I get the feeling Amazon wants to be the shovel seller for the AI rush than be a frontier model lab.
There is no moat in being a frontier model developer. A week, month, or a year later there will be a open source alternative which is about 95% as good for most tasks people care about.
I don't know how much they are spending to be fair.
I am basing my observation on the noises they are making.
They did put out a model called Nova but they are not drumming it up at all.
The model page makes no claims of benchmarks or performance.
There are no signs of them poaching talent.
Their CEO has not been in the press singing praises about AI unlike every big tech CEO.
Maybe they have a skunk-works team on it but something tells me they are waiting for the paint to dry.
Well, i have had chats with a few engineers working in Amazon retail and there is talk about adding agents for Ops and similar internal tasks. So there is a bunch of AI related things happening, and like others have said, they rent shovels for the rush, so they will bank all the money without having to compete with the money bonfires that others are burning.
In a country with dozens government supplied IDs, Aadhaar has been a godsend for the common man. It's one card to open a bank account, buy a SIM card, apply for a loan, enter an airport, or whatever.
I held out for many years due to privacy reasons. In the end, I changed my mind - its just immensely useful to the general public.
You just demonstrated first hand the point made by GP. When the supreme court ordered the Govt to cease making Aadhaar mandatory, they just responded by adding so much friction to daily life without Aadhaar that most people, including privacy conscious folks like you just gave in.
The friction already existed long before supreme court orders. No two departments agreed upon what ID they would need for doing the work. It could be rationcard, PAN, passport, driving license etc. Some organizations asked for more than one ID just in case. India just has too many IDs and it is asked for too many use cases.
Aadhar made it easier than before. It is really a quality of life improvement.
The main issue is government requiring IDs even when it is not usually needed in other countries. Mostly in the name of security. This is the root cause. Aadhar is just the symptom.
However Aadhar does enable deeper breaches into privacy due to its unified nature and the way it is validated through government owned infrastructure. There is full tracking possible on all the services that the residents used.
If Aadhar was a self sovereign ID, then having a single ID is definitely a good thing. It keeps privacy intact while usable where needed.
My point wasn't that no id was required before Aadhaar. It's that any id from a range of acceptable ids like passports, ration card, drivers license worked.
Post Aadhaar, even though all of those IDs are still legal and acceptable under law, the govt has added so much friction on the non Aadhaar path that in practice those IDs are unusable.
> It's that any id from a range of acceptable ids like passports, ration card, drivers license worked.
In reality different IDs were accepted at different departments and there was no consensus. It was really a pain. If someone took ration card as valid, others wanted another ID. In some states it was even worse.
It is true that the government has indirectly made Aadhar mandatory, contrary to the spirit of supreme court order.
I may have yielded, but that happened with the acknowledgement that it's not entirely a bad thing. Other IDs have varying levels of validity and authenticity; today I am of the opinion that countries like India shouldn't waste money and time on these. In fact, I'd say ditch the PAN card as well.
If Aadhaar makes it easier for people living near poverty to get say bank accounts, it'd trump the reservations I have. That's what made UPI possible - just about everyone today has UPI, even people begging for money sometimes have a QR code handy (at least here in Bangalore).
> today I am of the opinion that countries like India shouldn't waste money and time on these.
I agree that there are undeniable benefits from Aadhar. However, the issue is that the narrative from the govt has been that it's an either or situation. Either you have the convenience of Aadhaar, or you have privacy. This is unequivocally false. The solution isn't even technical. There are two simple, easily doable fixes which will deliver most of the benefits without significantly eroding privacy.
1. Ensure that legally valid ids other than Aadhaar are not treated as second class by any govt department. If a non Aadhaar id is refused, the reason must be given in writing. The problem is govt babus like the ease of Aadhaar and hence refuse to do the tiny bit of extra work needed on the non Aadhaar path.
2. Amend the Aadhaar act to ban the use of Aadhaar for anything except identity verification. If any personal data linked to Aadhaar is saved by a platform, then they are liable for leak of the data in the event of a breach.
Just doing these will enable the use of Aadhaar for it's original intent which was verifiable identity. The privacy degradation comes from using Aadhaar as a primary key for arbitrary storage of personal data, not from the existence of Aadhaar itself.
These are neither simple, nor easily doable. But the bigger problem is cost (time and money).
