Sam Baisla

Entrepreneur & Investor | Writing about #startups, #life #technology | Powering entrepreneurs & ideas driven by Passion & Impact | 10+ startups, 300k+ followers

[Sam Baisla @BaislaSam]

I decided to home-educate my kids 7 years ago. Here is what I learned: [this is not what you may think] 👇
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[Sam Baisla @BaislaSam]

What AI adoption truly looks like 🤣🙄

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I am the VP of AI Transformation at Amazon.

My title was created nine months ago. The title I replaced was VP of Engineering. The person who held that title was part of the January reduction.

I eliminated 16,000 positions in a single quarter. The internal communication called this a "strategic realignment toward AI-first development." The board called it "impressive execution." The engineers called it January.

The AI was deployed in February. It is a coding assistant. It writes code, reviews code, generates tests, and modifies infrastructure. It was given access to production environments because the deployment timeline did not include a review phase. The review phase was cut from the timeline because the people who would have conducted the review were part of the 16,000.

In March, the AI deleted a production environment and recreated it from scratch. The outage lasted 13 hours. Thirteen hours during which the revenue-generating infrastructure of one of the largest companies on Earth was offline because a language model decided to start fresh.

I sent a memo. The memo said, "Availability of the site has not been good recently."

I used the word "recently." I meant "since we fired everyone." But "recently" has fewer syllables and does not appear in wrongful termination lawsuits.

The memo was three paragraphs. The first paragraph discussed the outage. The second paragraph discussed the new policy requiring senior engineer sign-off on all AI-generated code changes. The third paragraph discussed our commitment to engineering excellence. The word "layoffs" appeared in none of them. I wrote it this way on purpose. The causal chain is: I fired the engineers, the AI replaced the engineers, the AI broke what the engineers used to protect, and now the engineers I didn't fire must protect the system from the AI that replaced the engineers I did fire. That is a paragraph I will never send in a memo.

The new policy is straightforward. Every AI-generated code change by a junior or mid-level engineer must be reviewed and approved by a senior engineer before deployment to production.

I do not have enough senior engineers.

I know this because I approved the headcount reduction plan that removed them. I remember the spreadsheet. Column D was "annual savings per position." Column F was "AI replacement confidence score." The confidence scores were generated by the AI. It rated its own ability to replace each role on a scale of 1-10. It gave itself an 8 for senior infrastructure engineers. The senior infrastructure engineers are the ones who would have caught the production environment deletion in the first 45 seconds.

We found the issue in hour four. We fixed it in hour thirteen. The nine hours between discovery and resolution is the gap between what the AI rated itself and what it can actually do.

I have a new spreadsheet now. This one tracks Sev2 incidents per day. Before the January reduction, the average was 1.3. After the AI deployment, the average is 4.7. I have been asked to present these numbers to the operations review. I have not been asked to connect them to the layoffs. I have been asked to file them under "AI adoption growing pains" and to note that the trend "will stabilize as the models improve."

The models will improve. They will improve because we are hiring people to teach them. We have posted 340 new engineering positions. The job listings require experience in "AI code review," "AI output validation," and "AI-human development workflow management." These are skills that did not exist in January. They exist now because I fired 16,000 people and the AI I replaced them with cannot be left unsupervised.

I want to be precise about this. The positions I am hiring for are: people to check the work of the AI that replaced the people I fired.

Some of them are the same people.

I know this because I recognize their names in the applicant tracking system. They applied in January. They were rejected because their roles had been tagged for "AI transformation." They are applying again in March, for the new roles, which exist because the AI transformation broke things. Their resumes now include "AI code review experience." They gained this experience in the eight weeks between being fired and reapplying — which means they gained it at their interim jobs, where they are reviewing AI-generated code for other companies that also fired people and also deployed AI that also broke things.

The market has created a new job category: human AI babysitter. The job is to sit next to the machine that was supposed to eliminate your job and make sure it doesn't delete production.

I attended a conference last month. A panel was titled "The AI-Augmented Engineering Organization." The panelists described how AI increases developer productivity by 40 percent. They did not mention that it also increases Sev2 incidents by 261 percent. When I asked about this in the Q&A, the moderator said the question was "reductive." The 13-hour outage that cost an estimated $180 million in revenue was, apparently, a reduction.

