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AI will shrink Amazon's workforce in the coming years, CEO Jassy says
- pryelluw 1y ago“Jassy wrote that employees should learn how to use AI tools and experiment and figure out “how to get more done with scrappier teams.” Isn’t this their general approach since forever?
- AtlasBarfed 1y ago[flagged]
- pryelluw 1y agoI reason they’ve been past the rectum for a long time and now well into the esophagus. Maybe the goal is a human centipede kind of setup? I mean, one human made up of multiple humans has to be the ultimately productivity machine. Plus they only have to pay one salary …
- happytoexplain 1y agoNote that "scrappier" here doesn't just mean fewer staff, but also less experienced and lower-paid staff.
- dale_huevo 1y agoNext they'll take away the door desks.
- nitwit005 1y agoThat's something odd with the recent AI hype. Companies that were already using AI, are making statements like this. Somehow they want to act like they are making a shift, rather than say they were ahead of the trend.
- chneu 1y agoThat's what businesses do. They want to lower payroll, always, and will use every new innovation to do it. The wording changes, the intention doesn't. If they could pay you nothing they would.
- goatlover 1y agoSounds like a flaw in the dominant economic model.
- ethbr1 1y agoI mean, labor is a significant component of prices for goods. But I expect the increasing income stratification of the 10s+ is a harbinger that we're running out of high-paying jobs for the number of people who are qualified for them. And the window is closing for countries to agree to something like a structural tax on AI with benefits going to society to address the ills. Absent that: further stratification, more employee-less businesses, and not a great future
- nitwit005 1y agoThis doesn't appear to relate to what I said.
- rsynnott 1y agoThe markets seem to like it, so if you go "we're going AI-first!" every six months, you'll get a little stock price boost. Actually _doing_ anything, naturally, is entirely optional. Expect this to repeat until the markets choose a new favourite thing (I'm betting on "quantum"; it's getting a lot of press lately and is nicely vague.)
- tart-lemonade 1y ago"We're going all in on AI" is the modern equivalent to adding .com to your company name to juice the stock price. It's utterly meaningless, yet it works shockingly well.
- droopyEyelids 1y agoSmall and scrappy teams work when the team has less than 8 hours of corporate busywork to do a day (Jira, compliance training, triaging 10k alerts from the new scanning software, etc)
- 827a 1y agoI find it extremely strange that a company leader though it would be ok to just say "our financial situation is in a place where we cannot adequately staff our teams". The market clearly thought it was strange as well, given their stock performance today. Really bad look and poor leadership from Jassy. There's a good way to frame adoption of AI, but this is not it.
- usefulcat 1y ago> The market clearly thought it was strange as well, given their stock performance today. For 6/17, the S&P 500 was down 0.84%, QQQ (Nasdaq stocks) was down 0.98% and AMZN was down 0.59%. AMZN slightly outperformed the market today.
- 827a 1y agoWith AMZN commanding 5% of the S&P's entire market capitalization, the market is not some independent entity that AMZN can be compared to; the S&P follows what AMZN does.
- usefulcat 1y agoI might be misunderstanding, but it sounds like you're claiming that the 95% of the S&P that is not Amazon "follows what AMZN does"? If so, I'd like to hear more about exactly how that works because it sounds very unintuitive, to say the least. In any case, my point was that objectively, AMZN suffered less today than many other stocks, including many other large cap tech (QQQ) and non-tech (S&P) stocks. Considering those facts, it seems like a stretch to claim "the market clearly thought it was strange as well".
- 827a 1y agoYou have what I would describe as a Ben Graham '80s-era view of how the stock market works. The stock market is fundamentally a very different beast post-2008. The top ten companies in the S&P 500 make up 36% of the entire index's market capitalization. In 1980, this number was closer to 15%. One cannot draw any conclusions about how an individual stock in the S&P 10 performs relative to the overall market, because of how correlated these companies are and how much their combined weight contributes to the overall market. Every company in the S&P 10 is a tech company, except Berkshire. They trade together, and how they trade impacts the entire S&P 500. When Jassy says something, it impacts Google's stock. When it comes out that OpenAI might have to sue Microsoft, it impacts Amazon's stock. Why this happens only makes sense to wall street's HFT systems which, quite honestly, are likely closer at this point to ASI than OpenAI; albeit totally unintelligible in their motives and reasoning. Amazon did not outperform the market. The market is Amazon. The S&P 10 is not 10 individual companies; its one company.
- theslurmmustflo 1y agoHow many h1bs will they ask for during that time?
