| ▲ | 'Sloppenheimer:' Amazon Employees Mock the Company's AI on Slack(404media.co) |
| 121 points by doener 2 hours ago | 56 comments |
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| ▲ | gavinray an hour ago | parent | next [-] |
| I recently wound up in conversation with someone working at Amazon. Inevitably, the convo steered into AI/LLM's at some point. Here is what I learned: - AWS had an in-house LLM tool that was terrible they tried to use for a while - A lot of them still use Kiro - Claude Code is currently the de-facto standard - They're in the process of getting some custom Codex variant that doesn't phone-home and is audited approved - There's no mandated organizational standard for what exact tools to some, various teams have different levels of adoption and stacks - No org-wide/team-wide conventions for Claude Code - They do have token budgets - There's an intenral push for something called "Agent Spaces" which was described to me as a sort of Lovable/Bolt-type thing if I understood it right I can't validate all of this and I might have misremembered, but just in case anyone else finds it interesting. |
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| ▲ | noisy_boy an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | I am more curious about how much token budget they have. Here I have to beg my boss for more as if he is paying from his pocket or I am using it for my hobby projects (I am not). I guess time to go back to copy/pasting to chat and doing things by hand like a caveman. | | |
| ▲ | garciasn an hour ago | parent [-] | | I don't understand this token budget shit. Why would anyone, in their right mind, not be using Claude Max? All of the engineers at our org are using 6.25x and several heavy non-developers are as well. The rest of the company with licenses are using 1.25x. I have hit my 6.25x limit exactly once in the last quarter. --- I realize that we will all eventually be forced to pay more for this and I have raised it as a real possibility to the org for budgeting scenario planning; however, for now, why would you pay by token when it's subsidized?! | | |
| ▲ | mrgaro 35 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | In order to get enterprise agreement you need to pay per token for Claude. | | |
| ▲ | garciasn 30 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Ah; I didn't realize there was a 150 person cap to Team and I suppose paying out the ear is worth it for compliance audit. Makes sense in that regard. |
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| ▲ | disgruntledphd2 35 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > I realize that we will all eventually be forced to pay more for this and I have raised it as a real possibility to the org for budgeting scenario planning; however, for now, why would you pay by token when it's subsidized?! Anthropic (and maybe OpenAI?) have gated all the important enterprise features behind API plus pricing in the last quarter or two. | |
| ▲ | dastbe 34 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | because they’re not; anthropic is pushing enterprises to switch to API/token pricing | |
| ▲ | mrguyorama 29 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | For the code I generate and the limited way I am using it, Claude Sonnet is reliable and good. I hope that I can someday run something very much like it locally. The moment that happens, the AI industry is essentially useless to me. I don't need some ultra expensive "Totally better" model that does the exact same thing. |
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| ▲ | tyingq 27 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Would be really curious what the internal market share for Kiro is. Not a really good look for it if it's just smattering use here and there. | |
| ▲ | add-sub-mul-div an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | From the outside it always seems laughably circuitious compared to just learning skills ourselves. Even if it did let me fill out TPS reports 20% faster, who even cares compared to all of this chaos? | | |
| ▲ | dfee an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | the problem is scale. there's a tension between an individual developing technical skills (transfer cost is high, slow, expensive) and developing agent skills (transfer cost is low, instant, free). so, just like a manager manages employees, or you consult a contractor, agents are a way of getting leverage over a system. that said, if you want to learn to play saxophone, you're free to do so. just note your personal endeavors may begin to look more like hobbies than marketable skills. | |
| ▲ | wahnfrieden an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Shareholders want the company to figure out how to pay fewer employees, and pay them less by down-skilling them |
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| ▲ | stanac an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| "Sign up for free access to this post". There should be a rule about this kind of posts. If there isn't already. https://archive.ph/1YRCE |
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| ▲ | sarreph an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | > If there isn't already. There is![0] [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989 | | |
| ▲ | mirashii an hour ago | parent [-] | | Importantly, in that rule: > Complaints about paywalls are off topic, so please don't post them. |
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| ▲ | cheshire_cat an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | By that logic links to the FT and the WaPo also couldn't be posted. Which I guess is a fair position to take, but seems too limiting to me. | | |
