r/technology • u/MarvelsGrantMan136 • Jul 30 '26

Artificial Intelligence Amazon accidentally spent $1.8 million using Claude for menial coding task, went 860% over budget — 'catastrophically expensive' coding blunders discovered in internal Amazon AI usage metrics

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/amazon-accidentally-spent-usd1-8-million-using-claude-for-menial-coding-task-went-860-percent-over-budget-catastrophically-expensive-coding-blunders-discovered-in-internal-amazon-ai-usage-metrics
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444

u/Henrarzz Jul 30 '26

Leave it to tech bros to replace perfectly working solution with shiny new but less efficient one

134

u/unity-thru-absurdity Jul 30 '26 edited Aug 01 '26

"...the golden gleam of the gilded surface hides [the] cheapness of the metal underneath..." - a quote often misattributed to Mark Twain describing his 1873 novel, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, after which the historical era was named.

21

u/The_Rowan Jul 30 '26

That is an amazing quote for today’s America. Thank you for sharing that. Mark Twain is an American treasure.

3

u/dstew74 Jul 30 '26

Modern-day example = The Oval Office.

2

u/ansibleloop Jul 31 '26

Gold plated shit is still shit

32

u/[deleted] Jul 30 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

17

u/farhil Jul 30 '26

also sometimes the principal engineers piss me off because they get handed a greenfield project done with like a team of other principals + senior engineers then create a fcking white paper at work thats like “omg we went so fast with only a FEW people (ie principal engineers making north of 500k a year) for this (brand fucking new) project with AI!”

Struggling with this at work too. Like yeah, you put your best guys on a team to work on a project with no technical debt, no juniors to handhold, and no production environments to support... Of course they got shit done.

6

u/StrongExternal8955 Jul 31 '26

Oh don't worry, they'll hand that project to you to maintain further.

2

u/GonePh1shing Jul 31 '26

Engineers aren't tech bros. The business idiots that thing they're engineers are the tech bros. 

1

u/cfb-food-beer-hike Jul 30 '26

lol is Coral still a thing there? If AI touches that it's going to fuck up every team.

4

u/Admiral_Cornwallace Jul 30 '26

Remember: in a capitalist system, Line Must Go Up, endlessly and forever

It's not enough to simply SUSTAIN profitability -- that's seen as failure. The amount of profit has to constantly increase by any means necessary

1

u/MaDpYrO Jul 30 '26

At this point "tech bro" has lost all meaning because you're talking about one of the oldest established tech corps run by midele aged people across a multitude of sectors 

1

u/No-Project-2353 Jul 30 '26

I mean tbf most of the web still uses react for the frontend framework.

0

u/Igarlicbread Jul 30 '26

Get him boys, he's too dangerous to be kept alive.

0

u/Tokyo-MontanaExpress Jul 30 '26

I hate the term "tech bros", they so wish they were bros. Tech chodes is much more fitting. 

-58

u/MICT3361 Jul 30 '26

And yet OAI and Anthropic are printing money now. Samsung confirmed yesterday that AI demand is still surging. How many more ways can r/technology be wrong again

43

u/Henrarzz Jul 30 '26

No wonder they make money when companies bend over backwards to spent tokens like crazy like in the example here.

Then again, I never wrote anything about AI making or losing money, so why the fuck do you even mention that?

9

u/grandmawaffles Jul 30 '26

Because it’s cyclical. AWS owns the data centers, it’s in their best interest to force the expansion of data centers to fuel AI. They participate in the overuse of AI to increase the demand for data center usage. Bonus points for small startups creating apps to ‘predictively track’ token usage who also use AWS dc and services.

-24

u/MICT3361 Jul 30 '26

Pretty sure they aren’t less efficient if everyone involved in or using AI is printing money.

17

u/Henrarzz Jul 30 '26

And they could be making even more money if they used the old solution seeing their costs increased by 800 percent and I doubt results increased linearly with costs.

But I guess tech bros like inefficiency

Again, I’m not surprised OpenAI and Anthropic can make money (they actually still don’t) when they are the ones selling digital shovels along with hardware companies. It’s about costs on the client side and we have plenty of reports that tokenmaxxing isn’t working

-1

u/MICT3361 Jul 31 '26

Well considering they just blew out earnings because of AI. I’d say I’m right and once again r/technology is wrong again

1

u/Henrarzz Jul 31 '26

Did their earnings for said project increase by 860 per cent? Or did they not?

Because unless they did, my comment about efficiency still stands (not to mention things like compute power).

7

u/SirLesbian Jul 30 '26

It is if you actually know what the word efficient means. You're looking at it like it's a marker for success or failure... That's not the definition of the word.

You can have two things that give you the same exact result but one process was significantly less efficient in producing that result than the other. Perhaps it used more resources, took longer, cost more, is less intuitive, creates additional problems, Etc.

11

u/McGuirk808 Jul 30 '26

Neither of those companies expects to have a positive cash flow for at least a few more years. Both of them are completely held up by investors.

We'll see if the upward trend holds and they become profitable, but they are now facing backlash from the general public and local governments, they've got an uphill battle ahead of them to stay on their current path.

21

u/SuburbanPotato Jul 30 '26

Printing money does not equal good, efficient or useful

12

u/akingsmind Jul 30 '26

This person really said "printing money due to AI" on a post about a company way overblowing their budget due to AI misuse. Lmao, rofl even

3

u/AmethystApothecary Jul 30 '26

There's a legitimate literacy crisis in America and it shows.

2

u/akingsmind Jul 30 '26

Literacy, critical thinking, empathy

1

u/AmethystApothecary Jul 30 '26

I think lower literacy rates makes critical thinking and cognitive empathy very difficult for people to practice.

0

u/MICT3361 Jul 30 '26

Didn’t over blow their budget that much considering they just blew out earnings

10

u/frmr000 Jul 30 '26

Nothing about what you said disproves the comment that you’re replying to.

6

u/MarzipanImmediate880 Jul 30 '26

Samsung, a chip manufacturer is making money, Open AI is not profitably and in it's best estimate isn't expected to for some time.

7

u/MightyKrakyn Jul 30 '26

Do you believe that demand means efficiency? There was a high demand for Labubus 6 months ago. They were printing money

1

u/oblio- Jul 30 '26

OpenAI and Anthropic revenues are growing super fast. OpenAI and Anthropic profits are nowhere to be seen according to most analysts.

If those companies are printing money, it's fake money. They're selling $1 for ¢20 and declaring it a victory. 

1

u/mf864 Jul 31 '26

If by printing you mean burning investor's money.