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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

#391

Post by s1ngular1ties »

andrekandre wrote: post #361
autoexec wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> things might get very uncomfortable for him if they're seeing zero return on that investment. > 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 thats exactly what i see first-hand; no actual measure of dollars in vs dollars out, just x number of employees are generating y number of pr's with z% ai cod…

> just x number of employees are generating y number of pr's with z% ai code + this quarter we made a profit = ai productivity boost...

TBH, if x,y, and z led to your company making an increase in profits over the quarter (im not saying it did, just that your recounting of it implies the connection was made), then it pretty much did its job. The last one is a more than meaningful metric for bosses, companies, and shareholders =)

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

#392

Post by palmotea »

eudamoniac wrote: post #307
dtnewman wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what inspired me to build my new CLI tool, Burn, Baby, Burn ( https://github.com/dtnewman/burn-baby-burn/tree/main ). (If you are a VP at Amazon, yes, I'll consider acquisition offers. I'm also working on an enterprise version of this with additional features.) Show HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48151287

Won't the company audit the requests to AI and see you're sending a bunch of BS?

> Won't the company audit the requests to AI and see you're sending a bunch of BS?

Shouldn't be too hard to game. Version 2 uses the M365 MCP server to load up your email and iterate over all the messages, summarizing them over an over.

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

#393

Post by autoexec »

s1ngular1ties wrote: post #391
andrekandre wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> things might get very uncomfortable for him if they're seeing zero return on that investment. > 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 thats exactly what i see first-hand; no actual measure of dollars in vs dollars out, just x number of employees are generating y number of pr's with z% ai cod…

> just x number of employees are generating y number of pr's with z% ai code + this quarter we made a profit = ai productivity boost... TBH, if x,y, and z led to your company making an increase in profits over the quarter (im not saying it did, just that your recounting of it implies the connection was made), then it pretty much did its job. The last one is a more than meaningful metric for bosses, companies, and sha…

The point is that kind of lazy accounting isn't really showing that the profit increase wouldn't have happened without AI. It may even be the case that profits would have been better without the cost and use of AI, or even that by generating a bunch of AI slop they're accumulating costly technical debt they'll eventually have to dig themselves out of.

We've already seen companies admitting that they aren't seeing a return on their investments in AI. We've also seen companies trying to convince us (or themselves) that ROI isn't important, and people should just stop worrying about it and that maybe in 5-10 years they'll start to reap some benefits. Some of the efforts people make to justify the costly investment they've made in AI can start looking a little desperate. All this token burning and tokenmaxxing might be another sign of that.

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

#394

Post by onion2k »

jordanb wrote: post #55
this_user wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is exactly the point. It may be wasteful, but it's the fastest way to explore how AI may actually be useful to your business. Even if 80% of employees are just wasting tokens, you still have 20% who are figuring it out.

Even if that were true it'd mean that current AI usage is overshooting actual, productive use by 5x. This is a problem when all the AI projections are that the current state is the minimum and future usage will be 10+x.

It does mean that, but in a situation where people don't know what the productive use is you have no other option.

It's like that famous quote about advertising that says "Half my ad spend is wasted, but I don't know which half". 20% of token use is useful, but as you don't know which 20% it is you have to spend 5x more to get that knowledge.

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

#395

Post by onion2k »

paulhebert wrote: post #226
krupan wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry, but that's insane. I mean, I guess if you have cash to burn I could think of even worse ways to spend it, but seriously, this is dumb. What other tool have businesses spent millions of dollars and person hours on to try and find something useful the tool can do?? Talk about a solution looking for a problem! If it's not clear in the early stages that this tool solves a problem then ditch it and move on! Giv…

Every dollar your company gives to AI providers is a dollar they're not paying you.

No it isn't. My salary won't increase if the AI budget reduces, or if the AWS bill goes down, or if the board decide not to do a retreat to Davos this year, or anything else. My salary is very strictly limited by the salary budget. The only impact of a reduced AI budget would be an increase in dividends to shareholders, but that would have a second order effect of making the company less valuable because our competitors would be racing ahead of us.

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

#396

Post by kylestlb »

jordanb wrote: post #50
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.

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.

Surprise - capitalism has always been top down planning. The bosses are the planners, my friend.

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

#397

Post by kylestlb »

xp84 wrote: post #177
nathan_compton wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The FFs were literally bourgeois, the american revolution was a bourgeois revolution. They were the big private enterprises, and they wanted to stop giving a cut of their winnings to king george.

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

#398

Post by Schiendelman »

cmiles8 wrote: post #241

It’s not surprising given Amazon’s pretty lackluster position in AI beyond providing raw compute, which itself is basically a commodity at this point. Have heard very similar stories to what the article describes. There were also outright revolts from tech folks being forced to use Amazon’s own shit self-built AI vs Claude Code and other top-tier products. Given Amazon’s early start with Echo and Alexa they should ha…

The "Amazon's early start" really reminds me of what the hybrid-focused Japanese car manufacturers did - they knew the battery tech and squandered their lead. This is normal though, this is why disruption is necessary.

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

#399

Post by cleaning »

eudamoniac wrote: post #307
dtnewman wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what inspired me to build my new CLI tool, Burn, Baby, Burn ( https://github.com/dtnewman/burn-baby-burn/tree/main ). (If you are a VP at Amazon, yes, I'll consider acquisition offers. I'm also working on an enterprise version of this with additional features.) Show HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48151287

Won't the company audit the requests to AI and see you're sending a bunch of BS?

Do you have an example of any company ever doing this?

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

#400

Post by bigstrat2003 »

treis wrote: post #263
malfist wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At my company we were told AI spend was part of perf review and that the "singularity" had happened. Now 20% of our infrastructure spend is tokens. The average number of pull requests per dev per week increased with all this spend. From 4.2 to 5.1. And that includes a huge chunk of PRs that are just agents changing a line or two in a config. It's all magical thinking

It's definitely not. It's a fundamental shift on how we interact with computers. It's a tractors on farms kind of moment.

It's not remotely comparable to tractors. Tractors actually do their job correctly and consistently.
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