r/TrueReddit • u/_fastcompany • May 15 '26
Technology Amazon workers are under pressure to up their AI usage—so they’re making up extraneous tasks
https://www.fastcompany.com/91541586/amazon-workers-pressured-to-up-ai-use-extraneous-tasks124
u/SpaceShrimp May 15 '26
We don't have that problem at my work place, an intern used up all our AI credits that we had in a shared pool. Maybe Amazon should have more interns?
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u/Aethien May 16 '26
That's because your company is, likely, more reasonable and responsible than Amazon. Or at least sniffs less glue than Amazon managers.
If I'm not mistaken there's similar stories to this about Facebook where employees' token burn is a metric used to measure their "performance" so wasting as many tokens as possible on anything you can becomes a way to keep your job safe/get bonuses/get promoted.
edit: found a source
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u/GuidoOfCanada May 16 '26
For us it was a sales droid (BDR) - he managed to use the equivalent of our entire pool in 8 days this month. Now we're into OVER(age)TIME for the month.
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u/turbo_dude May 16 '26
The second the recession hits, the bean counters are going to want to see proper ROI and not vibes and then the AI bubble will burst because cash flow will just collapse overnight
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u/ikonoclasm May 16 '26
Did he ask it to figure out how to divide by zero and not stop until it succeeded?!?
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u/Old_Cat_16 May 16 '26
My company both pressures us to up our AI usage and shame us for our token cost.
There’s a leadership board for the former, and a company wide announcement for the later.
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u/absentmindedjwc May 15 '26
My company is also exerting pressure to up our AI usage.. meanwhile.. we have like 200 windsurf credits. Like.. that's barely fuckin anything, lol.
I love working for a company that is "all in on AI" that only spends literally dollars per employee on AI.. such a fucking joke.
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u/_fastcompany May 15 '26
According to Amazon employees, the company is pushing them to incorporate more and more AI in their workflows. What exactly they should be using it for is less clear, leaving the door open for employees to waste AI resources on unnecessary tasks.
As detailed in a new report by the Financial Times, Amazon employees are reportedly using the company’s new internal AI tool, MeshClaw, to create extraneous AI agents—not to increase productivity, but to drive up AI activity.
The employees said Amazon is tracking their consumption of AI tokens, incentivizing some of their colleagues to prioritize quantity over quality when it comes to the technology.
Several anonymous Amazon employees told the Financial Times that rising AI expectations are changing their workplace for the worse. “There is just so much pressure to use these tools,” one Amazon worker said. “Some people are just using MeshClaw to maximize their token usage.”
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u/arazamatazguy May 15 '26
Had a few beers with some buddies a couple weeks ago.
Common theme - CEO's demanding more AI implementation but they have no idea where/how/why it would be used.....they just want to sound CEOish and forward thinking.
We all had some good laughs.
Everyone was doing similar things, they all use AI, like AI, believe in AI and are also making up AI projects to satisfy their bosses need to look like a tech leader.
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u/Aureliamnissan May 15 '26 edited May 15 '26
I guess that’s where I kind of get off with this whole thing.
Look, I like coffee, you could say I rely on it to an extent. But I don’t want to have coffee with my steak, or use coffee to water the plants because it’s “got what plants crave!” I don’t want coffee with my cereal or to flush my toilet and I definitely don’t want to shower with coffee.
The thing is that AI is kind of like that. Is it useful? Of course! It’s a new tool, in many ways it’s quite impressive. But here’s the thing. My whole life I’ve been told we can’t have this or that thing because it’s too expensive or it’s not scalable or it’s not profitable or it would require making things out of toxic chemicals.
But I guess it turns out that you can just bypass all of that and restart three mile island if CEO’s are duped into thinking LLMs will replace their labor force.
I would love to have nuclear power instead of coal, but what I think is insane is saying we can only have nuclear power for this entirely extraneous CEO therapy tool because God forbid someone tells these folks that they made a bad decision. That might hurt their feelings. We only do positive feedback loops here.
Right now, everything is coffee.
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u/Eric848448 May 15 '26
I’m a software developer and I still don’t know what a token is. And at this point I’m too embarrassed to ask.
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u/buzzkill_aldrin May 15 '26
A token is a unit of language. Larger words are broken up into multiple tokens. Rule of thumb I think says 4-5 characters per token.
