Amazon founder Jeff Bezos believes that artificial intelligence is going to lead to unprecedented productivity gains which could result in cheaper food, housing, and two income households deciding that they no longer need two incomes. Internally, Amazon employees mock the company’s AI tools, refer to its output as “slop,” and joke about the company’s failed attempt to motivate employees to use AI tools effectively.

The memes are yet another example of the contrast between what AI companies say in public about its potential power and benefit versus the reality of how the people who help create these AI tools use and criticize them internally. Amazon employees told me about these memes after they saw my story last week about Google employees also internally sharing memes critical of Google’s AI tools.

“Now I have everything I need,” says the text over an image of a jet taking off in one meme posted by an Amazon employee. The jet is edited to carry the purple ghost logo for Kiro, Amazon’s AI-powered coding tool. “Narrator: He did not have everything he needed,” says the text over an image of a bunch of people left behind on the tarmac. I've recreated all the memes rather than share screenshots from the Slack channel in order to protect sources.

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[–] Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.world 11 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago) (1 children)

I miss when machine learning was getting big. Communities were sprouting everywhere and making so many interesting demonstrations using it, and I mean genuinely interesting, not tech bro delusions. These were AI that could actually learn and improve themselves (albeit over thousands to millions of randomized iterations; they were still dumb as rocks compared to even the simplest animals), and stuff like genetic algorithms could brute-force discoveries that humans hadn't found even after decades of trying (for example, I believe a major hurdle in modeling protein folding was finally solved using these types of AI).

It was especially cool in the video game space. Hobbyists were doing crazy shit like getting an AI to reliably play a racing game while balancing vertically on the tip of the car the entire time, or setting up complicated mazes only for the AI to figure out how to cheat by launching onto the walls through physics engine exploits. AIs were making novel discoveries rather than just mimicking and piggybacking off of humanity like LLMs do.

[–] vrek@programming.dev 7 points 17 hours ago

You would probably be interested in TAS. It's tool assisted speed runs, basically how fast can you setup a bot to beat a game. Celeste is especially impressive to watch, chaining frame perfect tricks back to back to back for the entire game.