The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 59 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Kantrowitz: Iranian strikes disabled AWS availability zones in Bahrain and Dubai
“Iran has hit enough sites in Bahrain and Dubai that belong to Amazon that there are a couple of availability zones in those regions that are hard down, according to some internal communication that I was able to see, and that they're going to be unavailable fo…”
Cramer: Microsoft Azure's reported growth rate is overstated
“We need to see the real growth of Azure, which I think is overstated. Not, not, not illegal. The kind of thing that you have this weird confluence of Azure and whatever the hell they're doing it with the Sarah Fryer there.”
Wood: AWS customers saw their proprietary IP output back by ChatGPT
“We've seen actual customers see their own IP come back to them from the model, and that is terrifying to enterprise customers, where the IP is the crown jewels”
Wood argues public web data is fair game for AI model training
“Who's to say what this data can be used for when it's publicly available. You know, you chose to make it publicly available. If you want to put some permissions around it, or you want to take it private, Yeah, that's totally up to you. You still own the data. …”
Kantrowitz: Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, and Meta lack standout AI products
“What standout product does AI product does Microsoft have outside of selling AI services from Azure? What standout product does Amazon, AI product does Amazon have outside of selling some AI with AWS. What standout AI product does Apple have? We both know that…”
Garman: AWS automated reasoning mathematically eliminates AI hallucinations in bounded domains
“So by that, by this kind of mechanism, you're, like, systematically able to actually mathematically prove that you got the right answer coming out of this and completely eliminate hallucinations for that area, right? It doesn't mean that we've eliminated hallu…”
Garman: AWS is open to hosting OpenAI and Google Gemini models
“We're always open to having OpenAI be available in AWS someday, or having Gemini models be available in AWS someday, and maybe someday we will spend more time focused on our own models, for sure.”
Garman: Trainium 2 Delivers 30% to 40% Better Price-Performance Than GPUs
“We see 30 to 40% price performance games versus our instances that are GPU powered today.”
Garman: Expecting one dominant AI model is a fundamentally flawed premise
“And this is where a lot of people started, and I just think it's fundamentally the wrong way of thinking about it. Which is a lot of times people are thinking about there's just going to be this one model and I want to have the one model that's going to be the…”
Wood: Amazon Q Code Acceptance Rate Is 35% to 50%
“We've seen some customers get, you know, in terms of just the amount of code that is automatically generated that they accept. It's usually between 35 and 50%. It's higher on Q than any other comparable service”
AWS's Wood: AI agents will be the apps of the generative AI era
“I think agents have a good chance of being the apps for the generative AI world and the generative AI era. And that as we add more of those and we find ways to orchestrate multiple agents together, and there's already customers that are building multi-agent sy…”
Wood: Smaller specialized models beat frontier models on deep enterprise tasks
“I am absolutely positive that the inverse is also true. That you can find older, smaller, specialized models, ah, that, ah, will, ah, will offer much better, higher quality, lower hallucination results on specific tasks at the depth that most organizations nee…”
AWS's Sivasubramanian: AI scaling is not close to hitting a wall
“One, I don't think we are anywhere close to yet hitting that wall yet. So I do think we are going to actually see a lot of net new innovations when it comes to optimizing how to actually train these models in parallel and get better Utilization so that we can …”
AWS AI Chief: Enterprise AI needs smaller distilled models, not monolithic LLMs
“To put these LLMs to work to solve real world problems, you got to actually take some of these models and then customize it, and the end result is not the biggest model. It is actually a much more customized, smaller model or a distal model to solve specific b…”
AWS AI Chief: AI architectures beyond pure transformers are absolutely necessary
“I actually think, ah, new architectures are absolutely necessary in the future, ah, and, ah, there are already hybrid architectures evolving. I mean, ah, I mean in terms of state space models to actually connectors hybrid models between state space to transfor…”
Doshi: AWS Quoted 5x Market Price for GPUs in 2023
“I mean, we look, we were looking for compute last year and AWS wanted to charge us five times more for the same GPU than 10 different providers all around them.”
