few years ago, is there some like it available now?”
“I want a Hawaiian shirt in size 4x large, made from cotton, less than $30.”
Etc.
Amazon didn’t invent search, but they have search on their website. You wouldn’t say they’re necessarily a search company, but I’m sure that’s their most important revenue generating feature for retail.
Replace search with LLM + search. They’ll wait for this to shake out, implement an “OK” LLM for their site baselined on industry standards and will have everything you outlined.
It’s not existential, and will be another feature they provide, like developing a mobile app when smart phones became a thing.
1. Customer support.
2. Logistics and delivery service.
I don't care much about the listing or app since I know what I want to buy and I search for it directly.