My point was that India should switch to a single card/id for everything, and get rid of everything else including the PAN card. Eventually make Aadhaar digital, and chip based so that it can hold your DL as well. It is it bad for privacy, Yes. But what a country should spend on protecting or preserving privacy is a function of where it is on the socioeconomic ladder. If a single ID helps 80% of Indians (a billion people) navigate the labyrinth of our bureaucracy, I'm ok with it, _today_.
Besides, simpler rules go a long way in reducing the power of govt departments (which we can agree on). It reduces cognitive overload for citizens, as well as for govt workers. Factor in where the rest of India stands in terms of education etc, the value of simple rules cannot be overstated.
As someone who values privacy, there are still ways to do it. You just have to invest a lot more energy and time into it though.
What you are proposing is too sweeping, it is not just privacy that suffers. Making a single ID (whose attributes can't be changed) an entire identity of a person is a very risky one. This makes it a single point of failure and in cases like an ID theft, misuse the affected person suffers gravely, and onus will be on them to prove who they are, a Kafkaesque nightmare it would be.
There are several countries which use a single ID for all government interfacing. For that matter, Aadhaar is almost there already. I am not suggesting that private companies should use it, or should be allowed to use it. But a single ID will limit babudom arbitrariness a bit.
> whose attributes can't be changed
Many IDs (outside India) have similar issues, options to change attributes, and various redressal mechanisms.
I don't know of how digital IDs are used etc. in other countries and how ubiquitous there usage is. (One ID I'm aware of is social security numbers (SSN) is U.S, but that is considered as PII data and usually companies take steps to protect/mask them). But citing that this is how it is done elsewhere is just an appeal to tradition/common practice and not necessarily addresses the points I had made.
Hmm, could you previously open a bank account, buy a SIM card, apply for a loan, or enter an airport without any of those cards? If so, I think it's plausible that the government responded by adding friction to daily life in a way that promoted Aadhaar. If not, they didn't.
My point wasn't that no id was required before Aadhaar. It's that any id from a range of acceptable ids like passports, ration card, drivers license worked.
Post Aadhaar, even though all of those IDs are still legal and acceptable under law, the govt has added so much friction on the non Aadhaar path that in practice those IDs are unusable.
India supreme court is bonkers and often known for its BS judgements devoid of logic and law.
Aadhar is "identity", it is not a "card" of any kind though Indians have inherent love for collecting various cards for fun. I have my driving license, PAN, aapar, kisan and state government health insurance cards, labor department id card. I have few more in some drawer.
Once a person gets aadhar, it acts pretty much same as OAuth. You go to a hotel to get a room, Hotel by law is required to verify that your name and face match. You give your aadhar card to them which they scan on their computer and verify that your name matches your face. Because they are a hotel they have right to only verify that.
This is much more privacy preserving than what supreme court did. Because of Supreme Court, hotels no long bother to implement this and instead demand your passport and other identification, scan it and leave it in their system forever. They also are known to sell this data to other from time to time.
The technical idea behind was aadhar was similar to UPI. Government runs the core infra with basic APIs but private companies build apps on top of it. For example, say GPay builds aadhar interface where when you walk into a hotel to reserve a room, Gpay automatically generates a new aadhar number with permissions only to show your name, photo and age. Hotel system verifies that and stores a receipt. If in future government is investigating who stayed in which room, law enforcement can convert these receipts to identification.
This was a better model which would have unlocked a lot of potential. The government failed to argue the case correctly and supreme court acted more like an activist court.
I do think both Government and Supreme Court failed to show the correct user journey here.
I’d love to see a citation for a Hotel being legally allowed access to the Aadhaar KUA system, even before the Supreme Court judgement. No hotel in India does this, because Aadhaar as implemented is a “honor based system” for the majority of usecases where a photocopy of a Aadhaar (with or without QR) is assumed to be valid.
In comparison, a Voter ID and PAN are both hologram protected and forgeries are easily detected.
W3C verifiable credentials do not require a singular identity source, they work perfectly fine with multiple issuers.
Not op,I agree that hotels doesn't do any face matching.
However for getting a new mobile connection the flow is similar to what op has mentioned. It seems one can get a mobile connection by not opting for face recognition, but the process is cumbersome. Similarly for property registrations fingerprints (atleast in some of the states) of the concerned parties is matched against the ones that are associated with their Aadhar.