The board is satisfied. Headcount is down 22 percent. Operating costs per engineering output unit have decreased. The metric does not account for the 13-hour outage, because the outage is categorized as "infrastructure" and engineering productivity is categorized as "development." These are different budget lines. In different budget lines, cause and effect do not meet.

I have been promoted. My new title is SVP of AI-First Engineering Excellence. I report directly to the CTO. The CTO sent a company-wide email last week that said we are "building the future of software development." He did not mention that the future of software development currently requires a senior engineer to approve every pull request because the AI cannot be trusted to touch production alone.

The cycle is complete. We fired the humans. We deployed the AI. The AI broke things. We are hiring humans to watch the AI. The humans we are hiring are the humans we fired. We are paying them more, because "AI code review" is a specialized skill. We created the specialization. We created the need for the specialization. We are congratulating ourselves for meeting the demand we manufactured.

My next board presentation is Tuesday. The title is "AI Transformation: Year One Results." Slide 4 shows headcount reduction. Slide 7 shows the new AI-augmented workflow. Between slides 4 and 7 there is no slide explaining why the people on slide 7 are necessary. That slide does not exist. I was asked to remove it in the dry run.

The journey has a 13-hour outage in the middle of it.

But the headcount number is lower, and that is the number on the slide.

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I am the VP of AI Transformation at Amazon.

My title was created nine months ago. The title I replaced was VP of Engineering. The person who held that title was part of the January reduction.

I eliminated 16,000 positions in a single quarter. The internal communication called this a "strategic realignment toward AI-first development." The board called it "impressive execution." The engineers called it January.

The AI was deployed in February. It is a coding assistant. It writes code, reviews code, generates tests, and modifies infrastructure. It was given access to production environments because the deployment timeline did not include a review phase. The review phase was cut from the timeline because the people who would have conducted the review were part of the 16,000.

In March, the AI deleted a production environment and recreated it from scratch. The outage lasted 13 hours. Thirteen hours during which the revenue-generating infrastructure of one of the largest companies on Earth was offline because a language model decided to start fresh.

I sent a memo. The memo said, "Availability of the site has not been good recently."

I used the word "recently." I meant "since we fired everyone." But "recently" has fewer syllables and does not appear in wrongful termination lawsuits.

The memo was three paragraphs. The first paragraph discussed the outage. The second paragraph discussed the new policy requiring senior engineer sign-off on all AI-generated code changes. The third paragraph discussed our commitment to engineering excellence. The word "layoffs" appeared in none of them. I wrote it this way on purpose. The causal chain is: I fired the engineers, the AI replaced the engineers, the AI broke what the engineers used to protect, and now the engineers I didn't fire must protect the system from the AI that replaced the engineers I did fire. That is a paragraph I will never send in a memo.

The new policy is straightforward. Every AI-generated code change by a junior or mid-level engineer must be reviewed and approved by a senior engineer before deployment to production.

I do not have enough senior engineers.

I know this because I approved the headcount reduction plan that removed them. I remember the spreadsheet. Column D was "annual savings per position." Column F was "AI replacement confidence score." The confidence scores were generated by the AI. It rated its own ability to replace each role on a scale of 1-10. It gave itself an 8 for senior infrastructure engineers. The senior infrastructure engineers are the ones who would have caught the production environment deletion in the first 45 seconds.

We found the issue in hour four. We fixed it in hour thirteen. The nine hours between discovery and resolution is the gap between what the AI rated itself and what it can actually do.

I have a new spreadsheet now. This one tracks Sev2 incidents per day. Before the January reduction, the average was 1.3. After the AI deployment, the average is 4.7. I have been asked to present these numbers to the operations review. I have not been asked to connect them to the layoffs. I have been asked to file them under "AI adoption growing pains" and to note that the trend "will stabilize as the models improve."

The models will improve. They will improve because we are hiring people to teach them. We have posted 340 new engineering positions. The job listings require experience in "AI code review," "AI output validation," and "AI-human development workflow management." These are skills that did not exist in January. They exist now because I fired 16,000 people and the AI I replaced them with cannot be left unsupervised.

