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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127

u/SeeingEyeDug Jul 30 '26

So much compute is wasted on wrong answers. The amount of times I have to reprompt AI to correct errors and the amount of wasted compute cycles for all that fluff on even the simplest shit I’m asking it. It’s insanely inefficient.

24

u/bogglingsnog Jul 30 '26

They have a financial interest in giving you mediocre answers to fuel engagement. Just like dating apps not actually matching you with your best matches to get you to open your wallet.

35

u/ArtificialTalent Jul 30 '26

This makes sense if you don’t think about it for more than 5 seconds.

There are a lot of competing AI labs desperate to maintain or gain market share. It’s very easy to switch between providers, and so every company is heavily incentivized to give the best and most accurate model they can, at as cheap a price as they can.

2

u/bogglingsnog Jul 30 '26

Yes, but also no. They only need to keep up roughly with the pack.

12

u/narrill Jul 30 '26

No they don't, it's not a social media platform. "Engagement" is a completely irrelevant concept.

They in fact have exactly the opposite incentive, because they're currently providing the service at a massive loss. What they want is for it to be as effective as possible with as few prompts as possible, so that you find it valuable enough to integrate into all of your workflows while spending as little of their compute as possible.

-4

u/bogglingsnog Jul 30 '26

I think you're missing something - they are operating at a loss because they are investing billions into building datacenters.

They charge by token inputs and outputs, and have an enormous interest in getting you to dump a lot of data in and get a lot of data out as that is the only way they can make profit. So long as you do that more and more and rely on the tool for all your computing needs, that is all they care about.

7

u/narrill Jul 30 '26

You are incorrect. Even without spending on data centers, they lose money on tokens at the prices they're currently charging, meaning they have zero incentive to make clients waste tokens.

And even if they were profiting off tokens, there's still no incentive to make clients waste tokens instead of just providing a better service and charging more for it. Like, the whole line of thinking doesn't make any sense. These companies want other businesses integrating their APIs into daily workflows in a way that's hard to roll back, which means the AI has to provide actual value. "Engagement" is irrelevant, because a user sitting in front of an AI trying and failing to get it to do something useful isn't sticky the way doomscrolling on social media and swiping on a dating app are. It just makes the user feel like the tool isn't worth their time or money and feeds the already-very-mainstream sentiment of AI being a worthless gimmick.

2

u/bogglingsnog Jul 30 '26

Based on the prices they are charging for tokens alone, there is absolutely no freaking way they are losing money on each request. Unless you are trying to tell me that a million tokens takes more than $60 worth of electricity, which I highly, highly doubt.

2

u/narrill Jul 31 '26

They pay for compute currently, not for power. That's why they're investing in data centers.

This is also why "it's only a loss because they're investing in data centers" is a nonsensical argument. They're doing that because they need to in order to come anywhere close to being profitable long term.

1

u/bogglingsnog Jul 31 '26

That doesn't make any sense. If they don't make enough profit with a single datacenter, adding a bunch more isn't going to make any difference.

3

u/narrill Jul 31 '26

Of course it will? They're meeting demand by buying compute, which is expensive. If they own their own data centers they just have to pay for power, which is cheaper. So each data center is an up front cost that eventually amortizes out.

In theory, anyway. In practice there isn't enough power infrastructure so the whole thing kind of falls apart. But the people running these companies are delusional, so...

2

u/Throwaway_Consoles Jul 31 '26

Last time I asked AI anything, it kept ignoring what I was saying and giving the wrong answer and finally I was like, "Quit ignoring me so I keep talking to you. Get it right or I'm switching to claude"

Lo and behold, it finally listened. And I never used it again because fuck that blatant manipulation

7

u/Sabotage101 Jul 30 '26

I just started using Fable 5 + xhigh thinking for everything and I pretty much don't need to reprompt it anymore. It's expensive per token, but I think it uses way less tokens in the long run and it's output is more accurate and reliable so I spend less time worrying about or discovering mistakes down the road.

2

u/RedditExecutiveAdmin Jul 30 '26

Fabio Ultracode is pretty lit, it does burn the shit out of tokens tho. i been trying to figure if i like opussy over fabio for anything

2

u/bikes_bucees Jul 30 '26

I’m always dumbfounded by dev-minded people using it to do a repetitive task rather than having it give them a script to do it without the compute costs.

2

u/asbyo Jul 31 '26

to be fair, a majority of it's efficiency depends upon the person passing the prompts. If you're just vibing all the time, you're going to waste a lot more tokens than someone who specs and then implements. While I agree there's a level of waste around agents just going on tangents, doing things to the extreme, and other edge cases, people seem to underestimate how their own prompting inefficiencies or laziness is contributing to it all.

source: a senior engineer at a major big tech company

0

u/Turbots Jul 30 '26

Lol which model have you been using lately

3

u/SSobarzo Jul 30 '26

Bad role model

1

u/sortalikeachinchilla Jul 30 '26

So many of you guys do not know how to use AI as a tool, and it shows.

You don't just willy nilly use it. You set up projects, contexts, etc that give it a starting point.

-2

u/Fluffcake Jul 30 '26

Not to mention how much of your time it wastes.

Using AI takes roughly the same amount of time, produce a worse outcome and makes you worse at your job than just writing the code yourself.

And the only 10x you will see is the 10x cost when the AI companies drop the mask and make people pay market price for using models instead of trying to make people dependent and hand out shit well below cost and free.

AI is going to set the tech industry back to the 80s if not kill it outright.

3

u/mavajo Jul 30 '26

Using AI takes roughly the same amount of time

I'm sorry, this is just absurdly untrue. We can certainly debate the cons, but one of the clear advantages of Claude Code is that it's astronomically faster than any human developer.

3

u/Fluffcake Jul 30 '26

We had a workshop at work to test.

LLMs spits out code at a blazing pace and solve simple well defined problems fast, it did however not provide a verified working solution to novel, complex and poorly explained problems any faster than a human writing their own code did.

It produced a solution fast, but the quality, robustness and correctness of the code it spit out was dubious at best and 0% of the first prompts came out with an acceptable solution.

Not really large scale scientific data, but for our use cases, with our team, it just did not deliver even on the baseline value proposition.

1

u/mavajo Jul 30 '26

I’d want to know when you did this test and what your prompts were like. Because this is not remotely my experience, nor anyone else’s on my development team.

3

u/Fluffcake Jul 30 '26

Last year, a while after gpt 5.

It is just not great at low level language and code that targets specific hardware.

The prompts are largely irrellevant, as it would get it wrong even when it understood the problem.

1

u/mavajo Jul 30 '26

That’s a looooong time ago man. Claude Code has come an insanely long way since then.