Kantrowitz predicts Amazon will temporarily lead the AI arms race
“My perspective here is that Amazon will now become the everything store for AI models, and that is going to put it in the lead of the arms race. Does that mean it's going to win the AI arms race? I don't think so. We don't know yet, but is there going to be a …”
McCullough: GPU Startups Could Provide Alternatives to AWS and Incumbent Clouds
“There are these new startups that have access to the Nvidia chips that are creating sort of sort of new cloud offerings I've been hearing from a lot of people that, like, this could provide the opening for people to get a wedge against the traditional, because…”
Wood: There will not be a single AI model to rule them all
“We think that there's not going to be a single model to rule them all.”
Wood: AWS Is the Only Cloud for Privately Customizing AI Models
“Today we're the only place where you can take your own data, and we have customers With exabytes of data. You'd be surprised how many customers have exabytes of data on AWS, and they can take that data that they've invested in, and they can use it with these m…”
Wood: AWS's AI business could surpass all other AWS revenue within years
“It seems very low to me, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if just the, ah, AI part of our cloud computing business was larger than the rest of AWS combined in a couple years.”
Wood: Amazon's AI goal is pragmatic utility, not Artificial General Intelligence
“Others are talking about, well, our stated goal is that we want an artificially generally intelligent system. That is not our stated goal. Our stated goal is that we want to just be very pragmatic, meet customers where they're at today, and then provide capabi…”
Wood: Gen AI value lies in complex task automation, not chat
“Well, we have the other ones that I mentioned earlier, like the generative pieces, the search pieces, but the collaborative problem solving pieces, the automation pieces, completing complex tasks.
That I think is where the majority of the value is going to be.”
Siegler: OpenAI owes Microsoft rev share even on AWS and Google
“While Microsoft no longer has to pay revenue share back to open AI still has to pay it to Microsoft and they have to pay it even when they're using AWS or potentially Google in the future.”
OpenAI expands its AWS agreement by $100 billion over eight years
“OpenAI said it's expanding its existing thirty-eight billion dollar agreement with Amazon Web Services by one hundred billion over the next year, eight years.”
Kantrowitz: AWS grew 24% while Amazon guided to $200B CapEx
“AWS went up 24% in the fourth quarter, which is kind of astounding. But they said they were gonna spend two hundred billion dollars in CapEx. A 60% increase from last year and far above Wall Street expectations, obviously.”
Masad: Core infrastructure systems engineers have enduring job security
“So I think engineers there have job security for the foreseeable future, right? Because of the problem of stochasticity of these models and all of that, you need every line of code to be reviewed and managed very carefully.”
Kantrowitz: European AWS Risk From US Geopolitics Is Far-Fetched
“A world where the US, things get so bad between the US and Europe that your AWS stack is at risk is to, I mean, maybe I'm not imaginative enough, but is to me so far-fetched that I can't fully I wouldn't say a company would begin to change its strategy on it”
Kuyda: AI product startups should fine-tune open models, not build foundation models
“If you can fine tune a llama based model and focus on the logic, the product, the application layer on what you are, what value you're actually providing to the user versus training your own model that becomes obsolete in three months and requires incredible, …”
Garman: AWS Project Rainier will deploy hundreds of thousands of Trainium2 chips in 2025
“We're building together with them what we call Project Rainier and so it's using our next generation Tranium II chips, and this cluster that we're building for them in twenty-twenty-five will be five times the size, the number of exaflops that they use to trai…”
Garman: Past AI Accelerators Failed Due to Weak Software Versus NVIDIA
“I think that's one of the things where people who've tried to build Accelerated platforms before have fallen down is the software support has not been as good as Nvidia software support is fantastic.”