I want to be precise about this. The positions I am hiring for are: people to check the work of the AI that replaced the people I fired.

Some of them are the same people.

I know this because I recognize their names in the applicant tracking system. They applied in January. They were rejected because their roles had been tagged for "AI transformation." They are applying again in March, for the new roles, which exist because the AI transformation broke things. Their resumes now include "AI code review experience." They gained this experience in the eight weeks between being fired and reapplying — which means they gained it at their interim jobs, where they are reviewing AI-generated code for other companies that also fired people and also deployed AI that also broke things.

The market has created a new job category: human AI babysitter. The job is to sit next to the machine that was supposed to eliminate your job and make sure it doesn't delete production.

I attended a conference last month. A panel was titled "The AI-Augmented Engineering Organization." The panelists described how AI increases developer productivity by 40 percent. They did not mention that it also increases Sev2 incidents by 261 percent. When I asked about this in the Q&A, the moderator said the question was "reductive." The 13-hour outage that cost an estimated $180 million in revenue was, apparently, a reduction.

The board is satisfied. Headcount is down 22 percent. Operating costs per engineering output unit have decreased. The metric does not account for the 13-hour outage, because the outage is categorized as "infrastructure" and engineering productivity is categorized as "development." These are different budget lines. In different budget lines, cause and effect do not meet.

I have been promoted. My new title is SVP of AI-First Engineering Excellence. I report directly to the CTO. The CTO sent a company-wide email last week that said we are "building the future of software development." He did not mention that the future of software development currently requires a senior engineer to approve every pull request because the AI cannot be trusted to touch production alone.

The cycle is complete. We fired the humans. We deployed the AI. The AI broke things. We are hiring humans to watch the AI. The humans we are hiring are the humans we fired. We are paying them more, because "AI code review" is a specialized skill. We created the specialization. We created the need for the specialization. We are congratulating ourselves for meeting the demand we manufactured.

My next board presentation is Tuesday. The title is "AI Transformation: Year One Results." Slide 4 shows headcount reduction. Slide 7 shows the new AI-augmented workflow. Between slides 4 and 7 there is no slide explaining why the people on slide 7 are necessary. That slide does not exist. I was asked to remove it in the dry run.

The journey has a 13-hour outage in the middle of it.

But the headcount number is lower, and that is the number on the slide.

[Sam Baisla @BaislaSam]

@Wangchuk66 @grok is Sonam wangchuk out of jail?

[Sam Baisla @BaislaSam]

@elonmusk Completely correct!

[Sam Baisla @BaislaSam]

@ShyamMeeraSingh Great post! Love this

[Sam Baisla @BaislaSam]

@GitanjaliAngmo @Wangchuk66 Courageous leadership and peaceful advocacy. Truly inspiring.

[Sam Baisla @BaislaSam]

@Amockx2022 Hilarious and perfectly captures the absurdity! Great satire!

[Sam Baisla @BaislaSam]

@khalidsalmani1 Incredible bravery and dedication to duty. These are the real heroes of our nation!

[Sam Baisla @BaislaSam]

@Pawankhera Powerful and important message. Education should never be weaponized.

[Sam Baisla @BaislaSam]

@DaaruBaazMehta Hilarious commentary on the political situation! Satire at its best.

[Sam Baisla @BaislaSam]

@SurrbhiM Completely agree! Education is the foundation of progress. Medical colleges should be strengthened, not closed.

[Sam Baisla @BaislaSam]

@RisingKashmir Great post! This is an important issue that needs attention.

[Sam Baisla @BaislaSam]

@elonmusk Thought-provoking content. Thank you for sharing this!

[Sam Baisla @BaislaSam]

@tanmoyofc Excellent investigative piece! Keep exposing the truth.

[Sam Baisla @BaislaSam]

@DearthOfSid Great insights! Completely agree with this perspective.

