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Amazon Will Spend Nearly a Year of AWS Revenue on AI Investments

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Re: Amazon Will Spend Nearly a Year of AWS Revenue on AI Investments

#61

Post by scarface_74 »

blackeyeblitzar wrote: post #55
scarface_74 wrote: post #19

I left AWS Professional Services in 2023. Being in ProServe, I interacted with a lot of different service teams (teams that work on various AWS services) and I got a first hand view of their messaging and strategy. Internally, Amazon/AWS has always been a shitty company for employees. But they always were somewhat innovative and long term focused. I saw things going down hill by the end of 2022. They are definitely a…

I’ve heard most of the AWS services that are actually profitable are the old ones, and that all the new ones barely make money. Is that true?

What do you mean by making money? That’s not a simple question to answer. At the end of the day, all of AWS runs on a bunch of VMs that are spun up with a certain AMI depending on what the workload is. I’m sure AWS is charging enough to make the price more than the compute costs except for services that are completely free like CloudFormation.

If you mean do they cost more to develop than they are currently making for income, that’s how tech companies work - high fixed costs for initial development and low marginal costs that are spread across the customers.

They have started canceling projects where the cost of continued development doesn’t make a direct or indirect profit and don’t add to the ecosystem. The two I can think of most recently are CodeCommit (a very bad hosted git repository) and Cloud9 (hosted development environment).

Re: Amazon Will Spend Nearly a Year of AWS Revenue on AI Investments

#62

Post by lysace »

UltraSane wrote: post #57
lysace wrote: post #2

Financially liquid companies locked into feeding AWS (with their 50%-ish profit margin) should buy Nvidia/TSMC/ASML/(AMD) stock to get some of their money back? Totally not a bubble.

AWS has a lot lower margins that most enterprise IT companies.

No.

Re: Amazon Will Spend Nearly a Year of AWS Revenue on AI Investments

#63

Post by shell_game »

scarface_74 wrote: post #19

I left AWS Professional Services in 2023. Being in ProServe, I interacted with a lot of different service teams (teams that work on various AWS services) and I got a first hand view of their messaging and strategy. Internally, Amazon/AWS has always been a shitty company for employees. But they always were somewhat innovative and long term focused. I saw things going down hill by the end of 2022. They are definitely a…

Which business unit were you in?

Re: Amazon Will Spend Nearly a Year of AWS Revenue on AI Investments

#64

Post by scarface_74 »

shell_game wrote: post #63
scarface_74 wrote: post #19

I left AWS Professional Services in 2023. Being in ProServe, I interacted with a lot of different service teams (teams that work on various AWS services) and I got a first hand view of their messaging and strategy. Internally, Amazon/AWS has always been a shitty company for employees. But they always were somewhat innovative and long term focused. I saw things going down hill by the end of 2022. They are definitely a…

Which business unit were you in?

WWPS

Re: Amazon Will Spend Nearly a Year of AWS Revenue on AI Investments

#65

Post by ziddoap »

bdangubic wrote: post #50
ziddoap wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perfect example of a fantasy put forth by an executive.

these kind of comments on HN show me how many people lack creativity. wherever you work(ed) I am sure you met myriad of people and thought: - they don’t do shit - I can do what they do in my sleep it is these types of jobs that are being replaced and are easily replaceable with a little bit of creativity and imagination…

The parent comment asked (very specifically!) for real examples, not C-suite fantasies. They received a reply literally describing the fantasy of a c-suite individual. I thought that was funny.

How my one sentence reply pointing out the irony of the reply led you to believe that I (we? lots of HNers?) lack creativity is beyond me.

Re: Amazon Will Spend Nearly a Year of AWS Revenue on AI Investments

#66

Post by blackeyeblitzar »

scarface_74 wrote: post #61
blackeyeblitzar wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve heard most of the AWS services that are actually profitable are the old ones, and that all the new ones barely make money. Is that true?

What do you mean by making money? That’s not a simple question to answer. At the end of the day, all of AWS runs on a bunch of VMs that are spun up with a certain AMI depending on what the workload is. I’m sure AWS is charging enough to make the price more than the compute costs except for services that are completely free like CloudFormation. If you mean do they cost more to develop than they are currently making fo…

I mean that only a few of the services generate all the profit in AWS, and the rest are currently priced at a loss.

Surprised to hear they’re canceling some of them. That usually scares away developers.

Re: Amazon Will Spend Nearly a Year of AWS Revenue on AI Investments

#67

Post by scarface_74 »

blackeyeblitzar wrote: post #66
scarface_74 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by making money? That’s not a simple question to answer. At the end of the day, all of AWS runs on a bunch of VMs that are spun up with a certain AMI depending on what the workload is. I’m sure AWS is charging enough to make the price more than the compute costs except for services that are completely free like CloudFormation. If you mean do they cost more to develop than they are currently making fo…

I mean that only a few of the services generate all the profit in AWS, and the rest are currently priced at a loss. Surprised to hear they’re canceling some of them. That usually scares away developers.

I mean it’s literally one command to retarget the remote url of your git repository and Cloud9 was just a remote hosted VSCode with some AWS extensions you can get locally

Re: Amazon Will Spend Nearly a Year of AWS Revenue on AI Investments

#69

Post by throwaway290 »

quickslowdown wrote: post #49
burnte wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spend 90 minutes in a meeting with our CEO and two board members and the one guy went on almost the entire time about how amazing OpenAI Operators was and how we should find a way to replace most of our people with it. All because it was able to buy a plane ticket after he give it his login credentials.

I'm dealing with this as well. CEO basically soiled himself with excitement in a group chat, some toadies joined in, most were silent. Because how else can you receive that other than "think of all the money we'd have if we could get rid of those needy workers"

The workers on whose work the thing was trained, too

Re: Amazon Will Spend Nearly a Year of AWS Revenue on AI Investments

#70

Post by rbanffy »

scarface_74 wrote: post #47
rbanffy wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work with a couple workloads that can’t even be completely deployed in cloud environments. Those aren’t common. The vast majority of companies can get along with a Google office license and a Wix website. Not everyone works at a company with hundreds of thousands of employees and hundreds of millions of users. I agree RDS, Aurora, Big Query, S3, load balancers, declarative security policies, artifact repositories,…

You “worked with a couple of workloads” and that’s what makes you an expert on infrastructure and architecture at scale? Your LinkedIn profile is your HN profile. I see you have worked at some large well known companies. How can you possibly not have been exposed to some large deployments? These are three companies that you have worked at https://www.workday.com/en-us/company/partners/amazon-web-se... https://aws.ama…

And none of those is “the simple case” I alluded to. The vast majority of businesses need, perhaps, email, file sharing, instant messaging and, perhaps, a website. They won’t train their own ML models, nor have parallel sysplexes of mainframes spread across multiple datacenters.
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