| ▲ | dminik an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | What meaningful conversation can you have about an article you can read beyond the headline? | | |
| ▲ | dylan604 37 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Just because you don't have access doesn't mean that people with access should be disallowed from discussing it. It just means you can't really discuss the article, but that's never stopped anyone from commenting before | |
| ▲ | rustystump an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Sadly, knowing most people, headline is rarely read past even when it isnt paywalled |
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| ▲ | functionmouse an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | > seems too limiting to me. articles restricting most users from reading them seems too limiting ban all sites with paywalls/login walls including Twitter, NYT, FT, Business Insider, literally all of them | | |
| ▲ | nosioptar 36 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | For anyone who doesnt know: changing the x.com or twitter.com in a twitter link to xcancel.com usually works to view tweets without an account. (If I remember right, some video links dont always work with xcancel.) | |
| ▲ | imglorp an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Seems pretty easy to have a bot automatically try to create an archive link and comment it. | |
| ▲ | airstrike an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | WSJ and Bloomberg offer "gift links" that paid users can share. The latter is only good for 7 days IIRC, however. | |
| ▲ | incanus77 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Ok, anyone care to gather at a coffee shop so that we can discuss the print version? | | | |
| ▲ | Forgeties79 an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | There are plenty of posts every day that don’t require you to get through a paywall - I personally just ignore them. I imagine there are only a handful of paywalled articles a week, and most of them end up having an archive link in the comments anyway |
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| ▲ | cyanydeez an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Someone should point their LLM at creating a web plugin that just overlays a comment section & wiki style editing for archive and other similar websites. Then we can do the same thing LLMs are doing to invalidate primary sources. |
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| ▲ | giancarlostoro an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I'm surprised with Amazon and Meta in terms of AI. Less surprised with Google, I think Google has a very specific niche they picked. If you really think about it, you don't have to be the absolute best, you just have to keep refining your model for efficiency and cost, and I think that's Google's true goals and secret sauce. Google will snowball into place. They're also used more than most people realize. https://cloud.google.com/customers/qualia Then there's Mark Z who is throwing away piles of money, but nothing to show for it other than letting people easily hack his social media sites? I really hope they never let an AI just send someone a link like that again? If you're at the point where a person is taking over an account, have a human review it, check for red flags like a VPN. |
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| ▲ | ako an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | I think Amazon is doing ok as the cloud where most customers run their LLM. I think a lot of companies are using e.g., Anthropic models on Bedrock so it lives inside their AWS cloud. | |
| ▲ | disgruntledphd2 32 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Then there's Mark Z who is throwing away piles of money, but nothing to show for it other than letting people easily hack his social media sites? I mean, FB/Meta have been using lots of GPUs and compute for well over a decade at this point, they definitely are one of the few companies who can make use of relatively absurd amounts of these to drive revenue (i.e. improve ranking for both personal/organic and paid posts). Whether or not they'll get a return from this wave is much more up in the air. |
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| ▲ | cmiles8 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Amazon’s attempts at AI tooling are just far too behind to be taken seriously. Kiro, Quick whatever, the Alexa updates. All just a hot mess. Amazon’s own employees appear to have abandoned Kiro en mass when allowed to just use Claude. Amazon should just focus on being a utility compute provider. Anything they try to do on top of that is just consistently second rate. |
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| ▲ | computomatic 28 minutes ago | parent [-] | | It’s all relative. Kiro is second to Claude Code, but Amazon isn’t really competing with Anthropic. They need something better than Microsoft/Github Copilot and that is a low, low bar. |
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| ▲ | nozzlegear an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I've never worked in a big corporate environment, so I'm always surprised that these companies allow employees to mock their own products/managers/bosses. (Not saying it shouldn't be allowed, just that it's surprising based on how controlling I'd expect a big corp like Amazon to be.) |
