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Amazon Alexa is on pace to lose $10B this year

arstechnica.com

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Re: Amazon Alexa is on pace to lose $10B this year

#371

Post by thomasjudge »

aborsy wrote: post #228
enumjorge wrote: post #44

> Not many people want to trust an AI with spending their money or buying an item without seeing a picture or reading reviews. I wonder how much the decline in quality of Amazon's marketplace has affected other parts of the company's business including Alexa. I remember a time when, if I wanted to buy something online, I'd just buy off Amazon without shopping around. They almost always had the best price, their shipp…

I still buy from Amazon and almost never had issues. The delivery is max the following day, cheap, lots of variety, etc. It’s an open to all market, and there are certified channels and customers reviews. Big box stores dream to replicate that.

You must live in a major metro. I live in a medium size town in a rural state, I haven't had two-day prime delivery in years. Typical minimum is about a week

Re: Amazon Alexa is on pace to lose $10B this year

#372

Post by xnx »

enumjorge wrote: post #44

> Not many people want to trust an AI with spending their money or buying an item without seeing a picture or reading reviews. I wonder how much the decline in quality of Amazon's marketplace has affected other parts of the company's business including Alexa. I remember a time when, if I wanted to buy something online, I'd just buy off Amazon without shopping around. They almost always had the best price, their shipp…

Once you've shopped Alibaba, you recognize that Amazon is basically is just a more expensive interface with a better return policy. just learned that Target stores will price match Amazon at the register. No cumbersome customer service process or anything.

Re: Amazon Alexa is on pace to lose $10B this year

#373

Post by andrepd »

mcphage wrote: post #342
andrepd wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very curious why you would wiretap your home with 5 always-on internet-connected speakers running opaque software for a tech giant. I dunno, it's the sort of thing that would be fit for a robocop-like dystopia just a couple decades ago but is seemingly... "normal" now.

We leave most of them on "mute" most of the time. The one we don't, we use to play music, mostly.

There is no such thing as mute

Re: Amazon Alexa is on pace to lose $10B this year

#374

Post by mcphage »

andrepd wrote: post #373
mcphage wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We leave most of them on "mute" most of the time. The one we don't, we use to play music, mostly.

There is no such thing as mute

Maybe. The cameras have a physical shutter that you can keep closed, but the mute buttons are always just an electronic button that you have to trust Amazon to respect. Still, I don't think I've seen anybody claim that Amazon is lying about it, and there's enough people on the internet—especially here—that monitor their traffic, and would have noticed if echo devices were sending recordings that they shouldn't have taken.

Re: Amazon Alexa is on pace to lose $10B this year

#375

Post by nshm »

walterbell wrote: post #215
visarga wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Research is going strong. The Whisper model, recently open sourced, is great for ASR and runs on the edge. https://openai.com/blog/whisper/

Is there a recommended dev platform to test this model? e.g. Google/Coral TPU, Nvidia Jetson Nano, Rockchip RK3568 NPU, iPhone/Android NPU, ..?

Coral and Jetson are not very powerful actually, you can't run even medium model in realtime. https://github.com/openai/whisper/discussions/417

And there is latency issue too, you won't get response very fast. If you look for <0.5s latency or the answer, you need to try something like Vosk probably.

Re: Amazon Alexa is on pace to lose $10B this year

#376

Post by nathanasmith »

thehappypm wrote: post #304
edgyquant wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the result of a propped up economy avoiding recessions at all cost. These large conglomerates are completely out of touch and money has been so cheap they were not really competing for or providing good services.

Why does everyone have an obsession with “cheap money”? You still need to pay a loan back, can reduced interest on a loan really prop up a company up? I feel like that vastly overstates the impact of interest costs on business’s bottom lines

Cheap money makes marginal investments more likely to be profitable.

Re: Amazon Alexa is on pace to lose $10B this year

#377

Post by genewitch »

thehappypm wrote: post #361
genewitch wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"cheap money" lets you buy users. Netflix "allowed" people not paying the bill to use netflix accounts of those who did, Amazon sold devices at cost to get market share, uber et al hemorrhaged money to become ubiquitous as "taxi", and so on. When money isn't cheap anymore, and you have to start showing a profit to get more money , the screws turn and users get squeezed. Merely showing a profit doesn't mean anything i…

This doesn’t really answer the question though. Netflix for example has a lot of costs — servers, payroll, content creation, licensing, etc. Interest is one cost, but hardly the whole picture of them. How exactly does Netflix’s interest costs going up mean their business model fails? Does it mean they must charge $10.50 instead of $10 per user?

"money is expensive" means that, an investor, given the choice between giving netflix money to buy more customers and putting that into a bond or something starts to lean away from "give this company cheap money in the hope valuation goes up" and towards less "throw money at it and see if that works" investments.

It's not the interest, it's getting the money at all. Money was cheap, so netflix got lots of money, they put blockbuster and hollywood video and all the other companies out of business (mostly) with a great selection of DVDs and whatnot, then they got sweetheart deals from all the studios and production companies who couldn't imagine competing on the bandwidth costs alone; these deals, once again, greased by investor money. Once the major studios started their own streaming services, netflix was throwing investor money at consumer eyeballs with their whole "sharing is caring" model, where you're aunt's ex-husband's golf buddy could use your account credentials.

Now the free money has dried up, and investors want, you know, their investments back. Queue netflix raising prices, disallowing sharing accounts (and charging more for multi-screens); couple that with losing a huge portion of their library to studio streaming services, and suddenly paying adam sandler 100mm for a movie every year or two looks like a bad investment.

Re: Amazon Alexa is on pace to lose $10B this year

#378

Post by wepple »

mabbo wrote: post #323
wepple wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All of those people could have been doing useful, money-making, cost-cutting things instead. This is how you kill a tech company: stop innovating and fall back to simple “maximize revenue, cut expenses” MBA theory

Fine, forget putting those people to work on things that make money- have them innovate on 100 other projects instead of just this one that doesn't make money. Amazon's innovation age is dead, imho. They are the Day 2 company that Jeff Bezos always warned about.

Yeah, I think I agree with that.

The other challenge though is doing 100 other things half-hearted. Perhaps they should be MVPing smaller ideas to see if they take flight, but ambitious projects always require substantial resources.

The complaint “this could have been amazing but leadership simply didn’t fund it enough” is another common gripe.

There’s definitely some craziness in the idea that everyone will order toothpaste with their voice and it will work well and replace an application to the point it will be profitable.

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