Amazon is monitoring its AI more closely after several outages on its site

Amazon justified a large part of its recent layoffs (16,000 in January!) by the use of generative AI. It's nice to replace humans with machines, but obviously the technology has glitches. The company suffered a series of outages that affected the core of its operations: the online store. And you don't mess around with this!

Too much AI, not enough humans?

According to internal documents intercepted by the Financial Times, Amazon has noticed a concerning trend in incidents over the past few months. The latest one: a six-hour outage during which consumers could not access certain site functions, such as the very valuable completion of purchases. A problem linked to a faulty code deployment.

The company admitted that these incidents were partly due to code modifications made by generative AI tools. To correct this, Amazon now requires that these code changes be validated by more experienced engineers. The « good practices and safeguards are not yet fully established » for this new use of AI. Hence the reliance on the old-fashioned human brain.

The difficulties are not limited to the public website. The cloud computing division of the company, Amazon Web Services (AWS), has also experienced incidents involving AI code assistants. For example, in December, the internal tool Kiro caused a 13-hour interruption of a cost calculator used by customers, after deleting and recreating a technical environment. Oops.

Amazon claims that these incidents remain limited and are part of the normal functioning of a company that is constantly striving to improve the reliability of its services. Maybe more human supervision wouldn't be a bad thing.

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Source : FT