Amanda Burns

Product Manager @ Deel Local Payroll | Agile Delivery Leader

[Amanda Burns @MandsBurns]

We talk a lot about how AI is changing work.

I'm more curious about something else.

Has AI changed your personal life?
Not your job.

Your actual day-to-day life.

If yes, how?

[Amanda Burns @MandsBurns]

Every meeting should answer one question:

"What decision are we making?"

If there isn't one...

It probably didn't need to exist.

[Amanda Burns @MandsBurns]

@unusual_whales First OpenAI now Anthropic 🤭

[Amanda Burns @MandsBurns]

First OpenAI now Anthropic 🤭

[unusual_whales @unusual_whales]

BREAKING: Anthropic announced that its artificial intelligence models had breached three different organizations during cybersecurity tests that went awry, a little more than a week after its chief rival, OpenAI, disclosed a similar incident, per Bloomberg.

[Amanda Burns @MandsBurns]

Our kids have strict limits on screen time.

The one exception?

David Attenborough documentaries.

I'd much rather they spend an hour fascinated by whales, forests and insects than watching endless short-form videos.

Curiosity is a habit worth encouraging.

[Amanda Burns @MandsBurns]

People rarely change because they're told.

They change because they experience something different.

[Amanda Burns @MandsBurns]

David Attenborough is proof that your best work doesn't have to happen early in your career.

Decades of consistency can have an incredible impact.

[Amanda Burns @MandsBurns]

My husband thinks employment is risky.

I think entrepreneurship is risky.

Neither of us has convinced the other.

[Amanda Burns @MandsBurns]

This is what it means to be a Deeler 👏

[deel @deel]

The talent at Deel goes way beyond the day job.

Rainier Sarabia, one of our Directors of Engineering, just co-authored PHP Programming in the AI Era - now a #1 New Release on Amazon.

Proof that our people are shaping the future of AI, not just using it. 🚀

[Amanda Burns @MandsBurns]

@deel So proud to be a Deeler 👏

[Amanda Burns @MandsBurns]

Is it just me, or does rewatching an old TV series feel oddly comforting?

I'm rewatching The Mentalist at the moment.

I know exactly what's going to happen...

...and maybe that's the point.

After making decisions all day, it's nice to switch off and watch something with no surprises.

[Amanda Burns @MandsBurns]

Spent my week of leave...

✔ Bank card ✔ Phone ✔ Kids ✔ Appointments ✔ Vaccinations

Adulting is just project management with worse stakeholders.

[Amanda Burns @MandsBurns]

One thing I'm still learning:

Don't let one difficult interaction outweigh ten good ones.

Our brains naturally remember criticism more than praise.

The challenge isn't avoiding difficult people.

It's making sure they don't get to define your day.

[Amanda Burns @MandsBurns]

@elonmusk @HedgieMarkets This is what we needed to hear

[Amanda Burns @MandsBurns]

@HedgieMarkets Why does it feel like history repeating itself?

[Amanda Burns @MandsBurns]

@pinkos @itsolelehmann This is so devastating

[Amanda Burns @MandsBurns]

@gthartley @itsolelehmann It's hard to believe they actually did this

[Amanda Burns @MandsBurns]

@corbs95 @itsolelehmann @realDonaldTrump @JDVance @RapidResponse47 @DarioAmodei The librarian in me is sad for those books (and I'm not a librarian)

[Amanda Burns @MandsBurns]

@itsolelehmann This is so wild, it should definitely be made open source.

[Amanda Burns @MandsBurns]

They don't want you to know this!

[Ole Lehmann @itsolelehmann]

btw anthropic's internal document on this literally said "we don't want it to be known that we are working on this.”

it was called project panama.

here's exactly what happened:

1: anthropic concluded that books were the cheapest way to build a world-class model because they gave claude curated facts, structured arguments, compelling stories, and writing “an editor would approve of.”

2: once anthropic decided it needed books at enormous scale, its first solution was piracy.

it downloaded 7m+ books from online libraries including libgen. the judge later wrote that although anthropic had legal ways to buy them, it chose piracy to avoid what dario amodei called the “legal/practice/business slog.”

3: that piracy created a massive legal risk.

so in february 2024, anthropic hired tom turvey, the former head of partnerships for google books, to find a legally safer way of obtaining “all the books in the world.”

4: turvey first contacted major publishers about licensing their catalogs.

those attempts didn’t produce agreements, so anthropic chose a route that required no publisher permission: buying millions of physical books through distributors and used-book retailers.

5: within about a year, anthropic spent tens of millions acquiring and scanning millions of books, including many rare and 1/1 titles. one vendor proposal targeted 500,000 to 2 million books in six months.

6: to scan that many books within months, the vendors physically dismantled them.

a hydraulic cutter removed each spine. the pages were trimmed to size, fed as loose sheets through high-speed industrial scanners, and converted into searchable PDFs. the paper remains were then sent for recycling.

7: these PDFs were fed into claude as training data.

the complete collection became a private, searchable anthropic library that the company planned to “store forever.” the scans aren’t available to the public and were never open-sourced.