Amazon's empire rests on its low-key approach to AI
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Amazon's empire rests on its low-key approach to AI
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Re: Amazon's empire rests on its low-key approach to AI
#2> AMAZON’S SIX-PAGE memos are famous. Executives must write one every year, laying out their business plan. Less well known is that these missives must always answer one question in particular: how are you planning to use machine learning? Responses like “not much” are, according to Amazon managers, discouraged.
I think company culture & talent make a big difference here. At most companies this would run the risk of poorly shoe-horning ML into a bunch of applications and making everything needlessly complex & expensive without seeing improved results (same goes for blockchain).
Re: Amazon's empire rests on its low-key approach to AI
#3This year, our internal ML conference ran out of tickets within 90 minutes of opening registration. There is a whole helluva lot of ML research and applications going on.
Re: Amazon's empire rests on its low-key approach to AI
#4This year, our internal ML conference ran out of tickets within 90 minutes of opening registration. There is a whole helluva lot of ML research and applications going on.
Tell me about it!
- sincerely, someone that didn’t register in time
Re: Amazon's empire rests on its low-key approach to AI
#5> AMAZON’S SIX-PAGE memos are famous. Executives must write one every year, laying out their business plan. Less well known is that these missives must always answer one question in particular: how are you planning to use machine learning? Responses like “not much” are, according to Amazon managers, discouraged. I think company culture & talent make a big difference here. At most companies this would run the risk of…
Can anyone at amazon comment on whether this actually works?
Edit: the ai part specifically.
Re: Amazon's empire rests on its low-key approach to AI
#6Anyone has a link to the full article?
Re: Amazon's empire rests on its low-key approach to AI
#7Re: Amazon's empire rests on its low-key approach to AI
#8Anyone has a link to the full article?
Re: Amazon's empire rests on its low-key approach to AI
#9> AMAZON’S SIX-PAGE memos are famous. Executives must write one every year, laying out their business plan. Less well known is that these missives must always answer one question in particular: how are you planning to use machine learning? Responses like “not much” are, according to Amazon managers, discouraged. I think company culture & talent make a big difference here. At most companies this would run the risk of…
Can anyone at amazon comment on whether this actually works? Edit: the ai part specifically.
From what I have seen 6-pager process and more importantly the clear writing and efficient meetings that it fosters are pretty helpful. It's important to note that a 6-pager contains 6 pages of expected reading and can have as much additional appendix material as you want. I've seen "6-pager" documents that were dozens of pages long, and have heard possibly apocryphal stories of 6-pagers hundreds of pages long for major projects. If the question was specifically about AI being a required component, idk. But a VP at Amazon presides over a part of the business so large that it is implausible that there aren't useful applications for AI in their domain.
Re: Amazon's empire rests on its low-key approach to AI
#10> AMAZON’S SIX-PAGE memos are famous. Executives must write one every year, laying out their business plan. Less well known is that these missives must always answer one question in particular: how are you planning to use machine learning? Responses like “not much” are, according to Amazon managers, discouraged. I think company culture & talent make a big difference here. At most companies this would run the risk of…
There is also the story of Amazon mandating that all internal systems communicate with each other through APIs. I think leadership at Amazon has good technical knowledge so they can develop these strategies and see them through.
In my company nobody with a "C*O" title (including CIO and CTO) has any clue about tech so they are very susceptible to snake oil salesmen telling them things like "we must do ML". So they tell some random person to "implement AI" but nobody has any clear objectives or can make a judgement whether things go in the right direction. In most cases these things end up as expensive disasters. I am waiting for the "Blockchain Excellence Initiative" with a lot of presentations and shiny newsletters.