Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools
arstechnica.com
Workers are using an internal AI tool to automate non-essential tasks.

Amazon has told employees that the AI token statistics would not be used in performance evaluations. But several staff members said they believed managers were monitoring the data.

  • Windex007@lemmy.worldEnglish
    35·
    6 hours ago

    When a measure is used as a metric, it ceases to be a valuable measure.

    It’s literally a software engineers job to consider and understand functions. If you tell me I’ll be judged by the output of a function, I will crack it open to understand what inputs maximize outputs.

    I’ll burn though however many tokens you want me to. Give me hardware and a blank cheque I’ll bring a data center to its knees. I’m guessing your hope was that tokens burn would translate into productivity, but that hope was misplaced and that failure is on you.

    • Landless2029@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      1 hour ago

      And the only way to prevent this would have been keeping it away from managers eyes.

      Only the AI team should have access to that data. Maybe a separate “efficiency” data team can crunch numbers on completed tasks vs tokens.

      Never let managers or end users see a chart of token usage. That’s just stupid.

      This is just going to burn compute even more on LLM crap for no reason. Just burn it all down.