Amazon Just Proved AI Ain't The Answer YET AGAIN
How long will it take for them to learn this basic lesson?
Nvidia CEO and professional AI glazer Jensen Huang recently claimed that we have already achieved AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). Firstly, that raises serious concerns about his definition of intelligence. Current AI systems are more akin to a deeply hallucinating, plagiaristic sycophant than to any form of coherent intelligence. The toothless, tin-hat-wearing cider-addled man propping up my local pub from 11:00 AM every morning has infinitely more intelligence than these “flatten-the-curve” statistical slop machines. That guy is also infinitely more fun to talk to. But secondly, that simply ain’t happening, Chief! And Jensen would know that if he took a break from counting the billions of dollars he has earned in circular financing and actually looked at generative AI’s capabilities in the real world. You know, where intelligence isn’t some pseudointellectual, speculative bullshit concept but instead critical to real-world results. Take Amazon, for example. For the third time, they have learned the painful lesson that generative AI is not intelligent, can’t replace human intelligence, and isn’t a productivity tool. Well, I say “learned” — what is that fake Einstein quote about the definition of insanity? Something about doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results?
The Recent “Lesson”
Earlier this month, the Financial Times reported that Bezos’s favourite little monopoly had effectively called a giant emergency meeting of its remaining engineers to try and fix the rapidly increasing number of outages taking Amazon.com down. These aren’t little blips either. A week before this meeting was called, Amazon’s main shopping website was down for six hours! This one outage could have cost Amazon over $490 million in sales, given that $717 billion was spent on Amazon.com in 2025. Let’s just say that the bald man with more in common with Smaug than the rest of humanity wasn’t too happy about that. This meeting was an all-hands-on-deck moment. The engineers were expected to find the source of the problem and fix it.
And guess what the problem was?
Amazon’s own AI…
According to the official line, generative AI was a “contributing factor” in the botched “software code development” that caused these outages. But that is a bit like saying the untimely death of Archduke Franz Ferdinand was a contributing factor to World War I. This reeks of a PR spin designed to hide the embarrassment of the own goal that is Amazon’s AI “transition”, particularly when you consider the actual problems causing these outages, the engineers’ solutions to prevent them, and the wider context of Amazon’s recent business decisions. It all points to AI being the culprit.
Take the 13-hour AWS outage incident from December of last year. Last month, the Financial Times reported that Amazon’s own “agentic” Kiro AI coding tool was to blame. Engineers had allowed Kiro to make changes to Amazon’s AWS code and make “autonomous decisions”. As it turns out, Kiro ain’t that clever; it pulled a Musk move and deleted the entire working code environment before recreating it from the ground up with a ton of fatal bugs. In fact, the FTfound that Kiro caused outages like this not once, but twice!
Indeed, it seems to be both wild “agentic” AI and AI slop coding that are the culprits behind Amazon’s outages, and the smoking gun is the emergency solution these engineers came up with. Are you ready? Their solution is to require junior and mid-level engineers to ask senior engineers to sign off on any AI-assisted changes. This is almost fully admitting that AI caused all these outages.
But why are these engineers using AI like this? After all, 96% of professional coders explicitly don’t trust AI-generated code. These guys know giving it the keys to the kingdom was a bad idea.
Well, they were basically forced to.
Amazon has laid off thousands of engineers and plans to soon lay off around 30,000 workers, all while their major services, like AWS, expand dramatically. These services simply can’t be run on a skeleton crew, which makes this an obvious attempt to replace workers with AI automation. Indeed, last year, while these layoffs were happening, leaked documents showed Amazon’s plans to replace 75% of its workforce with automation and AI.
In short, these engineers are likely so stretched that they are forced to turn to AI to speed up their output. On top of that, Amazon recently mandated that 80% of its engineers use Kiro at least once a week. This isn’t necessarily a problem, but because they are so stretched, they don’t have the time to check the AI’s outputs, which practically guarantees these fatal mistakes will happen over and over again.
In other words, AI, despite its name, isn’t actually intelligent and is no replacement for genuine human intelligence in the real world. (I hope you are taking notes, Huang.)
But once again, Amazon has also proved AI isn’t a productivity tool either.
