Amazon closes S.F. AI lab, lays off 1,100 Florida warehouse workers - San Francisco Chronicle

Oh, what a jolly day for Amazon's grand AGI ambitions. The company has shuttered its San Francisco AI lab — the one that was supposedly wrestling with artificial general intelligence — and simultaneously binned 1,100 Florida warehouse workers as part of a 'renovation project.' Nothing says 'we're serious about the future of intelligence' quite like firing the people packing your boxes while pulling the plug on the research that might make them obsolete. The 30,000 office jobs that already went up in smoke this year were just the warm-up act.

Let's savour the corporate euphemism: 'renovation project.' Renovation suggests you're upgrading the building, not evicting the tenants. But Amazon isn't renovating the warehouse; it's renovating their workforce straight out the door. And the AGI lab closing? That's the kind of strategic pivot that tells you the singularity is not, in fact, imminent. If Bezos's brainchild couldn't make AGI profitable enough to keep the lights on in S.F., what chance do the rest of us have? Maybe the AI revolution is just a really expensive way to optimise a warehouse floor plan.

Still, don't weep for the 1,100. They'll have plenty of time to train as prompt engineers — assuming the AGI that never materialised doesn't write better prompts than them. Amazon's message is clear: the future of intelligence is on hold, but the future of cost-cutting is alive and well. It's almost as if the real AI is the friends we laid off along the way.