Link: AWS and advertising will reach 31% of Amazon's revenue by 2030
“AWS Growing 19, 20% with 33% margins. You have advertising growing up low double digits with 50% margins, and collectively those two businesses are, right now, they are about 24% of total revenue. That's gonna get to 31% by the end of this decade”
AWS's Wood: Generative AI has not reached its hockey-stick inflection yet
“My guess is that we're, it's probably more likely that we're at the bottom left hand corner. I don't think we've hit the kind of hockey stick inflection point yet. Of what this, ah, what this technology is capable of. It's still very, very, very early.”
Wood: Generative AI Functions as a Discovery Exhibiting Emergent Reasoning
“It's much more like a discovery than it is an invention. Ah, we discovered that if you build these very sophisticated mathematical models, that there is emergent behavior within them that resembles reasoning, that resembles intelligence.”
AWS's Matt Wood: Web-trained AI models have a six-month shelf life
“Today it looks like models have a shelf life of probably about six months if you're training on kind of open, open web data”
Sivasubramanian: Trainium2 offers 4x faster training and 2x energy efficiency
“AWS actually, for instance, we have invested in technologies such as Trinium-II chips, which actually can deliver up to four X faster training. And, ah, also it is while improving energy efficiency up to two times, as an example.”
Sivasubramanian: Amazon Bedrock guardrails improve AI model accuracy up to 84%
“We see up to 40, 84 percent improvement in further accuracy because of those capability as well.”
Ramaswamy: Snowflake employees are forbidden from running OpenClaw on work laptops
“I will flip out if I find out that anyone's running OpenClaw on a Snowflake laptop. Please don't do that. That's not safe. We will help you get like a free Ubuntu machine on AWS if you want.”
Bill Vass left AWS over concerns about government AI adoption trailing China
“One of the reasons I left at AWS and I loved being at AWS. I worked on 63 of the services there and built a lot of them myself, worked on quantum computing and robotics and a whole bunch of things is I was worried a little bit about government adoption of AI a…”
Garman: Andy Jassy's bureaucracy critique applied inside AWS too
“Yeah, I think it's across across Amazon. So it wasn't specific to the rest of Amazon. It was definitely inside of AWS too.”
Garman: Cloud Optimization Is Largely Finished, Funding AI and AWS Growth
“Customers, I think number one, a lot of them have been optimized, right? And there's only so much you can kind of squeeze into an Optimize place and customers are still looking for optimizations, but a lot of that work has been done and they're using some of t…”
Garman: NVIDIA treats AWS very fairly in allocating GPU supplies
“They're very fair in dealing with us and we give long-term forecasts and they tell us what they can supply.”
Garman: Nvidia Blackwell delivers about 2.5x compute performance of H100
“I think we were expecting about two and a half times the compute performance out of the Blackwell chip that you get out of an H-one hundred”
Garman: Generative AI workloads are 50/50 today but shifting toward inference
“You know, we're still probably seeing about that ratio of fifty-fifty. I think more and more it's more inference than training, and increasingly we'll see more and more of the workload shift that way.”
Garman: Enterprise cloud adoption will flip from 20% today to over 80%
“But I do think, and I actually think that at a minimum I think that, that percentage could flip, and it could be eighty-twenty versus 28 where it is today, or even less.”
Wood: AI Startup NinjaTech Has Hundreds of Thousands of Monthly Active Users
“I think Ninja Tech is seeing, you know, remarkable growth. They have hundreds of thousands of monthly active users.”
Wood: AWS AI and Machine Learning Business Exceeds Multibillion-Dollar ARR
“Bedrock, which is the service that we make available to customers to build generative AI applications. That's one of our fastest growing services ever. And all up, AI machine learning at AWS is already a multi-billion dollar business. In terms of ARR.”
Wood: Most enterprises will fine-tune existing models rather than build foundation models
“There isn't one model to kind of rule them all. Each different model has, you know, different sweet spots, and it's my expectation that most customers will invest in not building the foundation models, but will invest in fine tuning and improving those individ…”