The cost cutting at Amazon continues to produce financial results. My team grew from 6 to 800 in 9 years. That was awesome for me and we got a lot done, but throwing people at problems eventually led to giant, expensive teams. /@EthanEvans/
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It’s a Bird! It’s a Plane! It’s Brazilian Bum Bum Cream!
nytimes.com: [Excerpt] Recently, Amazon has developed a new drone — known as the MK-30 — that it claims solves many of the problems with previous models. The new drones fly twice as far, and the company says they are significantly quieter. The drones can also identify where to drop packages with the help of cameras and sensors, which means no more yard surveys or QR codes.
This year, Amazon began offering drone delivery from a facility in Tolleson, Ariz., a suburb of Phoenix — where, as in Texas, the skies are typically sunny and clear, making for optimal flying conditions. Its drones now deliver dozens of packages a day to real, paying customers in the West Valley Phoenix Metro area — a tiny fraction of what even one Amazon van could do, but a step toward fulfilling Mr. Bezos’ original vision.
investors.intuit.com: [Excerpt] Intuit QuickBooks will become Amazon’s preferred partner for financial management solutions integrated directly into Amazon Seller Central to fuel the success of Amazon sellers.
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Intuit Inc. (NASDAQ: INTU) and Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) today announced a multi-year strategic partnership to empower millions of Amazon sellers to manage their finances, stay compliant, access capital, and grow their business. By leveraging Intuit’s AI-driven expert platform, millions of Amazon sellers will be able to discover and access Intuit’s platform seamlessly, benefiting from powerful financial insights like profitability, cash flow, and estimated tax liabilities to fuel their growth.
wsj.com: [Excerpt] Amazon’s New Robotic Warehouse Will Rely Heavily on Human Workers.
The 3 million-square-foot distribution center in Shreveport, La., demonstrates the limits of automation in big logistics operations.
Amazon just opened its most-automated warehouse yet. But underneath the robotics and artificial-intelligence technology at the site, the facility will still rely on thousands of employees.
Source: Shreveport Times (Gannett Co., Inc.)
The e-commerce behemoth said its 3 million-square-foot building in Shreveport, La., is its first warehouse to use automation and artificial intelligence at every step of the fulfillment process.
aboutamazon.com (10/9/24): Amazon unveils the next generation of fulfillment centers powered by AI and 10 times more robotics.
nlep.org (10/26/23): Amazon Invests in Second Facility in Shreveport.
This facility will be the second Amazon location in Shreveport, with the first being a Robotics Fulfillment Center slated to open in mid-2024. At Robotics Fulfillment Centers, employees work side-by-side with robots to pick, pack, and ship customer orders such as books, toys, and housewares. A last-mile facility is where customer orders are prepared for delivery to customers.
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☑️ #166 Dec 4, 2024 🟠 opinion
Limits of automation in Shreveport (SHV1)
@RihardJarc: Investors have underestimated $AMZN's AI strategy with the narrative that $AMZN is behind in AI.
Now, this narrative is proving out to be wrong, and the stock is getting rerated as:
$AMZN now has a significant stake in Anthropic (the number 2 LLM provider right now), and AWS becoming Anthropic's main cloud provider.
AWS is seeing big AI adoption with their Bedrock open strategy approach, with the AWS CEO saying yesterday that the number of users on AWS Bedrock in the last year alone had 5x.
Jassy saying that you will see a 25% lower cost to serve this holiday because of AI and robotics
$AMZN making significant strides with its custom silicon AI ASIC development with companies like Anthropic using AWS custom chips, but also $AAPL becoming their chip client.
Once again, the market's lack of understanding of a company's fundamental development and domain knowledge is the reason why there are always opportunities out there. As Philip Fisher said it well: The stock market is filled with individuals who know the price of everything, but the value of nothing.
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☑️ #165 Dec 3, 2024
AWS CEO Talks New Chip Clusters, Nvidia and AI Ambitions
@markets: [Excerpt] AWS CEO Matt Garman discusses Amazon's new AI chip arrays and a large language model called Nova. Speaking on "Bloomberg The Close," Garman also comments on the company's partnerships with Intel and Nvidia. Amazon's new chip arrays, called Project Rainier, will contain hundreds of thousands of Trainium2 semiconductors, quintupling Anthropic's current processing power.
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☑️ #164 Dec 3, 2024
PwC, AWS Expand Strategic Alliance to Catalyze Generative-AI powered Transformation for Industry Customers
pwc.com: [Excerpt] Collaboration will leverage new Amazon Bedrock Guardrails Automated Reasoning checks, announced today at AWS re:Invent.
