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Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools

arstechnica.com

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Re: Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools

#211

Post by thesz »

tverbeure wrote: post #174
ua709 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> use cases related to root causing complex simulation failures. That's a pretty interesting use case. I assume this is for RTL simulation given the thread, but how do you connect the output of the simulator to the AI?

For a small case, a colleague took a screenshot of waves in the waveform viewer and pasted it into the AI tool. It worked. But for large cases, use tools to extract all interfaces from the waveform file and save it as a text file, or add $display statements in the Verilog itself to dump the transactions. A SOTA LLM will eat it up. You point it to the RTL, a log file with hundreds of thousands of lines, and give it a…

Have you tried to change your HDL to something more modern like Bluespec System Verilog or, god forbid, anything embedded into Haskell or Scala?

I read that BSV source code is about three times shorter than similar design in Verilog and also has three times smaller defect density (defects per significant line of code). So just by changing the HDL from Verilog to BSV one can have nine (9) times less defects in the design.

Re: Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools

#212

Post by humanfromearth9 »

nextlevelwizard wrote: post #34
Argonaut998 wrote: post #29

I swear the industry is being Garry Tanned. Senior management let go our localisation staff. Now they want us to use AI to translate. They still want manual review. We use Github Copilot at work, we get a measly 300 requests with the budget to go over if necessary. Opus 4.7 or GPT 5.5 would eat all of those up in a day. Are we supposed to be using more than the allotted amount, do management see that as a good thing.…

How you burn 300 requests in a day? From my Copilot usage Opus consumes surprisingly few requests to do a lot of stuff. It isn’t paying by token but instead by prompt or something.

Review-fix rounds after generation of text or code, until convergence to a solution that doesn't need more improvements.

Re: Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools

#213

Post by creative_name3 »

jjk7 wrote: post #133
the_snooze wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My questions for that approach are: Why treat AI as a special technology that needs enterprise-scale exploration to come up with a useful application? And why not take the alternative approach of identifying the subset of people who have indeed found solid uses and spread their best practices around? The top-down approach to encouraging (mandating?) AI usage strikes me as infantilizing to the workers, who are perfect…

A tool so good, the workers need to be forced to use it.

Workers are good at their job using tools they know because they had years/decades to hone that craft.

The new tool might make a lot of that experience obsolete. Also, some people that were good with old tools might be great with the new tool. Some may not.

Overall, I don't think it's a bad idea to burn some tokens (and money) to let people experiment.

Re: Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools

#214

Post by judahmeek »

pfannkuchen wrote: post #176
_bypa wrote: post #16

The fact that management signed off on measuring AI use through token usage shows how incompetent management really is, including in allegedly technical conmpanies like Amazon. Tokenmaxxing was an entirely expected and rational response. IOW You measure employees in stupid ways, you're going to get stupid behaviour as a consequence.

So my assessment of the current mania is that it’s basically a management variant of Pascal’s wager. If you as a “leader” refuse to go along with the crowd and you’re right, then after the dust settles you look like someone who guessed right. Oh and now we’re in a recession so you are probably having a bad time regardless. You maybe get one promotion, congratulations. If you refuse to go along with the crowd and you’…

Yes, leaders can & should be expected to devise experiments to determine what processes might possibly be optimized though AI-assistance.

But doing so properly requires expending a serious amount of cognitive effort & agile methodology, which is the exact opposite of what Amazon's management has demonstrated here.

Re: Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools

#215

Post by [deleted] »

shimman wrote: post #124
jkingsbery wrote: post #63

I work at Amazon (standard disclaimer: just sharing my own experience, not an official spokesperson, etc.) I can't say that this isn't happening, but at least the parts of the company I get visibility into, what the article describes isn't my experience. There is a lot of interest in using GenAI, but people are mostly getting kudos around creative uses for GenAI, not just for raw amount of tokens. For most scaled Gen…

Amazon is a massive company, your single experience is worse than an anecdote because there is no way verify. What we can verify is how how Amazon already treats workers, they will surveil anyone within their systems regardless of the futility of said surveillance. Why are we suppose to not believe them using LLM systems as a means to further control their expensive employees from unionizing or seeking out solidarity…

[deleted]

Re: Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools

#216

Post by judahmeek »

asdfman123 wrote: post #201
this_user wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One argument I have heard in favour of this is that management knew this would be a side effect, but that it's more important to have people engage with AI as much as possible simply to explore what is actually possible. You are effectively knowingly wasting money in the expectation that you might learn something useful that will be more valuable in the long run.

Exactly. That's the problem ICs don't want to admit. Managing a lot of people at scale is messy and you have to use crude solutions. It's impossible to know everything that's going on. If you were a manager you wouldn't do any better. Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.

Your argument that bad processes can't possibly be improved is contradicted by all of recorded history.

Re: Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools

#217

Post by binsquare »

amazon leaders are obsessed with "metrics" but they care very little about what those metrics actually measure

it's all a political performance.

Remember when they made the decision for return to office and just...decided to post no support data on why they need to do it?

Re: Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools

#218

Post by bigstrat2003 »

nradov wrote: post #188
_bypa wrote: post #16

The fact that management signed off on measuring AI use through token usage shows how incompetent management really is, including in allegedly technical conmpanies like Amazon. Tokenmaxxing was an entirely expected and rational response. IOW You measure employees in stupid ways, you're going to get stupid behaviour as a consequence.

If it's stupid and it works then it's not stupid. Sometimes executives have to use blunt instruments to turn around the culture of a hidebound large organization. When Jeff Bezos sent his 2002 API mandate it might have seemed stupid at the time and yet it worked. https://nordicapis.com/the-bezos-api-mandate-amazons-manifes...

Stupid things that work are still stupid. There's a reason we have the expression "a broken clock is right twice a day". Moreover, evidence so far seems to suggest that this AI push is not working for Amazon.

Re: Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools

#219

Post by judahmeek »

tverbeure wrote: post #199
the_snooze wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I asked: >And why not take the alternative approach of identifying the subset of people who have indeed found solid uses and spread their best practices around? A bottom-up approach has a far better chance of finding those particularly good use cases, and if you lean on the people how found those fits, they're more persuasive than top-down edicts. They actually know what they're talking about. If the poin…

How do you know up front who will find the best use cases? Both approaches can work.

I'd bet my life savings that the person who is forced to use a tool by top-down edict is less likely to find a valuable use case than the person who is sincerely curious about said tool.

Re: Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools

#220

Post by watwut »

tverbeure wrote: post #196
watwut wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not unreasonable to assume that many people are set in their ways and unwilling to change their behavior without a bit of a push. You include those only in second round along with guidelines and recommendations on how to use it effectively.

What if those people are some of the most experienced ones, who can see use cases, and flaws, that more junior people won't?

People who have to be forced to try it are unsuitable for the exploratory "find what it is useful for" task regardless of seniority.

Also, we are talking about large companies here. There will be plenty of more suitable seniors.

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