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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

#171

Post by Henchman21 »

MrCharismatist wrote: post #9

Like six months ago we got a presentation from an AWS guy on the AI tooling available and how it fit with our particular use cases. At one point seemingly out of nowhere he pointed out on his screen share "Look at how many tokens I've used this month. I run so much Opus." It was a number that was offensively large. I remember thinking "That's a really odd flex, this crap is so expensive the fact that you use so much…

> "You've used AI to do something that was a single command."

As time passes and the layers of abstraction pile up, later generations won't understand the underlying layers of the abstraction. This is a huge weakness in our systems development -- and a huge potential attack surface for adversaries.

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

#172

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

mrbungie wrote: post #47
MrCharismatist wrote: post #9

Like six months ago we got a presentation from an AWS guy on the AI tooling available and how it fit with our particular use cases. At one point seemingly out of nowhere he pointed out on his screen share "Look at how many tokens I've used this month. I run so much Opus." It was a number that was offensively large. I remember thinking "That's a really odd flex, this crap is so expensive the fact that you use so much…

I still don't know how to reconcile these reports with what other people say about GenAI-agentic assisted engineering being the only way of working nowadays, especially in startups. Probably there is no dichotomy going on and it depends on multiple factors, but it seems so weird to see reports that are so different between each other.

I think GenAI-agentic assisted engineering is the only way of working nowadays, and it's the only way I personally have worked for months. I still think that an outright majority of presentations on AI tooling I've seen have been in the nonsensical "Look how many tokens I can burn" genre. Had to sit through one guy recently who explained why you need a complex agentic team with 6 different roles in order to ask Claude to investigate a bug, which you most definitely do not.

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

#173

Post by mikojan »

mrbungie wrote: post #51
Our_Benefactors wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You've used AI to do something that was a single command Yes, and that’s a good thing! This is in fact where a lot of AI value lies. You dont need to know that command anymore - knowing the functional contract is now sufficient to perform the requisite work duties. This is huge!

Once I learn a command that is both repeatable and useful, I prefer to either keep it in my mind or in my aliases. Thank you.

That's what Skills are for

:^)

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

#174

Post by ecshafer »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #91
wolvoleo wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In our place it is really a thing and comes from leadership. They feel like they spent a lot on copilot and they want to see people using it.

It's too bad that they go with a safe enterprise option that is so deficient that the outcomes will be bad and lots of people will learn useless lessons that don't translate to state of the art tools and usage patterns

I tried to have copilot create a powerpoint slide with some content and a rough design idea. It created an empty powerpoint slide with the default template, told me to download it, then created a separate bit of text and told me to copy and paste it in (random bullet point nonsense), no design elements. Whereas claude actually created a slide, with color and formatting, and the content was generated and fit it. Copilot feels like Chatgpt 3.0

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

#175

Post by xp84 »

quikoa wrote: post #41
Our_Benefactors wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You've used AI to do something that was a single command Yes, and that’s a good thing! This is in fact where a lot of AI value lies. You dont need to know that command anymore - knowing the functional contract is now sufficient to perform the requisite work duties. This is huge!

I can't tell if this comment is sarcasm or not. If you let AI run commands you don't understand (especially in production) you may end up with some nasty surprises.

With a comment like that, it's no wonder you're dramatically below our minimum guidance for tokens consumed.

If AI breaks production this way, you just tell AI to fix it! And look, now you've consumed tokens twice. Think on that and I'll see you at the end-of-year performance review.

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

#176

Post by tencentshill »

Insimwytim wrote: post #81
pjc50 wrote: post #21

Lots of people reporting their "I had to use up my tokens, so I burned them on worthless stuff" stories. Incredible thing to do in a climate emergency. Push harder guys, maybe we can hit 3C warming? This reminds me of the story of how the USSR nearly made whales extinct to meet a quota for whale meat that nobody wanted to eat.

> USSR nearly made whales extinct USSR barely accounted for 15% of the world caught amount (with Japan as the leader). > that nobody wanted to eat unsubstantiated.

Whale meat is really bad, now only eaten ceremonially in most places. It was an unrationed meat in the Britain during WWII, and people still didn't go for it.

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

#177

Post by xp84 »

nathan_compton wrote: post #104
jordanb wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been noticing how our economy keeps getting more Soviet as it becomes more top-down. We basically have central planning now with all the pathologies inherent in that system, but unlike the soviets we just have a bunch of guys who happened to get rich or bribe the right people running our GOSPLAN.

The problem is that the founding fathers believed in constraining the state because it could be abusive, but they should have understood that all power ought to be subject to the people, not just state power.

I wonder what the largest and most powerful private enterprise the FFs knew about was. I suppose they'd probably heard of the Hudson's Bay Company, but I have no idea how they really felt about the potential that many normal people would feel equal amounts of domination from companies with revenue much larger than most countries' GDP.

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

#178

Post by AvAn12 »

1. so is everyone who is subject to a corporate mandate... but...

2. this may be ok. A good way to learn a piece of software or tool or process is to play with it. We learn lots of general knowledge through play and experimentation. Heck we get better at musical instruments by playing on them.

Mandates are kind of dumb in many ways. But they will force the issue of discovering whether anything useful can come from AI other than coding.

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

#179

Post by laweijfmvo »

eunoia wrote: post #127
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.…

Interesting. When you say leadership along with manager meetings, are you referring to managers, who might just be exacerbating the rumors I mentioned, or actual company leadership, like Directors, Vps, etc? And are they saying “AI usage”, or explicitly “Token count”?

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

#180

Post by autoexec »

xp84 wrote: post #145
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…

Even as a very happy NVDA shareholder I agree with you. It's comical that managers are being so naïve as to think that you can crap out a dashboard of "tokens consumed per week" and get any useful signal at all from it, beyond learning who's not using AI. Incompetent use of a coding agent, or just general shenanigans, can burn tokens all day but it's not going to get tickets done. Just looking at the work output - ho…

> It's comical that managers are being so naïve as to think that you can crap out a dashboard of "tokens consumed per week" and get any useful signal at all from it, beyond learning who's not using AI.

If some guy decides to spend a bunch of money bringing AI tools into the company things might get very uncomfortable for him if they're seeing zero return on that investment. He's sure not going to get recognition and a massive bonus for it. If on the other hand, he can put some numbers in a spreadsheet or powerpoint showing that employees are using AI all the time and profits are up again this quarter, maybe he can take some credit for that or at least keep his boss or the company's shareholders from questioning the wisdom of dumping so much cash into those AI products.

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