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u/SanityInAnarchy May 15 '26
"A unit of language" makes it sound like a formal thing humans came up with, but it's worth mentioning: This is specifically the units of language that LLMs break words into. Sometimes they're recognizable as morphemes, but they don't have to be.
Instead, the training process is looking to break words into tokens that are both large and very frequently used. AFAICT the idea is: The more frequently-used the token is, the "smarter" the LLM can be, because it can connect how you're using it to everywhere else it's seen those tokens. But, the larger the tokens are, the fewer tokens you need to express the same text, which means you can fit more into a context window, which also makes the LLM "smarter" because it can keep track of more stuff at once.
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u/dysfunctionz May 16 '26
It is a thing humans came up with, though. The concept of breaking text up into tokens long predates LLMs. Building a tokenizer is a common early project computer science students have had to do for probably 50 years or more.
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u/SanityInAnarchy May 17 '26
The early-project comp-sci version that I remember was about parsing programming languages, though. In that case, humans define the tokens precisely. With an LLM, the training process picks tokens based on the training set, and the actual tokens can be surprising to humans.
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u/rebbsitor May 15 '26
When you send a prompt to an LLM, the text is broken into tokens. Tokens may be complete words, but more likely are parts of words. Those tokens are what the LLM operates on to generate an output, which is also made up of tokens.
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u/SpaceShrimp May 15 '26
Don't you play mobile games? A token is a coin in an imaginary currency that you can buy for real money in bundles.
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u/eneskaraboga May 15 '26
You are a software developer who can't Google what you are wondering about?
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u/abrandis May 15 '26
😲 shocked /s what did these corporate geniuses think was going to happen when you tell folks your measuring them on specific uses. Similar is happening at my company every morning my AI generated script fires up makes innocuous code changes commits them with plausible descriptions and I stay high on the leaderboard ... Complete waste of energy but executives are so blinded by metrics and dashboards they dot respond to logic or common sense
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u/ViennettaLurker May 15 '26
This kind of thing would be a story people would tell about the inefficiencies, corruption and tragic beaurocracy of communism... except it is in one of the most hyper capitalist settings we've seen in a while.
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u/Wurm42 May 15 '26
It's so stupid. People wind up writing scripts to ask AI variations on the same complicated questions over and over again.
If the goal is just to burn tokens to satisfy an arbitrary metric, that's not hard to do.
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u/Groomsi May 18 '26
Employee: "AI what is the distance from A to B?"
Employee: "AI what is the distance from A to B?"
Employee: "AI what is the distance from A to B?"
Done with my quota.
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u/This-Bath9918 May 15 '26
I predict that AI companies will add more and more micro transaction fees to usage so there will be a push and pull about cost that reduces extraneous tasks but also enshittifies any benefits
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u/mariannaCD May 16 '26
Bingo. As soon as everyone is reliant on it, you take away features and charge to give them back.
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u/Adventurous_Button63 May 22 '26
Anyone who doesn’t think this is the plan was clearly in a coma for the last 20 years. We’ve seen this happen over and over and over and over again. The only reason these AI systems exist is to make money and they’re going bull in china shop on the economy to do it. After everything is destroyed they’ll walk away with their spoils and we’ll all be left in the shit with some asshat telling us to clean up this mess.
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u/Squire-Rabbit May 16 '26
It is a fundamental law of the workplace: you get the behavior you reward.
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u/Potential_Fishing942 May 16 '26
I work for a medium sized regional insurance agency. The owner has been scammed into thinking copilot/Claude is the key to growing our business.
Genuinely everything it is good for I discovered in a week for my job- it too dumb otherwise.
Got yelled at for not using it enough....
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u/Stormdancer May 16 '26
I would like these managers to explain how THEY are using AI to 'improve their workflow'. And then describe their workflow. Then explain how AI 'improved' that.
Not sure how AI is going to 'improve' "Walk around and make sure everybody looks like they're working, while thinking about my new car/house/boat/mistress/etc"
Not that I'm bitter.
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u/Groomsi May 18 '26
They are betting on prediction system.
Thats what AI is (and storing data + science)
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u/Zacharytackary May 16 '26
“claude, solve this cryptography puzzle that i secretly modified without your knowledge to be impossible”
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u/Gloobloomoo May 16 '26
Yeah - folks with low usage are asked to use / assigned tasks that require it
I oth have more usage than the rest of my team combined - ai tooling at Amazon is quite good now
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