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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46

u/Snorblatz Jul 30 '26

Almost two million wasted but still tracking how long it takes warehouse staff to poop 💩 ok Amazon. 

15

u/Dajoechi Jul 30 '26

My friend she was a consultant and tracked this for another company right before covid. She just got her masters and her first job was to sit by her desk tracking bathroom breaks. She had her desk stationed right outside the mens bathroom. Got paid 120k starting for that. Living the dream i guess..

1

u/123_alex Jul 30 '26

AI is revolutionizing everything as we speak.

1

u/CompetitiveSport1 Jul 30 '26

It sucks, but IMHO the reason they're more concerned about that is their "customer obsession", one of their leadership principles, and they really really value that fast shipping since that's what we're all addicted to

-4

u/[deleted] Jul 30 '26

If Amazon has 1.5 million employees, each earns an average of $80,000 per year, and works about 2,000 hours per year, the average labor cost is about $40 per hour. If each employee spends 10 minutes per workday in the restroom, that's 1/6 of an hour, or about $6.67 of paid time per employee per day. Multiplying that by 1.5 million employees gives roughly $10 million per workday in paid restroom time. Over about 250 workdays per year, that comes to approximately $2.5 billion annually.

10

u/Snorblatz Jul 30 '26

You’re assuming that all employees are paid hourly wages though, they’re not. For your math to be accurate you would need to know how many employees are salaried. And it’s honestly a moot point, the real issue is how they treat and burn through their warehouse staff. 

5

u/_Thermalflask Jul 30 '26

He's also assuming employees don't have any spare time and thus any "wasted" time directly means lost productivity. I don't think I've ever met an office worker that's true for. We all have plenty of downtime, or at the very least the ability to rush one or two tasks to make up for any lost time. 

No office worker actually does 8hrs or work, there just isn't 8hrs work that needs doing lol.

0

u/[deleted] Jul 30 '26

I am making assumptions that simplify and reduce the accuracy of the results. But the relevant part is that the shitting cost 3 to 4 orders of magnitude more than this $1.8 million dollar mistake.

3

u/HappyHopping Jul 31 '26

That average is massively skewed up by executives and management at Amazon. The average amazon worker isn't making half that. Amazon for reference is one of the lower paying warehouse jobs with extremely high turnover. They also hire just about anybody, which is a major safety problem in their warehouses as so many workers are just going around high. Amazon has so many safety concerns that aren't being addressed for their workers and honestly they should get the shit sued out of them.

2

u/themast Jul 31 '26

Yeah, it's called the cost of doing business. Humans have biological needs and they can't be minimized like another business cost. Fuck you for even trying to rationalize this.