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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[–] SparroHawc@piefed.world 12 points 12 hours ago

Productivity gains haven't resulted in an increase in wages since the '70s, Bezos. Get your head out of the sand.

[–] Avicenna@programming.dev 17 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago)

it is not going to result in cheaper housing unless you pests stop buying houses in bulk as an investment or politicians grow a spine and bring an end to basic human rights necessities being investments.

[–] sundray@lemmus.org 11 points 14 hours ago

"You're so right! I AM become death, destroyer or worlds! Great catch!"

[–] MaggiWuerze@feddit.org 57 points 20 hours ago (3 children)

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.

Pretty sure This only applies if it is a two billionaire income household

[–] smeg@feddit.uk 29 points 19 hours ago (2 children)

The problem (well, one of the many problems) is that "AI" is a meaningless buzzword slapped on everything by marketing drones. I'm sure there are some real advances that could be made by what five years ago we'd have called "machine learning", but the chatbots that everyone's currently obsessing over don't have anything to do with that.

[–] Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.world 10 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 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 14 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.

[–] vrek@programming.dev 4 points 15 hours ago

One of the coolest examples I saw a few years ago was for an automated optical inspection. You would take a picture and identify all the critical features and then manually check like 50 parts, varied between good and bad and marking why the bad ones were bad. Afterwards just throw a part under the camera and it could accurately tell good from bad with about 99% accuracy(biased towards false failures). Granted it was about 35k just for the camera and software but still really impressive.

It could locate the part and rotate the image with no fixturing and each inspection was between 10-90 milliseconds depending on what features were being inspected.

[–] generic_computers@lemmy.zip 9 points 17 hours ago

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is completely out of touch and just sounds like a moron

[–] Sibbo@sopuli.xyz 10 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

Such that women finally can go back to the kitchen and make food and babies? And be completely dependent on the income of the man again?

[–] django@discuss.tchncs.de 10 points 19 hours ago

As god intended.

[–] mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works 28 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

which could result in cheaper food, housing, and two income households deciding that they no longer need two incomes.

You know what is a better way to achieve this, Jeff? FUCKING PAYING YOUR EMPLOYEES A FAIR WAGE!!!

[–] anon_8675309@lemmy.world 8 points 15 hours ago

And paying taxes.

[–] OneCardboardBox@lemmy.sdf.org 16 points 18 hours ago

I like that the response from Amazon was very obviously AI-written