The only thing I can think of is if they had converted Alexa into a truly useful assistant and gotten people to sign up for a premium to it while everyone was still in awe of and having fun talking to LLMs.
Even if they executed this perfectly though, I think all it would do is increase the burn rate related to Alexa. Plus there's no moat, everyone has a phone with more capable hardware that would be a better place for this assistant to live long term.
I don't think they missed too much on the AI front. Bedrock was crap during formative LLM-solution building times, maybe that was a legitimate miss of theirs? SageMaker still is crap, another miss?
Bedrock is just hosting a bunch of different LLMs. It is just as capable as the third party LLMs it hosts. It hosts everything except for OpenAI and Gemini models as far as the popular ones. Even Nova, Amazon’s models, are good enough for the most part, cheaper and usually faster.
Bedrock imposes limitations on context window sizes and output sizes over and above those of the underlying model. There's also a bunch of undifferentiated heavy lifting that Amazon requires their customers to perform when they could have added value there.
Even if they executed this perfectly though, I think all it would do is increase the burn rate related to Alexa. Plus there's no moat, everyone has a phone with more capable hardware that would be a better place for this assistant to live long term.
I don't think they missed too much on the AI front. Bedrock was crap during formative LLM-solution building times, maybe that was a legitimate miss of theirs? SageMaker still is crap, another miss?