According to the PwC US 2024 Cloud and AI Business Survey, companies that are seeing increased productivity and creating new revenue streams with GenAI are more than twice as likely to realize these benefits through industry-specific solutions. Together, PwC and AWS will build a series of industry-specific applications based on proven use cases leveraging the broad selection of proven foundation models from leading AI companies like Amazon—including Amazon Nova—a new generation of foundation models (FMs) that have state-of-the-art intelligence across a wide range of tasks, and industry-leading price performance. Amazon Bedrock also comprises the new Automated Reasoning checks, the first and only GenAI safeguard that helps prevent factual errors due to hallucinations, using logically accurate and verifiable reasoning. This gives customers confidence to more easily deploy powerful and explainable GenAI solutions that can enhance decision-making and accelerate digital transformation.
PwC will also integrate Amazon Bedrock Automated Reasoning checks within existing industry solutions, such as the Maestro Medical Legal Review solution, to validate that LLM-generated content complies with regulations, and within call center solutions, helping customers more easily confirm that agents comply with respective company protocols.
Introducing Amazon Nova, our new generation of foundation models
aboutamazon.com: [Excerpt] New state-of-the-art foundation models from Amazon deliver frontier intelligence and industry-leading price performance.
As the next step in our AI journey, we’ve built Amazon Nova, a new generation of foundation models (FMs). With the ability to process text, image, and video as prompts, customers can use Amazon Nova-powered generative AI applications to understand videos, charts, and documents, or generate videos and other multimedia content.
LAS VEGAS--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- At AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ: AMZN), today announced the general availability of AWS Trainium2-powered Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, introduced new Trn2 UltraServers, enabling customers to train and deploy today’s latest AI models as well as future large language models (LLM) and foundation models (FM) with exceptional levels of performance and cost efficiency, and unveiled next-generation Trainium3 chips.
New Amazon EC2 Trn2 instances, featuring AWS’s newest Trainium2 AI chip, offer 30-40% better price performance than the current generation of GPU-based EC2 instances.
New Trn2 UltraServers use ultra-fast NeuronLink interconnect to connect four Trn2 servers together into one giant server, enabling the fastest training and inference on AWS for the world’s largest models.
AWS Trainium chips are a family of AI chips purpose built by AWS for AI training and inference to deliver high performance while reducing costs.
The first-generation AWS Trainium chip powers Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Trn1 instances, which have up to 50% lower training costs than comparable Amazon EC2 instances. Many customers, including Databricks, Ricoh, NinjaTech AI, and Arcee AI, are realizing performance and cost benefits of Trn1 instances. Read more
Ultracluster in 2025: A massive Al supercomputer powered by its Trainium chips offering up to 83.2 petaflops of computing power.
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☑️ #161 Nov 27, 2024
Annapurna Labs
siliconangle.com: [Excerpt] Amazon’s secretive AI weapon: An exclusive look inside AWS’ Annapurna Labs chip operation.
Nestled on the ninth floor of an unassuming building in an affluent area of Austin, Texas dubbed The Domain, is one of the world’s most influential research labs powering modern artificial intelligence.
SiliconANGLE got an exclusive, behind-the-scenes tour of Amazon Web Services Inc.’s Annapurna Labs, where the cloud powerhouse does the secretive work of designing and testing the upcoming generations of itsAI accelerator Trainium and custom cloud compute Graviton chips.
Upon arrival, Martin was greeted in the lobby and escorted to the Labs, a highly restricted area even for Amazon.com Inc. employees. After being checked in, given a temporary visitor’s pass and a handful of Jolly Ranchers, Martin met with Rami Sinno, director of silicon engineering at AWS. Joining AWS from Arm Holdings PLC, Sinno brought large-scale project management experience to the project since its inception, detailing the challenging work of recruiting a team of talented engineers for the Trainium chip, a completely stealth initiative at the time.
Japan competition authorities raid Amazon Japan, source says
asia.nikkei.com: [Excerpt] TOKYO (Reuters) -- Japan's Fair Trade Commission on Tuesday conducted an on-site inspection of Amazon Japan on suspicion of violating anti-monopoly laws, a government source said.
The unit of Amazon.com is suspected of inappropriately urging sellers to lower their prices on its e-commerce site in exchange for giving their products advantageous placement on the site, the source said.
@citizenlab: The books that were banned were largely related to sensitive topics like erotica, religion, the occult, and LGBTIQ issues. Even though these books were in stock and a seller was willing to ship, Amazon still restricted users from shipping them to that region. Countries affected are the UAE, Saudi Arabia, other Middle Eastern countries as well as Brunei Darussalam, Papua New Guinea, Seychelles, and Zambia.
