Love it. This needs to become a new trend, and price per token can't rise soon enough.
Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks
111–120 of 450 posts
Re: Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks
#112Not just Amazon, too. It feels like all of big tech (and some smaller firms) have simultaneously gone insane. Imagine if your CEO woke up one day and told the company: "We need to encourage travel spending. Please book as many business trips as you can, and spend as much money as possible. Fly first class to our satellite offices! Take limos instead of Ubers! Eat at fine restaurants! Make sure you are constantly trav…
You mean like using lines of code as a metric to rank engineers [1]?
Managers love metrics. Bad managers particularly love metrics. Tokens used was almost the obvious bad metric that was going to be used.
I would argue that tokens used has actually exposed a useful metric: any manager who focused on this, demanded this or ranked based on this should be fired, for being a bad manager.
[1]: https://evan-soohoo.medium.com/did-elon-musk-really-fire-peo...
Re: Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
At least that nominally creates some value at the end of the day. Documentation is the thing everyone wants but no one has time/desire to create. My most recent token heavy task was having an agent write unit tests for coverage on a little graphAPI tool I'd written a bit ago to satisfy SonarQube.
People don't want to read LLM-generated docs though. It'll lack the context to justify why things were designed the way they were, and there's always a risk of hallucination so you still have to verify the documentation's claims, since the person who published it likely did not scrutinize it.
There's two major types of documentation "why is this like this" documentation and then there's "here's the features of this library/tool" documentation. LLM stuff is fine for the latter as long as you screen it for hallucinations. Your right the former they can't really do because they don't have access to the reasoning but I've often found even the latter to be lacking in many teams.
Re: Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks
#114Not just Amazon, too. It feels like all of big tech (and some smaller firms) have simultaneously gone insane. Imagine if your CEO woke up one day and told the company: "We need to encourage travel spending. Please book as many business trips as you can, and spend as much money as possible. Fly first class to our satellite offices! Take limos instead of Ubers! Eat at fine restaurants! Make sure you are constantly trav…
If we suddenly went from rail travel to jets that's exactly what would happen. We'd go from 0 to all the business flights that happen today. Everyone would be under enormous pressure to not be a laggard.
I washed a former intelligence agency person get interviewed on a youtube talk show and (tangential to the policy subject being discussed) they they said that's basically how it was after 9/11. We couldn't onboard people fast enough to figure out how to spend the money so while we were doing that we flew first class half way around the world to waterboard people with bottled water. The people authorizing it didn't care. They were spending X to fight terrorism. The public was never gonna see the nitty gritty breakdown.
That's basically how it seems to be with AI. Just replace "spent X fighting terrorism" with "spent X implementing AI workflows" or "invested X in AI" or whatever. Nobody actually knows or cares just how far the dollars are going.
Re: Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks
#115Hasn't Anthropic being experiencing issues due to extremely high usage? Being their investor, you would think Amazon wouldn't do Anthropic dirty by weakening their ability to handle user traffic
Amazon runs anthropic models in it's own DCs with Bedrock.
How does this work?
Anthropic sends .gguf and a claude-serve binary?
Re: Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
Obligatory: Negative 2000 Lines of Code https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44381252
Versus my sibling comment to yours, I actually sent that to some internal folks after the bit about AI+total lines committed was said.
was there any kind of response or reaction to that? it’s something i would have done and probably wouldn’t have gone well. xD
Re: Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know some that was told to try and use AI more on the job so they created some agent to just burn tokens and ended up using about 10x what the next highest employee used. Buddy expected to get shit but instead got an accolade and was asked to give a short talk to the other employees about how they could match their success.
i call BS on this story
If you've never seen this level of perverse incentive, you have been lucky. The creation of and subsequent exploitation of them aren't new. For pre computer examples: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-cobra-effect-2/
Re: Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks
#118The Casual form of Goodhart's Law...
https://unintendedconsequenc.es/new-morality-of-attainment-g...
Re: Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
At least that nominally creates some value at the end of the day. Documentation is the thing everyone wants but no one has time/desire to create. My most recent token heavy task was having an agent write unit tests for coverage on a little graphAPI tool I'd written a bit ago to satisfy SonarQube.
Inaccurate documentation can be worse than no documentation at all!
...Yes. I didn't say fire and forget but it can handle a lot of rote recitation of library flags and functions perfectly well. The kind of stuff that's autogenerated with javadocs, inputs, outputs and effects that are all in the code are available to the LLMs. Like all things with LLMs generate and review but I've seen some good outputs with minimal errors that saved days of work no one was going to be given the time to do.
Re: Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks
#120I work at a FAANG (not Amazon), and have heard this a lot, both internally and publicly. Except, never officially from anyone that mattered (leadership). It always starts with a rumor and/or someone (internal) creating a dashboard/metric, and blows up from there. I've even heard leaders proclaim that it's NOT what they're looking at, and that you better NOT be wasting those expensive tokens. Now, they might be; they'…
My friend at Google says they have a "ai-usage" dashboard that tracks everyone's ai token usage as well as aggregated per team, per org, etc. There's a sign on it that says "don't use this for perf reviews!" but I think everyone knows that that's exactly what they're going to use it for.