Yes, because Telcos are designated as AUAs, and expected to do a full KYC under DoT regulations. Hotels are not.
I have two SIMs, and I surprisingly got the newer of them in 20 minutes at a remote village in India without an Aadhaar. Telcos do a Liveness check with their phone instead these days.
> and instead demand your passport and other identification, scan it and leave it in their system forever. They also are known to sell this data to other from time to time.
Isn't this the problem vs the Supreme court judgement? Why does the hotel need to save this data forever?
A simple fix will be to make companies liable for leaks of personal data. That alone will incentivize then to delete personal data as fast as humanly possible.
Congratulations! Your data is already sold out for Rs. 40 in black market! Also, why do you need aadhar to enter airport?
Now, the morons in charge are making it mandatory to book a gas cylinder as well. It’s like once a blind suddenly starts seeing, he wants to capture everything.
Indians have this crazy love for idiotic paperwork and nitpicking around paperwork, coupled with mostly low IQ and less educated clerks everywhere it becomes worse. I once submited my PAN and Passport to the bank who refused it claiming the spellings of both names do not match as my middle name was shortened on PAN card. I showed them that my photo is present on both and both cards belong to the same person. But nopes.
A friend then showed me that he downloaded aadhar PSD online, put a random invalid number, his photo and a non-existent address on the bank and used it everywhere where people were asking for aadhar without any need. Building and Airport security, Hotel reservation staff, Bus tickets and so on and used real aadhar only for banking and sim cards. He said this simplifies life a lot.
This is the ultimate facade of Digital Identity that UIDAI lets happen while sitting idly by. They put a circular against “Aadhaar photocopies not being valid” only to rescind it the next day because everyone made fun of them.
The truth, as you point out, is that Aadhaar in reality is a an “honour based system”, where UIDAI pretends everything is valid and authenticated as long as it gets used everywhere.
In India you have to cheat just to get things done at all due to how nonsensically strict things are, which leads to increased scrutiny due to cheating, which leads to more need for non-cheaters to cheat just to get things done, which leads to increased scrutiny due to cheating…
As for the low IQ thing no one wants to acknowledge it but check the charts and see that it’s true. Centuries of caste based inbreeding and colonial clerk education will do that to a population. The added toxins in the turmeric will finish the job.
I think this point is bit orthogonal. The current outrage was largely because the app has to be pre-loaded and there wasn't an option to disable or uninstall it.
In the later incarnations, if this is an app which you need to access government services that is less of an issue, though I'm not advocating that this is completely fine. There are already apps like these CoWin (during Covid time), or Digiyatra (despite some of the privacy concerns around it [1]) which many are using. I hope if at all this app gets introduced (in the form you mention) there are larger discussions about permissions and the data access the app would need,and it can be disabled, uninstalled.
Its also just financially lucrative? The right tends to have more politically incorrect things to say and its no surprise click-farms from Asia would want to capitalize on that shock value.
For a long time, I did not get twitter either. But it seems to be the only popular platform where the academics and intellectual class want to hangout. Economists, researchers, policy wonks prefer posting on twitter over any other social platform.
It is also the only way to get my city's public transport system to reply to queries about why a bus is extremely late, when/if it is coming. I always get a nice polite reply because it's publicly available. If I call I get stonewalled with endless call center rerouting eventually leading to a dial tone
Righting Wrongs by Kenneth Roth said something along the same lines, except in this case he said as director of human rights watch he was able to get the attention of despots and change their behavior by posting on twitter. It's clear there are some benefits. Roth's messaging would probably not be impacted by revealing his nation of origin, so it doesn't seem like have to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
The whole enterprise of the data center buildout reminds me of the chapter from Hitchhikers where they build a huge supercomputer for answers but never ponder what the question is.
Like someone else said your question is kind of broad. But I d recommend reading TigerBeetle's documentation to understand how financial transaction processing may differ from what they call general purpose databases like PostgreSQL.
A lot of outages off late seem to be related to automated config management.
Companies seem to place a lot of trust is configs being pushed automatically without human review into running systems. Considering how important these configs are, shouldn't they perhaps first be deployed to a staging/isolated network for a monitoring window before pushing to production systems?
Not trying to pontificate here, these systems are more complicated than anything I have maintained. Just trying to think of best practices perhaps everyone can adopt.
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