Did you mean "overestimating"? "somewhat help" is putting it strongly, IMO.

My spouse works at a large (50k-100k) org in a program management role where she is getting a lot of pressure to organize various AI evangelism efforts aimed at developers. Workshops, bake offs, demo days, etc.

I mean sounds neat, but is this being done because it's useful or because someone up high needs to justify their AI budget spend with AI usage metrics?

Do we believe that ICs are actually so stupid/stubborn they need to be mandated, coaxed, coached, bullied and bribed to use something that makes their jobs easier?

Doesn't most of the best tech end up being bottoms-up?

Most of us who were around 15+ years ago recall a lot of BigCorp had to be dragged unwillingly into mobile by internal useres/devs who got their first iPhone and saw the light. A lot of stuff starts as small team internal skunk works / unofficial projects working around productivity drains. I am highly suspicious that the C-suite knows what people 10 levels down actually need for productivity enhancement.

It doesn't have to be either/or of course - a cloud provider may well support a range of models, some developed in house and some not.

Vertical integration - a cloud provider building everything they sell - isn't necessarily the most logical business model. Sometimes it makes more sense to buy from a supplier, giving up a bit of margin, than build yourself.

LLMs look to be shaping up as an interchangeable commodity as training datasets, at least for general purpose use, converge to the limits of the available data, so access to customers seems just as important, if not more, than the models themselves. It seems it just takes money to build a SOTA LLM, but the cloud providers have more of a moat, so customer access is perhaps the harder part.

Amazon do of course have a close relationship with Anthropic both for training and serving models, which seems like a natural fit given the whole picture of who's in bed with who, especially as Anthropic and Amazon are both focused on business customers.

The way I see it, product management is not a role, is a discipline. There needs to be more partnering in software. E.g. pair a project manager with a tech-lead, together they do product management.