Amazon Changing AI Strategy

Amazon is overhauling its AI strategy, winding down many in-house models, reorganizing teams, and focusing engineers on a new strategy to compete at the frontier, according to people familiar with the matter. The changes follow layoffs in Amazon’s Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI, organization last week and the shutdown of AGI Lab, a research group it created in 2024 after hiring most of the team behind AI startup Adept.

Joe Wilkins (Hacker News):

Instead, labor and computing power are being diverted toward a singular “frontier-model effort” led by Pieter Abbeel, director of the Berkeley Robot Learning Lab whose robotics company Covariant was hoovered up by Amazon in 2024. At the time Abbeel joined the tech giant, Covariant’s founders were working on AI models for robots, which lines up pretty well with Amazon’s push to automate everything it possibly can. News of the shift in Amazon’s strategic focus comes a week after it closed one of its key AI offices in San Francisco, an 80-person site specializing in research on artificial general intelligence, the supposed next-level of AI development where the tech obtains human-level intelligence and reasoning skills.

Corey Quinn (Hacker News):

Conveniently, this week Amazon published a treatise by Terk Terkowitz, a VP/Distinguished Engineer/Final Boss of Their Independent Contributor Technical Career Track, on the role of the developer in the age of AI. The memo says “If your work does not benefit from current AI tooling, that is a finding, not a failing.” Document it, bring it to your manager, work through the problem. I agree with every word of that! The question is whether anyone’s promo doc is gonna survive citing it. Here’s what happens next. The memo concedes that input metrics are “deeply flawed,” but then in the next paragraph says to go ahead and use them anyway, carefully. It then warns that non-adopters are falling behind. Those are three different positions within three sentences and they’re not at all aligned with one another.

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