> In 2006, Amazon launched what is now AWS, exposing the internal compute, storage, and database services its retail group had built. The internal pitch was identical to Marketplace seven years earlier.
These were not internal services, and it wasn't exactly the retail group that built them (Chris and Ben were dedicated to EC2 and the team ran remote from Seattle). Nor was Marketplace run on the 1P Amazon platform, so it would have been a strange analogy to use for a pitch.
In the end, though, the point is the same as I made elsewhere in the thread — once you are big enough you can try and bootstrap pretty much anything adjacent to your business and have a good shot at success.
This read was mildly interesting, but I'm left thinking that the study of any sprawling monopoly will come up with similar mildly interesting and irrelevant rationalizations of success. Once you get as as big as Amazon was in the early 2010s, provided your culture doesn't melt down (by itself no small feat), you are well positioned to expand and flatten adjacent parts of the economy.
So the question is whether you read this to be inspired by it and attempt to create your own monopoly, or to be afraid of it and start thinking about regulation. Or both :-)
Actually there is a long and storied history of mechanisms created to compel American companies to comply with requests for digital intervention. A good starting point is the concept of the NSL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_security_letter
Oh this almost makes me want to go back and consider NFS for our local lab. I used to run it but everywhere having a centralized SPOF was a constant concern, and there isn't a simple HA story for it sadly.
> Without any context provided, the state-of-the-art model, GPT-5.1 (High), is only able to solve less than 1% of tasks. This starkly demonstrates that the data is contamination-free, as the model is almost entirely incapable of solving the tasks without learning from the context.
[...]
[With context provided,] on average, models solve only 17.2% of tasks. Even the best-performing model, GPT-5.1 (High), achieves just 23.7%.
> In 2006, Amazon launched what is now AWS, exposing the internal compute, storage, and database services its retail group had built. The internal pitch was identical to Marketplace seven years earlier.
These were not internal services, and it wasn't exactly the retail group that built them (Chris and Ben were dedicated to EC2 and the team ran remote from Seattle). Nor was Marketplace run on the 1P Amazon platform, so it would have been a strange analogy to use for a pitch.
In the end, though, the point is the same as I made elsewhere in the thread — once you are big enough you can try and bootstrap pretty much anything adjacent to your business and have a good shot at success.