Amazon joins Microsoft in sending message to employees

(finance.yahoo.com)

27 points | by hereticles a day ago ago

14 comments

  • jmchuster 21 hours ago

    I guess that tokenmaxxing phase has served its purpose, of forcing people's brains to go from "i will never use AI, it's scary and new and useless" to "i must learn to use it, this is the new normal, otherwise i'm getting fired".

    And now they're able to move to the phase of "let's now learn to actually use it effectively".

    • bigfatkitten 19 hours ago

      I am in the “I will use AI where it makes sense to make my job easier” camp. This approach was unfortunately incompatible with my SVP’s “we need to 10x AI” goal.

      I found ChatGPT to be a never ending source of ideas for how to light tokens on fire as fast as possible in order to hit my target.

  • llbbdd a day ago

    Kind of surprising. I had interpreted these tokenmaxxing initiatives at some of the larger companies as R&D investment, motivating employees to find the useful applications of a new technology with fairly broad applicability. Obviously some people gamed it, but I wonder if everyone gamed it or if opening the floodgates made for any useful discoveries.

    • Ancalagon 21 hours ago

      If any useful optimizations were discovered I imagine they belonged to people at the bottom of the leaderboards and hence weren't noticed by tokenmaxxing chad execs too dumb to have an ounce of creative thinking.

    • rescbr 21 hours ago

      Day 2 Amazon only cares about the KPI.

      Innovation does not grow out of KPIs.

    • belval 18 hours ago

      You still have near-infinite tokens, you just don't get awards for using a lot.

  • RattlesnakeJake 21 hours ago

    > What happened next was predictable in hindsight. Employees began inflating their scores through tokenmaxxing: running meaningless tasks through AI agents to consume tokens and climb the rankings.

    That was predictable in foresight.

    • sgarland 17 hours ago

      Right? Make any metric meaningful for an employee, and they will find ways to maximize that metric. I thought this was a well-understand phenomenon.

    • hereticles 21 hours ago

      It's a classic example of giving people the wrong incentive

  • a day ago
    [deleted]
  • HellDunkel 21 hours ago

    "normalised deployments," sounds even worse than tokenmaxxing

  • Daishiman a day ago

    A metric was introduced. A metric was maximized. The metric stopped being a proxy for anything. A new metric is to be introduced and likewise gamed.

  • ChrisArchitect a day ago