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.
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.