[HuwFulcher]

AWS specifically have really dropped the ball on this.

I interact regularly with AWS to support our needs in MLOps and to some extent GenAI. 3 of the experts we talked to have all left for competitors in the last year.

re:Invent London this year presented nothing new of note on the GenAI front. The year before was full of promise on Bedrock.

Outside of AWS, I still can’t fathom how they haven’t integrated an AI assistant into Alexa yet either

[jackwilsdon]

There's Alexa+ [0] which uses generative AI but it's planned to be a paid option at $20/mo.

[0]: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/devices/new-alexa-generativ...

[spanishgum]

> Alexa+ costs $19.99 per month, but all Amazon Prime members will get it for free.

I'm curious if non prime members make up a big market for Alexa. I rarely use my smart devices for anything beyond lights, music, and occasional Q&A, and certainly can't see myself paying 20$/month for it.

[serial_dev]

Alexa consistently fails with the simplest of questions.

Only thing it can do is set a timer, turn off a light and play music.

It is still nice, but it’s so frustrating when a question pops into my mind, and I accidentally ask Alexa just to get reminded yet again how useless it is for everything but the most basic tasks.

And no, I won’t pay 240 dollars a year so that I can get a proper response to my random questions that I realistically have only about once a week.

[israrkhan]

I enabled Alexa+ few days ago on my devices. Everyone in our home immediately disliked the new Alexa. There were some fairly basic things that Alexa+ cannot do, and Alexa was able to do. Some fairly simple question/answering tasks, and questoins about status of an order.

[iLoveOncall]

It will be free if you have a Prime subscription (which means nobody will ever pay for it given Prime is cheaper and you get much more included).

But the project is pretty much dead, it was supposed to launch in February or March and is still not anywhere close to being out.

[HuwFulcher]

Yes have seen about that. It’s crazy to me that they still haven’t released it. Really think it could save a dying product

[Jordan-117]

They basically have with Alexa+. It's slightly more limited than ChatGPT, but it sounds much more realistic than stock Alexa and blows it out of the water in terms of smarts. The old model was basically a Siri-like "set timers and check the weather with specific commands," plus some hit-or-miss skills you had to install separately. But the new one gives much more of a sense of understanding your question and can carry on conversations with contextual responses. I've been pretty impressed with it, and the nature of the Echo device makes it much easier to query at will than having to open the ChatGPT app and switch to voice mode.

[chihuahua]

I agree. I think the Echo devices are good for certain kinds of voice-driven LLM experience. Although it's not that useful for detailed responses and serious questions, since you can't go back and read its response again.

[el_benhameen]

Having briefly interacted with AWS Q out of curiosity, I can see why they haven’t pushed much out publicly. Aside from giving someone a chuckle when they decided to call its suggestions “Q Tips”, it’s functionally useless.

[kotaKat]

They all but abandoned Astro, their home robot. My suspicion (and information I've heard internally) all but points at them only using Astro as a testbed for self-navigating warehouse robotics, and now that they got what they wanted out of it, the Vesta team basically got thrown to the wolves.

[newsclues]

They bought a company that did warehouse robots called kiva before that

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Robotics

[bee_rider]

Lingo question: is MLOps like devops for ML, or like flops for ML? I wonder because… actually, either case seems like somewhere Amazon might be losing experts to hot startups.

[snoman]

The former. Basically: build, train, test, deploy, monitor, repeat for ML algos.

[HuwFulcher]

As the other response said. It’s DevOps for ML. They have Amazon SageMaker which is the managed ML/MLOps offering that we use extensively because we’re a small team. The documentation is awful

[mv4]

Isn't "Alexa+" doing this? (I have not signed up)

[liquidpele]

Didnt they basically can most of Alexa a few years ago? I think they realized asking a device questions doesn’t generate profit.

[redditor98654]

They thought Alexa will enable users to buy more from Amazon just by voice. But most users turned out like me. I would not spend a single dollar on Amazon without actually seeing the item on my mobile or desktop. I wouldn’t even add to cart via Alexa. That’s not an ideal user for device and service that requires hundreds of millions to run.

[BoredPositron]

They still have no serverless inference.

[OliverGuy]

SageMaker have serverless inference endpoints

[zmmmmm]

Bedrock is not usable for that?