Hacker News Reader

Comment by pj_mukh | Hacker News Reader

Take the L man, you are sitting on 3 countries worth of GDP in cash. Buy Mistral, move on. That's what Amazon (basically) did and they're about to ship [1].

[1]: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/devices/new-alexa-generativ...

View on HN

I wouldn't use Amazon as an example until we see Alexa's real world performance.

Mistral is French; that's their whole value. A US company can't buy them.

What? Of course a US monopoly could buy them, anything else would be communism they always tell us.

That's what Amazon (basically) did and they're about to ship

Ship what?

Will what they ship be anything better than just using ChatGPT? Right now companies don't need to buy anything, because everyone has what is essentially the exact same product. Maybe OpenAI's is a bit better than everyone else's in everyday use, but a run of the mill AI offering with maybe? better usability is still a run of the mill AI offering.

That's the problem. There really is no differentiation out there. You know you're all using pretty much the same thing when fanboy-ism rears its ugly head. "My ChatGPT is better than your Claude!" Or vice-versa ad-nauseum.

The only way to win in that environment is to leverage your other businesses to force use of your models onto the market.

But I guess, kudos to Apple for at least trying to improve their product. They really don't need to do that. But how long will that attitude last? Sooner or later even Apple will start foisting their models onto the markets by leveraging their other business lines. Like Microsoft has figured out recently, "hey, we don't need to be good at AI to win. We just need to force everyone to use our models!" Expect the same from Amazon, FB, Google et al.

Alexa has integrations with a bunch of third party services - Uber, smart home, etc. - not to mention Amazon shopping, and Alexa+ taps into that preexisting wide ecosystem. So as an agent it's already a lot more effective than ChatGPT for "getting things done". I think they've beaten Apple at their own game by at least a couple years.

You've just reiterated what I was saying.

They know they have a run of the mill model. Maybe even not as good as Gemini or ChatGPT. (or even DeepSeek? Who knows?) So they leverage other business to force use of the models onto the market.

Everyone else will do the exact same thing. Why? Because I don't think their models will be better in any material way than the slop Amazon is slinging.

The possibility to do things does not mean it's able to actually finish the task, at least not until you and I have an opportunity to try it out ourselves and verify that things actually work, and work at least as well as you do it yourself on a first party app. Why are people so eager to promote these fairytales?

Ship what?

In Amazon's case, Alexa. The voice assistant market seems like a great place to leverage this tech but two of the three major services in this space (Apple, Google, and Amazon) have nothing to show and Google is only recently getting their act together.

I meant Alexa the home assistant (100M MAU, currently mostly setting timers), not Alexa the web-based chat tool that no one uses.

Once Alexa (the home assistant) gets Claude capabilities natively, I can see it becoming infinitely more useful.

Didn't MS already enter into some sort of agreement with Mistral?

Also - I don't think Amazon (or more specifically Alexa) is exactly worth emulating. I am willing to bet there are a substantial number of issues with their new Alexa features that don't happen with Siri specifically because of its reduced scope (can't browse the internet and shop for you, etc.)

Why not let users have default open-source model and “free” limited token access to a model where they can pay extra to use further or swap. Like Perplexity does with their surface. Over time they can build their Sonar equivalent.

Or, heck, just buy Perplexity. You have the cash.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com