{"text":[[{"start":9,"text":"Amazon has shut down an internal leaderboard that tracked employees’ use of AI tools after workers tried to boost their scores with unnecessary activity that increased the company’s computing costs."}],[{"start":20,"text":"Employees at the $2.9tn group were told this week its “Kirorank” service — which scored users of Amazon’s Kiro developer platform based on their AI activity — had been taken offline, according to two people familiar with the matter. "}],[{"start":34.8,"text":"The decision came after the tool led some workers to assign AI agents — autonomous bots that can take actions on behalf of users — to carry out needless tasks in an apparent attempt to climb the rankings."}],[{"start":47.65,"text":"Dave Treadwell, an Amazon senior vice-president, told staff earlier this week that the leaderboard had been built with “good intentions”, according to people familiar with his remarks."}],[{"start":58.05,"text":"But he added that the result had been additional costs for Amazon due to employees “tokenmaxxing” or inflating their consumption of AI tokens — units of data processed by models."}],[{"start":69.05,"text":"“Please don’t use AI just for the sake of using AI,” he told staff."}],[{"start":73,"text":"Amazon confirmed in a statement that “the beta dashboard was not a formal or approved tool, and has since been deprecated”."}],[{"start":79.75,"text":"The move highlights how tech groups’ efforts to encourage the use of AI can lead workers to try to game performance measures with pointless activity, increasing infrastructure expenses. Meta employees have similarly sought to boost their position on internal tables by driving up token consumption."}],[{"start":97.65,"text":"Amazon’s decision comes after the FT reported how staff were using Kiro and MeshClaw — an in-house version of the popular OpenClaw tool that allows users to run agents on their own hardware. "}],[{"start":109.2,"text":"Some employees said colleagues were using the software to generate additional AI activity to drive up token consumption and demonstrate adoption of the technology."}],[{"start":119.05,"text":"The behaviour comes amid growing pressure on staff to adopt the technology after Amazon introduced targets for more than 80 per cent of developers to use AI each week."}],[{"start":129.05,"text":"The leaderboard “was created by a group of employees who wanted to drive awareness for how AI can accelerate work”, Amazon said, adding that the company was focused on “operational efficiency”."}],[{"start":140.65,"text":"The cloud giant has undertaken sweeping lay-offs in a bid to reduce its costs and help finance its vast AI investment. Amazon this year is expected to spend $200bn in capital expenditure, the vast majority of which will go towards AI and data centre infrastructure."}],[{"start":157.4,"text":"AI labs such as Anthropic have recently shifted to a consumption-based pricing model away from monthly flat fees, in a move that significantly increased the costs of some customers. Amazon uses Anthropic’s AI models extensively."}],[{"start":171.35,"text":"Amazon had started to use a metric called “normalised deployments”, evidence of engineers regularly using AI to create useful code, to measure the success of its AI tools and adoption of the technology rather than outright token consumption, the people added. "}],[{"start":188.15,"text":"Treadwell told staff that he did not want workers to focus on token use and instead instructed them to focus on building better products."}],[{"start":204.60000000000002,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1780018713_1221.mp3"}