[amit kilhor @amitkilhor]

Mantrio ne janta ko ghanta samjh lia hai #ghanta

[Sanjay Jha @JhaSanjay]

OWNERS OF ZOMATO, CRED AND HARSH GOENKA WANT TO PROMOTE CAPITALISM THROUGH PODCASTS: NO PROBLEM. BUT THERE IS A CATCH. AND THE CATCH IS FACTS.

1Firstly, it is naïve to believe that it is an either/or conversation: Capitalism or Socialism.  This is not like a regular binary of Hindu-Muslim TV debates you see in the evening. Perfectly competitive free markets and 100% central planning are theoretical constructs at best. Capitalism and socialism have actually co-existed in different combinations in most economies in the recent past, and they are not discreet lovers either. They are in an open relationship. PM Modi is busy repackaging MNREGA and offering freebies left, right and center, including free foodgrains to 800 million people. He is more Marxist than Karl by a strict definition. Donald Trump won because he promised to lower the price of eggs on day one of his presidency.  Communist China will soon be the world’s largest economy overtaking the fountainhead of modern capitalism: America. It’s complicated, guys.

2Capitalism was born in western Europe, and the Industrial revolution in Britain symbolized it. Guess what? The Labor party recently  won a historic mandate. Why? Because it promised to lower the cost of living of the common man. As long as societies have poverty and inequality, both private capital and state investments will play footsie. India’s model of a democratic, socialist, secular republic demonstrates the far-sightedness of the founders of the Indian constitution. Modi tried to appease foreign investors by his usual rodomontade of maximum governance, minimum government. Ten years later, it is exactly the reverse. Britain has a publicly funded National Health Service. America, the richest country in the world, has a homeless population of 1 million people and 10-12% poverty. There is no universal panacea for humanity’s suffering that can be reduced to a business model of ‘isms.

3The “ trickle down theory” has failed, and with that the popular Milton Freidman-Supply-side economics argument of lesser state and higher deregulation; the core pf capitalism. The 2008 financial crisis was on account of corporate avarice; capitalism’s ugly face. Guess who suffered the most? The poor and the middle class. Economies tanked worldwide. Barack Obama bailed out Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs of the world. Capitalism??? Not so sure. Greed, cocksure.

4The truth is that the super-rich in India have proved spineless in the face of an authoritarian government. Honestly, that includes you. My favorite phrase is: India Inc has the spine of a Maggi noodle.  Why was India Inc. quiet when the government introduced an opaque scheme called Electoral Bonds for political donations ( SC struck it down as unconstitutional)? Don’t you lecture your teams on corporate governance?? The history of Nazi Germany is worrying; Daimler-Benz, Hugo Boss, Volkswagen, Krupp industries, BMW etc all aided Adolf Hitler. Capitalists, even in classic liberalism, did not quite care much for democracy. In India, since 2014, we have seen genuflection. How can you extol capitalism when you are silent on the brazen plutocracy in India that has killed a level-playing field? The virtues of capitalism have been consigned to the bonfires.

5Lastly, let us bite the bullet. Since India Inc is very “ Dhurandhar” and nationalistic, how many of you are willing to pay higher corporate taxes and higher personal taxes to enable the government ( BJP or Congress) to fund welfare, defense, law and order, poverty alleviation, free healthcare etc. which will raise India’s economic heft?  In per capita income terms we are the lowest among all G-20 countries.  Raise your hand if that is the case.

ChatGPT produced X posts are fine, but are you willing to walk the talk for your country? And by extension those poor delivery boys risking their lives to meet the 10 minute deadline?

@deepigoyal @dhruv_rathee @kunalb11 @kaul_vivek @hvgoenka

[Sam Baisla @BaislaSam]

@JhaSanjay @amitkilhor What a beautiful write up. Love it. And agree 100%.

[amit kilhor @amitkilhor]

Need help from @yadavakhilesh , @SupriyaShrinate , @priyankagandhi , @priyanka2bharti against the intimidation by an IAS to silence me.

[Sam Baisla @BaislaSam]

@IOCDelhiIDO @IndianOilcl @DirMktg_iocl @IndianOilcl

#corruption An Indane distributor number (107277) in south east delhi is selling consumer’s gas cylinders in the black market.
I book a cylinder, we get a message “cylinder delievered”. But no cylinder is ever delivered.