- amazingamazing 1y ago[flagged]
- ofjcihen 1y agoTIL immigrant is a race
- amazingamazing 1y agoWhen 75%+ of them are non white, yup. Changed to xenophobic tho to help you
- ofjcihen 1y agoI don’t think all immigrants are H1B holders, are they?
- amazingamazing 1y agoAre h1bs immigrants?
- ofjcihen 1y agoSure, but that’s not what being xenophobic means. Do you think that maybe it’s possible the OP has a problem with the program and that crying racism whenever someone brings it up might actually be hurting your argument?
- umbra07 1y agoIs this satire?
- 1y ago
- podgietaru 1y agoI don’t doubt that Amazon will do this. Not because of the efficacy of the tools, but because of the direction Amazon has been going in for years. But, you know, company that has invested billions in AI selling the idea that AI will be replacing labour is not surprising.
- SimianSci 1y agoAt this point im convinced that these sorts of headlines are being intentionally put out there as a form of marketing via fear. What better way to convince people to learn/use your AI offerings than to have those people think their livelihoods are in danger because of them. AI has provided alot of unique value, but despite the countless headlines stoking fear of mass job loss, there still remains little substance to these claims of being able to automate anything but the most meanial of jobs. Until we can directly point the finger to AI as the cause of job loss numbers rising, and not other unrelated economic factors, this all just smells of fear mongering with a profit incentive.
- SlowTao 1y agoYep, "out tech is so amazing it will take jobs! Please invest now!"
- AtlasBarfed 1y agoCeos always are personally marketing their "leadership" to maintain position with the board and stockholders and for future jobs, and to push around peers in the sociopath executive class. These people universally hate labor. The entire tech industry went on a firing binge when musk bought Twitter and fired everyone, and nazi salutes have done a bit to blunt his golden boy status in the exec ranks, not THAT much... Now every CEO is trying to elbow their way to be the AI golden boy. It's worth tens of billions as musk had shown.
- exabrial 1y agoNo it wont lol. It'll just make: 1. The existing codebase worse 2. The existing employees work more 3. The salaries stay flat
- msgodel 1y agoIt's not like Amazon has been optimizing for high quality engineers to begin with.
- dymk 1y agoI’m of the radical opinion that engineers at Amazon are pretty good, but they’re in a pressure cooker that incentivizes bad work. At minimum, it rarely gives space for people to excel.
- AndrewKemendo 1y agoYou’re making the assumption that these are relevant to the overall goal of Amazon I’d argue that 1 is irrelevant provided the system continued to extract profit at the same or greater margin Amazon lives and dies by not caring about #2 so that’s constant #3 is desirable from Jassy and the boards perspective Seems like exactly what I’d expect from Amazon
- exabrial 1y ago> You’re making the assumption that these are relevant to the overall goal of Amazon not at all! no assumptions made: Their website, technology stack, and SAAS platform is all garbage... yet, they persist in their success to make obscene amounts of money!
- herval 1y agoGiven the business is still growing, even if that’s all they achieve, it’s already a massive win, no?
- exabrial 1y agoPrecisely, I expect their profits to expand, I was strictly speaking of the claim in the title. No doubt they will continue to expand on their current strategies.
- smrtinsert 1y agoIf that's all he sees, it's a hilariously myopic take on the impact of AI. AI is for coding velocity like electricity is for better room lighting. We haven't seen the nature of work after AI yet, we're still in a nascent phase. Consider every single white collar role, process, worfklow in your organization up for extreme disruption during this transition period, and it will take at least a decade to even begin to sort out.
- poslathian 1y agoI like this metaphor about electric lighting. However, having lived in two ~1850 houses, they sure look and function a lot like they did before electricity, despite nearly every element having been “disrupted” by electricity and all the rest.
- salt-thrower 1y agoAt every company I’ve ever worked for, the bottleneck is not “how fast can we spit out more code?” It’s always: “how fast can the business actually decide what they want and create a good backlog?” Maybe startup development will significantly accelerate with AI churning out all the boilerplate to get your app started. But enterprise development, where the app is already there and you’re building new features on top of a labyrinthian foundation, is a different beast. The hard part is sitting through planning meetings or untangling weird system dependencies, not churning out net new code. My two cents anyway.
