Financial Times: “Amazon service was taken down by AI coding bot”

Amazon Web Services experienced a 13-hour interruption to one system used by its customers in mid-December after engineers allowed its Kiro AI coding tool to make certain changes, according to four people familiar with the matter.

The people said the agentic tool, which can take autonomous actions on behalf of users, determined that the best course of action was to “delete and recreate the environment”.

Amazon posted an internal postmortem about the “outage” of the AWS system, which lets customers explore the costs of its services.

Multiple Amazon employees told the FT that this was the second occasion in recent months in which one of the group’s AI tools had been at the centre of a service disruption.

Rafe Rosner-Uddin

Not surprising that these kinds of outages happen when you hand over operations to unreliable systems without proper controls. Having invested astronomical amounts in AI technologies, management is all too eager to expand their use and to demonstrate tangible return-on-investment — beyond the cost reductions from constant layoffs. The rapid and uncontrolled push for AI in critical software infrastructure has been blamed for the multiple bugs in Windows updates over the past year as well; Microsoft even officially admitted some of the issues and committed to working on fixes.

The Hollywood Reporter: “Brandon Sanderson’s Literary Fantasy Universe ‘Cosmere’ picked up by Apple TV”

The first titles being eyed for adaptation are the Mistborn series, for features, and The Stormlight Archive series, for television.

The latter already has producers involved: Blue Marble, run by former WME agent Theresa Kang, is attached to executive produce The Stormlight Archive television adaptation.

The deal is rare one, coming after a competitive situation which saw Sanderson meet with most of the studio heads in town. It gives the author rarefied control over the screen translations, according to sources. Sanderson will be the architect of the universe; will write, produce and consult; and will have approvals. That’s a level of involvement that not even J.K. Rowling or George R.R. Martin enjoys.

Borys Kit

This announcement was met with widespread enthusiasm online, both because of the popularity of the ‘Cosmere’ and the level of control Sanderson is supposed to have over the final adaptation, in theory ensuring a faithful result. Me, I was more skeptical when reading about this, though perhaps this has more to do with my apprehensions around Sanderson, and Apple TV to a lesser degree.

The Hollywood Reporter: “Heavy is the Crown: George R.R. Martin on His Triumphs and Torments”

Last year, Martin sat down with one of his idols, Robert Redford, who was a fellow executive producer on Dark Winds. Redford came out of acting retirement to film a brief cameo in the show with Martin. In the scene, the two are sitting at a chessboard, and Redford ad-libbed a line: George, the whole world is waiting, make a move. It was a meta joke about how long it’s taken Martin to finish Winter. Then Redford died, too. His chess scene with Martin — like something out of The Seventh Seal — was his final performance.

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Martin says he has around 1,100 manuscript pages finished. He’s also said the number for a while. He long has blamed the endless distractions that have come from shifting from a full-time author to a producer and celebrity. The success of Thrones was both the best thing that could have happened to Martin and the worst thing that could have happened to the greatest story he ever wrote.

James Hibberd

I have long surmised that Martin’s inability – or unwillingness – to finish his magnum opus was down to the fact that he was already making more than enough money off the various TV adaptations and side projects to ever bother completing a series that became overstuffed with characters and marred by the poor reception of its on-screen conclusion. But reading through this article makes me think that he doesn’t even acknowledge the issue to himself. He keeps talking about wanting to finalize it, but other projects constantly getting in the way.

Spyglass: “Aside from That, Mr. Cook, What Did You Think of the Movie?”

While Cook was enjoying his popcorn and champagne with the likes of Mike Tyson, Tony Robbins, and other “VIPs”, it was complete and utter chaos on the streets of Minnesota. Just hours earlier, Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse, was shot and killed by ICE agents. Maybe, just maybe, postpone the movie premiere?

Of course, President Trump was never going to do that because the official White House stance is that Pretti was a “domestic terrorist” and the agents were acting in self defense. And never mind that this was the second such murder in the past 17 days, the show must go on!

But it didn’t have to for Cook. He could have, and should have, backed out of the event. Obviously. The fact that he didn’t either suggests horrible judgement on his part or worse, cowardice. This is a man and leader of one of the biggest and most important businesses in the world who had long been thought to have a great moral compass.

He has lost his way.

M.G. Siegler

I’ve heard the same point about Tim Cook’s ‘moral compass’ in a podcast the other day and I couldn’t roll my eyes hard enough. It takes an incredible amount of naivete – or rather self-delusion – to think the CEO of a billion-dollar corporation has any guiding principle aside from his own wealth and status. This whole concept that Apple and by extension its leadership is somehow more moral or righteous than its competitors can only be explained, I suspect, by Apple fans retroactively constructing this narrative to justify their unflinching loyalty to the brand.