The bar raiser decides “hire for Amazon at X level and role” and then the manager decides if they want that person on their team or not. If it’s a hire decision but manager declines the specific person they find another team instead.
The reason they don’t push this is because Stadia, like a lot of things, is just a side project at google. It does nothing to drive significant new ad revenue, so it’s never going to get this kind of deep pocket investment.
What is different this time is cloud computing / always connected devices. This enables easy collection and access to enormous amounts of training (and continuous retraining) data needed, as well as offloading processing to a single, central model that can be optimized for fat hardware for runtime.
It is an ROI decision. Almost everyone on the planet now carries around an echo-equivalent in their pocket all day, that also happens to have video, GPS, text and call data, and as such is a far more significant personal privacy concern than a smart speaker in a kitchen. However, most people do so because the benefit outweighs the concern. Same with smart speakers. Whats the difference from having an Alexa and having your phone on the same counter from a privacy concern perspective? It is effectively 0.
There isn't though. This is just voice control of existing things people are already doing through Amazon. This is data they already have. Is data inherently evil? I don't understand how there is some significantly different privacy concern of using Amazon services (wish lists and purchasing things) via voice control than via their website or app.
There are many legitimate privacy concerns with ever-listening devices in your house, but having "data" from people directly using existing features of a company via voice instead of mouse clicks isn't really one of them.
I doubt they want to start a cell company, more likely it is to have favorable terms for embedding 4G into Echo devices, making car and portable echos possible. They have done this for years w/Kindle, which would also benefit.
I think its really #4 - cloud is still a minor side bet for them, something investors are expecting them to try to work at but that the core company doesn't really care about. its kind of a bigger google X project. aws and azure are significant company bets from amazon/microsoft where they are staking their future, google cloud is not a bet on googles future.
Amazon is not a monopoly, Google is. Retail is ENORMOUS and even in the area of online retail, which is still only a minor segment of all retail sales, Amazon still only has something like 30-50% marketshare depending on the type of good/week of the year. There is no "search" outside of the Web and google controls 90%+ of it.
gold is actually used to do things, outside of jewelry its used in various industrial applications (for example, the computer you are using right now). so there is a floor to the value of gold, because its a real commodity. there is no floor to a digital currency with little real world adoption/use.
Your numbers on US online spending are way off. US online spending was about $400B in 2016. In 2017 Amazon alone has posted about 120B in revenue (low 100s minus AWS) year to date with guidance for 55-60B in Q4 alone.
The OP that I was replying to was insinuating that FB is collecting audio as training data to create AI models like the ones you are talking about. I was pointing out that raw audio is useless to train an AI model for recognizing words, the whole point of training data for AI is that you have an input and a known output (transcription) that you can use to train and test the model with, having just input is useless for training.
Its only useful to train if they also have the transcript by a human. Eavesdropping conversations and having armies of people transcribing them seems like a very expensive and illegal way to get that data when there are probably millions of available samples, TV shows, etc that have both voice and transcription available already off the shelf.
This is a ridiculous standard for an employer. He has at will employment, they can fire him and he can also leave if he dislikes their diversity programs. Regardless of his thesis, a private employer has no duty to support any/all speech from their employees to other employees during business hours and using their business resources (which all of this was). It is perfectly legitimate, 100% protected first amendment speech to tell your boss to go f-ck themselves at work, or to call a customer a piece of sh-t to their face, but don't expect your employer to support you for it.
Software has always been about copying features, since the very beginning of the industry. With a software product there is always only a short window of having something innovative before others add it to their same products.
This enables them to very quickly scale out AmazonFresh, which to date is only in about a dozen areas, to every single area that WholeFoods is in.
If you have not used AmazonFresh its pretty clearly a competitor for the same income level people as a Whole Foods customer and already offers a ton of organic/fair trade/etc stuff at Whole Foods level prices.
They can also leverage the WholeFoods brand for items, bringing additional customer trust to the quality.
Further, this makes PrimeNow delivery cheaper for them. Again, if you have used AmazonFresh you know that you can add PrimeNow-style Amazon stuff to your purchase for the delivery slot. This brings that capability to every WholeFoods location and expands the reach of people buying PrimeNow items (e.g. people will add things to their grocery delivery at a lower threshold than they will pay $5 and reorder on PrimeNow the same thing).
Tech has probably increased 20-25% YoY, as it has for a while. Alexa and AWS especially are basically hiring as fast as they can get people to move to Seattle. More remote offices are opening/expanding to make up the difference.
Amazon figured out a while ago its tech can extend their primary business and also be sold to other businesses on the side (AWS and 3p sellers/FBA). This is a broadening that google hasn't been successful at yet.
I think, as proven by Glass, that the public seems to view Google as nice but creepy. Whereas Amazon is usually tops in customer brand/satisfaction type of scores. My guess is that this is why even though Google definitely has a technologically superior product (better understanding, better inference, etc) they seem to be losing the "hearts and minds" of consumers to Amazon's more bare MVP technology.
Actually its good. If you study for months on interview questions to be able to pass the interview, you have "gamed" the system to get in and will likely be washed back out in 1-2 years depending on the mercy if your leadership team. People who spend the night before brushing up on their CS and passing the interview are those that actually pass (and stay and grow) and that is who the company really wants. Its just hard to weed out people who are very determined to game their way through.
In most cities you also need to be able to afford private school and the public transportation options are not as dense as NYC. A city like NYC is in a completely different echelon from nearly every other medium/large city in the US.