Sure, but fundamentally they’re acting as a distributor of someone else’s product in the form of the frontier models. That’s a classic middle-man.
replyNo value judgement. I think this is a fantastic strategy.
Weights are worth far more than data centers.
reply> Weights are worth far more than data centers.
replyI dunno, hey. After all, I can't distill my competitors datacentres :-)
Why?
replySeems like open weight models keep catching up to state of the art within a few months, at most. Doesn’t seem like much of a moat to me.
If/when open-weight models do catch up (i.e. become the dominant product in demand), Amazon transitions from a middle-man to the supplier with the best economies of scale.
replyGreat business either way. You could even draw an analogy to Linux/OSS & the origins of AWS. They started as basically an infra middle-man for other people’s technology. But as the core tech commoditized, they transitioned into selling their own higher level services at scale—like Bedrock.