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Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks

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Re: Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks

#121

Post by dkarl »

ryandrake wrote: post #17

Not 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…

I kind of get what they're thinking in trying to make sure all engineers use AI. For myself, and for the engineers working with me, I saw everyone go through an initial aversion and resistance to AI, and then an instant productivity boost when we started using them. So there's definitely a good reason to get everybody to start using AI. You don't want a good engineer resisting AI indefinitely if you know it will make them more productive.

Incentivizing people who are already using AI to use as many tokens as possible does seem a little crazy, though.

Re: Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks

#123

Post by akomtu »

ryandrake wrote: post #17

Not 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…

IMO, the investors behind AI play the Uber game: they subsidise the AI costs and inject it into all facets of society they can get their hands on. They can tell the execs to increase AI usage at any cost. Their bet is that we'll become AI addicts with athrophied brains before they run out of money.

Also, don't forget that their datacenters will burn our electricity and boil our rivers at rates much cheaper than what we are billed in our homes. So while you're happy generating mountains of AI slop, somewhere there is a datacenter boiling a river.

I'd compare this to a new patented formula of water that's nobody asked for, and the patent owners are trying to replace all water supply with their crap before we wake up.

Re: Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks

#125

Post by noworriesnate »

d_philla wrote: post #67
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #61

Use Vim or you're fired!

this one is legit the right call, though

But how would you compete when people inevitably started mandating superior editors such as emacs[1] or even notepad[2]?

[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Notepad

Re: Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks

#126

Post by krupan »

akomtu wrote: post #123
ryandrake wrote: post #17

Not 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…

IMO, the investors behind AI play the Uber game: they subsidise the AI costs and inject it into all facets of society they can get their hands on. They can tell the execs to increase AI usage at any cost. Their bet is that we'll become AI addicts with athrophied brains before they run out of money. Also, don't forget that their datacenters will burn our electricity and boil our rivers at rates much cheaper than what…

But Brawndo's got what plants crave. It's got electrolytes.

Re: Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks

#127

Post by eunoia »

laweijfmvo wrote: post #63

I 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'…

Fellow FAANG. We have weekly manager meetings where leadership encourages us to increase token usage. We do push back, and leadership acknowledges that token spend is not a great metric and people are likely to game it... and then go right back to encouraging us to increase token spend in our teams.

We have token tracking dashboards that leadership is looking at. I know because they show us in these manager meetings. Haven't opened them to everyone yet as some kind of leaderboard, so at least that's nice.

Lots of rumors token spend will be involved in perf reviews. Leadership denies it... but then holds more meetings telling us how important it is to increase our token spend and discussing inadequacies from the token spend dashboards.

Re: Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks

#130

Post by 866-RON-0-FEZ »

ryandrake wrote: post #17

Not 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…

> 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.

I had a manager like this once. He didn't last very long, but it was without a doubt the most fun six months of my career.

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