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'Sloppenheimer:' Amazon employees mock the company's AI on Slack
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- zuzululu 4mo ago[flagged]
- bobim 4mo agoIf 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.
- zuzululu 4mo agoYou don't actually have skin in the game as part of the cost center. Again, the thing to do if you are not happy with the decision making or management is to leave and let another mature professional replace you instead of adding to the complaining and degrading morale of the overall company. A professional recognizes the above and someone just there to pay the bills isn't.
- supjeff 4mo agomaybe the managers should be replaced
- Perz1val 4mo agoArchive link? I'm not making an account to look at their memes, come on
- lucrbvi 4mo agohttp://archive.today/1YRCE http://archive.today/1YRCE
- Insanity 4mo agoHardly newsworthy, everything is mocked on the internal slack lol.
- stanac 4mo ago"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 https://archive.ph/1YRCE
- cheshire_cat 4mo agoBy 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.
- functionmouse 4mo ago> 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
- gavinray 4mo agoI 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.
- add-sub-mul-div 4mo agoFrom 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?
- wahnfrieden 4mo agoShareholders want the company to figure out how to pay fewer employees, and pay them less by down-skilling them
- dfee 4mo agothe 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.
- rustystump 4mo ago
- tcp_handshaker 4mo agoYou 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.
- kotaKat 4mo agoSidebar: I love how Amazon basically gave up on AWS Chime for Slack. Even dogfooding their own messaging product didn't work.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- Centigonal 4mo agoIDK 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 4mo agoGenuinely, 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 4mo agoDang, that's a pretty classic dynamic. It even happens between just using a single chat app and email
- cyberax 4mo agoAmazon acquired it. Initially, it was a messenger app (not) used in India.
- reducesuffering 4mo agoAmazon'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.
- 4mo ago
- bebeidjdkrjrjr 4mo ago[flagged]
- giancarlostoro 4mo agoI'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 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.
- ako 4mo agoI 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 4mo ago> 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.
- giancarlostoro 4mo agoWhat kills me more about them is they could easily build a coding model, purely focused on coding, and it could probably be competitive, instead they're wasting away at anime avatars or whatever Mark Zuckerberg needs for his metaverse utopia.
- 4mo ago
- economistbob 4mo agoAny 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.
- ChrisArchitect 4mo agoAnother 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48400311
- nh23423fefe 4mo agoagree. im already beginning to see this domain as indicator of trash quality post why would hackers be interested in this
- cmiles8 4mo agoAmazon’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.
- computomatic 4mo agoIt’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.
- fg137 4mo ago> They need something better than Microsoft/Github Copilot Why? What's wrong with using Claude Code/Codex?
- antonvs 4mo agoBecause they have a multi-trillion dollar market cap that they need to justify and maintain.
- computomatic 4mo agoEnterprise GTM for these behemoths relies on offering everything a customer needs so they don’t shop around. It’s Microsoft’s playbook and AWS copies it for the same market. That’s why they each offer a “good enough” (but objectively garbage) solution for everything under the sun.
- mrbonner 4mo agoThen how do they get promoted?
- nozzlegear 4mo agoI'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.)
- bobim 4mo agoAs an individual contributor I sell my time, not my soul.
- TheCoelacanth 4mo agoIt'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.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- nijave 4mo agoOn one hand, they don't want to piss off all their employees with big brother culture. To some extent, it's less offensive to mock your own stuff the bigger you are. In my limited big corp experience, everything was so big and convoluted it was never anyone's fault (150 teams worked on <thing>) something sucked and there were always 25 more teams working to fix it anyway. In some ways, it was actually helpful because people would stay engaged trying to improve things "on a big scale" Suppressing systematic issues makes it easy to carve out a niche pretending to look useful while doing nothing (which is ultimately a waste of money)--big corp already have plenty of those
- compiler-guy 4mo agoEven before the internet, employees were making these kinds of criticisms at lunch, at the water cooler and during their car pools. If the company forbids it on visible internal channels, it will just pop up on external, private channels. With less corporate control and less corporate visibility and more leaks.
- yesitcan 4mo ago> 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.
- Apocryphon 4mo agoPerhaps Kiro has yet to master reading text in images.
- 05 4mo agoimages/screenshots could have watermarks, recreations don't. Sources = not the people who created memes, sources here just mean people who sent the screenshots to the journalist.
- burger_moon 4mo agoThe non-programmers at amazon I know are all just getting onto kiro. I guess there’s two versions of kiro(?) one aimed at devs and the other more web/mcp friendly. Ic and managers are still just wading into the waters and still haven’t learned that token dashboards are snake eating its own tail endgame for these groups. From the outside it looks like a hot mess of many competing teams trying to become the chosen one for all of Amazon’s ai use. As a result it’s a confusing mess of tools that don’t last very long and creates tons of churn and confused employees who learn new tools as they're killed. Definitely enjoying watching the chaos unfold from a distance at these trillion dollar businesses
- burger_moon 4mo agoOof hit a nerve with the jeffbots on this but it doesn’t change the fact that everyone is laughing when you know the layoffs are predictably coming in with each earnings call.
- bilsbie 4mo agoAre they don’t anything useful with AI? I would have figured it could help their operations.
- isengard3000 4mo agoAmazon employee here. - Can confirm that channel exists and it's great. Rofl every day for all the stupidity happening in the company. - Despite many seeing Amazon as outsider for AI, it's actually a great place to work (if not fired). We have free access to all frontier models, including today's Mythos release for all employees. - Every model available on Bedrock is available for free with no caps. I think it's because these models are deployed on trainium chips which is essentially free for Amazon. - Claude code and Codex are available unlimited for employees. - For this one I will be bitten, but I actually like Kiro CLI. It's powered by the same Anthropic/OpenAI models. It's a bit easier to understand for me than CC and surprisingly does a better job at writing research papers. - Amazon Quick, alternative to Claude Cowork, also has some nice features like in-browser presence so you don't have to copy/paste content from the web. - I personally haven't seen a push to use AI at all costs. Yes, there are many internal tools being developed (e.g. meshclaw) but no one tracks their adoption for redundancy purposes. I think leaders are pretty consistent with what they communicate externally (e.g. hiring of juns).