> Significant losses: Internal documents revealed that Amazon's devices division lost over $25 billion between 2017 and 2021. A separate report estimated the Alexa division alone lost around $10 billion in 2022.
Think about this way: They subsidized the hardware and hardware development too much and created a messy third-party ecosystem rather than focusing these 25 bn USD on developing an AI chat (OpenAI spent less in total).
Alexa came out in 2013, long before transformers (2017) or chatgpt (2022). The state of the art back then was closer to CleverBot than anything useful.
We will likely have decent standalone voice assistants at some point soon but Alexa and Siri were way too early for that.