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@citizenlab: However, there are some miscategorized books that fall victim to this censorship. Researchers identified censorship blocklists used by Amazon US that resulted in overly broad or miscategorized restriction of unrelated products. Some examples include books on breast cancer, Nietzsche’s Gay Science, and “rainbow” Mentos candy. Also banned are recipe books that invoke “food porn” euphemisms.
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@citizenlab: The study analyzes the complex censorship system #Amazon uses to restrict shipping . Our analysis reveals Amazon uses a model that is sensitive to the presence of keywords, (e.g., terms like “gay,” “porn”) but this method is flawed and flags books for keywords even when the content is not related to controversial topics.
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@citizenlab: The report concludes that @amazon fails to meet its obligations under the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights which guarantees the right to access information and ideas without censorship.
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☑️ #158 Nov 23, 2024
Temu vs. Amazon
Bristlemoon Capital: Temu vs. Amazon is classic counter-positioning. $AMZN can’t compete head on with Temu because it’s hamstrung by its fee structure - its merchants simply can’t make money on ultracheap goods given the hefty fees Amazon charges. We explore this in our recent $PDD report.
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☑️ #157 Nov 22, 2024
Amazon's total investment in Anthropic to $8 billion
anthropic.com: [Excerpts] Powering the next generation of AI development with AWS.
Today we’re announcing an expansion of our collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS), deepening our work together to develop and deploy advanced AI systems. This expanded partnership includes a new $4 billion investment from Amazon and establishes AWS as our primary cloud and training partner. This will bring Amazon's total investment in Anthropic to $8 billion, while maintaining their position as a minority investor.
The AI Effect: Amazon Sees Nearly 1 Billion Cyber Threats a Day
wsj.com: [Excerpt] The technology has spawned a surge in hacking attempts, says cyber chief CJ Moses, while Amazon is also using it to powerfully amp up its threat-analysis capability.
Just as criminals have embraced AI, Amazon has also turned to the technology to drastically scale up its threat-intelligence capabilities. The company, given its vast presence online, can now view activity on around 25% of all IP addresses on the internet, it says, between its Amazon Web Services platform, its Project Kuiper satellite program and its other businesses, giving the company a sweeping view of hacker capabilities and techniques.
Amazon’s chief information security officer, CJ Moses, spoke with WSJ Pro Cybersecurity on how the company is approaching threat intelligence in the AI era. Prior to his current role, Moses ran security for Amazon Web Services, its cloud business, and before that investigated cybercrime at both the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Air Force Office of Special Investigations.
techcrunch.com: [Excerpt] Amazon confirms employee data stolen after hacker claims MOVEit breach.
The confirmation comes after a threat actor claimed to have published data stolen from Amazon on notorious hacking site BreachForums. The individual claims to have more than 2.8 million lines of data, which they say was stolen during last year’s mass-exploitation of MOVEit Transfer.
The threat actor, operating under the alias “Nam3L3ss” claims to have published data allegedly stolen from 25 major organizations, cybersecurity firm Hudson Rock reports.
In a statement given to TechCrunch on Monday, Amazon spokesperson Adam Montgomery confirmed that employee information had been involved in a data breach.
community.progress.com (6/25/24): MOVEit Transfer Critical Security Alert Bulletin – June 2024 – (CVE-2024-5806)
progress.com (7/5/23): MOVEit Transfer and MOVEit Cloud Vulnerability.
socradar.io (update; 11/12/24): [Excerpt] In the manifesto we mentioned, which was released alongside the data leak, Nam3L3ss claims they do not actively hack organizations but “simply monitor the dark web and exposed online cloud services.”
@fs0c131y (update; 11/12/24): Based on ChatGPT's analysis of messages from Nam3L3ss, the hacker who exploited the critical vulnerability in MOVEit could be either a native English speaker or a non-native speaker writing quickly and informally, without careful editing
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☑️ #153 Nov 11, 2024
US % Market Share of Parcel Volume
@libertyrpf: US Delivery market. Look at Amazon Logistics go!
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☑️ #152 Nov 6, 2024
47th President
@JeffBezos: Big congratulations to our 45th and now 47th President on an extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory. No nation has bigger opportunities. Wishing @realDonaldTrump all success in leading and uniting the America we all love.
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☑️ #151 Nov 5, 2024
Amazon Maintains Dominant Lead in the Cloud Market
@StockMKTNewz: Jeff Bezos just filed for his sale of 1.07M shares of Amazon $AMZN stock at $200.07 per share bringing in ~$213.8 Million (Pre-Tax)
