I was in New York this week for the AWS Summit, and while it’s always great to catch up with readers (thanks to those of you who came out to the drinkup!), AWS friends, and others, I found myself rather taken aback by the overwhelming strength behind the Generative AI theme of the entire event.
I know, I know–all of the industry is currently consumed by a paroxysm of GenAI hype; I’m not ignorant of this fact. However, the badge lanyards were GenAI branded, the keynote opening slide simply said “Generative AI,” and every single offering discussed during the ~98 minute keynote was centered around Generative AI. Nearly every expo hall booth was dripping with GenAI; Elastic even went so far as to rebrand itself as “The Search AI company.”
I am not an AI refusenik; I use it myself for a variety of tasks. That said, I’m old; “because it’s cool” (and let’s be clear, AI is very cool) fails to state a compelling business case. There has to be downstream value derived from any business initiative. Terms like “transformation” are bandied around cheaply; so far all of the value business that I’ve spoken with are deriving from GenAI initiatives represent evolutionary steps rather than revolutionary steps.
And so, the hyperfocus on GenAI is concerning to me because of what’s being shunted aside to create room for it.
They’re Amazon WEB Services, not Amazon GenAI Services. I fix large AWS bills for large enterprises for a living; my customers have a raft of very large-scale challenges that don’t involve GenAI in the slightest. Two years ago the AWS event keynotes were full of offerings that made solid strides towards assuaging those customer concerns. This year there was none of that; the non-GenAI section of the keynote simply didn’t exist.
It’s not that AWS doesn’t have things to talk about beyond GenAI; the day before the summit Graviton4 instances became generally available eight months after being announced at re:Invent. This wasn’t even mentioned on stage, nor was anything else germane to running infrastructure.
326 bites at the apple and the other two companies are still beating the pants off of you?
AWS did make the time to take a cheap shot at Google and Microsoft about how AWS has had 326 AI/ML feature releases, which is “more than twice as many as the other two companies combined.” I cannot fathom who in their right mind thought that this would be a good thing to say in public. “Number of features” is a metric about which no customer cares (particularly when ‘deploying a thing to a new region’ is counted as a feature), and it’s needlessly bringing up competitors at a moment when it’s very apparent that AWS is having its corporate butt handed to it by Google and Microsoft in the GenAI space. It stank of competitor focus, insecurity, and fear. In short, it was emblematic of “Day 2” thinking that many former Amazonians report has taken root inside the culture. It’s becoming increasingly apparent that when it feels threatened, Amazon will abandon the values it once held dear–and that should be terrifying enough to give anyone pause.
The hell of it is that though they don’t seem to realize it themselves, AWS has many things to offer this space that showcase them at their best. Whether your workloads are GenAI or not, you need performant data services to feed them, and high throughput networking to convey that data to compute services that will crunch that data to perform tasks. When it comes to infrastructure, nobody can touch Amazon’s level of operational excellence, no matter what those other companies say in their own marketing to the contrary. I don’t build workloads on AWS because I’m some kind of shill; I do it because from an infrastructure perspective they are pretty clearly the best there is.
But as soon as you start moving up the stack into GenAI applications and GenAI assistants, Amazon’s leadership position evaporate as they begin trailing significantly behind their competition. It’s very hard to contend with a straight face that Amazon Q Developer can outcompete GitHub Copilot, and while the just-launched low-code internal app builder App Studio seems promising, it remains to see if it can even outcompete the now-deprecated Amazon Honeycode, let alone something like my own beloved Retool for quickly throwing together inward-facing applications. (As one example, it’s not at all clear exactly what constitutes a user-hour; does a user session time out, or does it linger forever like SageMaker Canvas’s user sessions do? At 25¢ per user-hour, that’ll add up once the free trial expires, and the documentation as of this writing remains utterly silent on this.)
The longer term problem here is that as long as AWS is going to say things that are clearly not true (“Amazon Q Developer is the most capable generative AI–powered assistant for software development”), it gives license to call into question how true other statements AWS makes, such as “we don’t train our AI services on customer data.” This leads to an erosion of trust, as AWS’s historical “show, don’t tell” marketing approach gives way to overhyping the bejeezus of of its offerings to the point where the truly remarkable aspects of what they’re building gets lost amid a sea of noise.
I’m worried about the future of AWS in a way I never envisioned I would be.