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| ▲ | TheCoelacanth 10 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | It's a fool's errand to try to prevent criticism to that extent. It's mostly harmless and functions as a release valve for people's frustrations and helps to stop them from doing something more extreme than just complaining. It's also possibly illegal to stop them. Employees in the US have a legal right to talk to each other about their working conditions and employers are not allowed to stop them. Most companies aren't above violating that law, but they want to save that for actual union-busting, not to stop people from sharing memes. | |
| ▲ | bobim an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | As an individual contributor I sell my time, not my soul. |
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| ▲ | zuzululu an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Maybe those people need to part ways with the company and let professionals replace them instead |
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| ▲ | bobim an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | If you've been 20 years in and built the infrastructure you might disagree with new management and have a very clear view on the harm new policies are making. Professionals might be the ones that have skin in the game. | |
| ▲ | supjeff 14 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | maybe the managers should be replaced |
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| ▲ | yesitcan 42 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > I've recreated all the memes rather than share screenshots from the Slack channel in order to protect sources. 300 IQ move. Nobody will be able to trace it back to sources now. |
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| ▲ | Insanity an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Hardly newsworthy, everything is mocked on the internal slack lol. |
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| ▲ | kotaKat an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Sidebar: I love how Amazon basically gave up on AWS Chime for Slack. Even dogfooding their own messaging product didn't work. |
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| ▲ | Centigonal an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | IDK how the Chime team managed to make such a garbage product. Like, somehow they managed to make something even worse than Teams with a UI that made Webex look modern. I know there are good product people inside Amazon, so IDK what combination of incentives resulted in Chime. | | |
| ▲ | KyleTheDev an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Genuinely, it was one of the worst parts of working at Amazon. Especially since I often interacted with people who only used Chime. Messages would be missed for weeks because they'd never check slack, or I'd never check chime. Awful experience. | | |
| ▲ | dieselgate 4 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Dang, that's a pretty classic dynamic. It even happens between just using a single chat app and email |
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| ▲ | hbn an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I'm trying to think of a single Amazon-made product I've used that has a good UI/UX. I guess their main shopping website gets the job done (I would argue their messy product categorization would harm my UX rating of them) but their iOS app is one of the ugliest thing I have installed on my phone. | |
| ▲ | reducesuffering an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Amazon's toxic culture finally caught up to them. Early on they nailed it with Retail and AWS. Since then, all that terrible cutthroat culture grinded the efficacy down into producing just abomination after abomination of any business besides, just throwing bodies at AWS. | |
| ▲ | cyberax an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Amazon acquired it. Initially, it was a messenger app (not) used in India. | |
| ▲ | gedy an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Whatever the reasons, all Amazon UIs are always pretty awful |
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| ▲ | cmiles8 an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | When AWS had meetings with us we’d insist on setting up the call ourselves to avoid using the steaming pile of garbage that was Chime. AWS folks confided that they didn’t mind and weren’t thrilled about being forced to use dogfooded stuff that literally seemingly no customers wanted to buy. |
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| ▲ | Perz1val an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Archive link? I'm not making an account to look at their memes, come on |
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| ▲ | economistbob an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Any text forums these days has the grokenspiels played by sloppenheimers. It feels like a literature cross between Punk'd and Crank Yankers but stars clanker wankers rather than TV and movie celebrities. |
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| ▲ | ChrisArchitect an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Another one of these 404 Media bait posts, okay, we got it, there's internal staff memes. Related: Google employees internally share memes about how its AI sucks https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48400311 |
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| ▲ | tcp_handshaker an hour ago | parent | prev [-] |
| You cant deliver and have quality engineering teams, while you spent the last 15 years treating your employees under a frugal way, and being the biggest H1B IT employer in the US. |