- DoesntMatter22 1y agoYup I agree. The fundamental limiter is humans deciding. But it will trivial to clone apps where things were already decided. Though AI will probably just proactively add features and open PRs and people can choose
- ethbr1 1y agoThere was a submission a few months ago that boiled down to 'AI will force us to reevaluate our human in the loop decision points.' Which I expect will be the gist of management consulting reports for the next decade. If human decision-makers become the bottleneck... eventually that will be reengineered. I'm fascinated to imagine what change control will need to look like in a majority-AI scenario. Expect there will be a lot more focus on TDD.
- DoesntMatter22 1y agoEerily similar to the plot of terminator
- herval 1y agoI never worked at a place where not having a backlog was an issue. Quite the opposite in fact - there’s always infinite backlogs of stuff. Every single time I’ve seen organizations being slow to decide anything, it was due to the human tendency to stretch their tasks to occupy as much time as possible. Planning meetings are “the work” for a legion of people (even though they also know they’re mostly pointless). Untangling dependencies is harder when it involves approvals of other humans (particularly fun as multiple people are “the tech lead”, are all objectively wrong but unable to see how they’re simply getting in the way). I don’t think LLMs are particularly smart, or capable of, or will definitely replace humans at anything, or if they’ll lead to better work. But I can already tell that their inherent lack of an ego DO accelerate things at enterprises, for the simple reason that the self-imposed roadblocks above stop happening
- kaonwarb 1y agoI see several folks commenting on this from the perspective of software engineering. Keep in mind that those are a small minority of Amazon's enormous workforce: an estimate a few years back [0] was 3.5%. [0] https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/amazon https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/amazon
- jonny_eh 1y agoThis is Hacker News sir
- tartoran 1y agoAnd shrink the product as well even though they will try to look like it's growing. AI will not only eat into the workforce but the profits these companies are making.
- altairprime 1y agoReplacing the topic word “says” with “hopes” is a more precise statement about the mindset driving the creative theft behind AI; only the hope of deprecating all skilled workers in America with one technological advancement, without loss of gross revenue, could justify as severe a gamble as corporations are taking on it.
- loosetypes 1y agoHe also released an internal memo on atoz today with a grammatical mistake in the first sentence.
- tqi 1y agoAs long as managers want to be senior managers, senior managers want to be directors, and directors want to be vice presidents, this will not happen
- user4673568345 1y agoThe ole ai perpetual labor machine is a big fat lie
- 1970-01-01 1y agoSo what happens during an S3 outage? Who gets blamed when things are offline and the AI isn't sure what to do? Even better, what happens when the AI running on the same region that is down?
- ldjkfkdsjnv 1y agotheyve been automating S3 operations for 15 years. the critical AWS services are extremely mature, people have no clue
- mym1990 1y agoSurely Amazon would implement redundancy where an AI from a different region to the one that is down would take over. Not sure I follow why "blaming" someone is necessary to move forward with recovering from a failure. In most workplaces, the post mortem is around figuring out what the issue was and remediating it/making sure it doesn't occur in the future, not pointing fingers.
- 1970-01-01 1y ago>Not sure I follow why "blaming" someone is necessary to move forward with recovering from a failure. I wasn't clear, but to get that AI to admit that it has made an error and getting it to actually correct its error is like trying to put a round peg into a square hole. It will take the blame and continue as if nothing needs to change, no matter what prompts you send it.
- mym1990 1y agoI think this is assuming that the model doesn't get better through additional training or feedback, but it seems to me that reward/punishment is actually what drives better prediction over the medium/long run. Right now we are definitely in a place where the models are over confident but I think with time the self correction will become very good.
- ldjkfkdsjnv 1y agoInside view: Amazon has a document writing culture, all of those documents will be written by AI. People have built careers on writing documents. Same with operations, its all about audit logs. Internally, there are MCPs that have already automated TPMs/PMs/Oncall/maintenance coding. Some orgs in AWS are 90% foreign, there is fear about losing visa status and going back, the automation is just beginning. Sonnet 4 felt like the first time MCPs could actually be used to automate work. A region expansion scoping project in AWS that required detailed design and inspection of tens of code bases was done in a day, it would usually require two or three weeks of design work. The automation is real, and the higher are ups are directly monitoring token usage in their org, and pushing senior engineers to increase Q/token usage metrics among low level engineers. Most orgs have a no backfill policy for engineers leaving, they are supplimenting staffing needs with indian contractors, the expectation being that fewer engineers will be needed in a years time.
- lpv4n 1y agoIs the technological process being weaponized against the working class a thing of our time or the world was always like that? We're living in a period of almost zero job stability and on the top of that we get bombarded everyday with news that things are going to get even worse.
- kjsingh 1y agothey gotta make a stock price boosting statement every month