“Amazon is holding a mandatory meeting about AI breaking its systems,” Olejnik wrote.
“Proceed with caution,” Musk replied.
Dave Treadwell, Amazon’s senior vice president of e-commerce services, reportedly wrote in an email that the team’s weekly “This Week in Stores Tech” (TWiST) meeting would in part be used to implement additional guardrails on how AI is used by engineers, including requiring more senior engineers to sign off of AI-assisted changes made by junior and mid-level engineers.
“Folks, as you likely know, the availability of the site and related infrastructure has not been good recently,” Treadwell wrote in an internal email, the FT reported.
An Amazon spokesperson told Fortune that the TWiST meeting is a regular weekly operations meeting with a group of retail technology teams and leaders to review operational performance.
“As part of normal business, the meeting will include a review of the availability of our website and app as we focus on continual improvement,” the spokesperson said in a statement.
The company confirmed Amazon Web Services (AWS) was not involved in the incidents. Amazon said only one incident discussed was related to AI, but none involved AI-written code. Junior and mid-level engineers are also not required to have senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes, according to the company.
The outages and subsequent meeting has raised concerns from cybersecurity experts about risks associated with the rapid rollout of AI tools. Features like Amazon’s AI assistant Q can speed up the coding process, producing more code faster, but it may come at the risk of disrupting systems for how that code is written, checked, and deployed, making platforms more susceptible to outages, Olejnik told Fortune.
“I’m not making an argument against deployment of AI,” he said. “There isn’t any. It can’t be stopped. Everybody is going to deploy AI. It’s an argument against speed for its own sake or using AI for the sake of using AI.”
Olejnik warned the transition from human-centered coding to AI-run systems too quickly could result in missing safety checks resulting in prolonged downtime or data loss that could result in “blowing up” a business due to irresponsible AI deployment.
When asked, he said he saw eye-to-eye with Musk regarding the level of attention AI deployment in tech should require.
“I agree with him,” Olejnik said. “AI brings a lot of opportunities, but there’s a middle ground between going to obsolescence due to not using AI, and blowing up businesses due to ill-judged deployments.”
