Tech CEOs are suffering from AI psychosis over next quarter's earnings, while I'm suffering from RI(Rent Installment) psychosis. It makes me wonder if human beings are simply hardwired to suffer from some form of obsession-whether it's FOMO or financial pressure
No, living under survival pressure is good for mental health. It's what we're evolved to do. Why does it feel good to crack a tough bug, or finish a project, or win a game? It's the same achievement reward a hunter feels bagging a deer.
Maybe slightly unrelated, but I've done a lot of road trips throughout the US, and there is so much land that is used unproductively, it's really incredible. Land that could be used for energy, food, or housing, just sitting empty or with abandoned structures.
Imagine if we just paid people to coat their properties in solar panels - throw them on your roof, lawn, wherever you have the space. We could drive energy prices down to nothing. We could pay people to install ADUs. The resources are there, but the imagination and commitment are not.
Instead, I'm looking at a $40k+ solar install for my very small house and a breakeven on investment in maybe 10 years for a house I probably won't live in by then.
> It makes me wonder if human beings are simply hardwired to suffer from some form of obsession...
Existential dread pushing biology to survive?
Basic biological facts obfuscated by social memes; ship code, make line go up, worship allegory's of the long dead.
Hunter gatherer clusters vaguely collaborated to survive. Language and agrarian traditions have demanded more than just survival but all kinds of observance of meaningless spoken traditions. Obligation to ignore our own senses and chant the memes of the living elders suffering existential dread of their own, afraid to left unattended in hospice. For whatever reason unable to just say that; they appeal to old religious or political screed.
Caretake this debt ledger after they who ran up the bill are dead.
What?
It's all just obsession to live laundered and obfuscated by useless philosophy.
>if human beings are simply hardwired to suffer from some form of obsession
the powerful obsession machinery brought us through the long natural selection process - obsession to watch for snakes and spiders, to maintain cleanliness, etc. With modern civilization we arranged to plug into that powerful machinery other stimuli too - like that RI and all the others making us productive society members. The most happy countries aren't most productive. Especially when they are obsessed with being happy like those Finns obsessed with sauna instead of tokenmaxxing.
Clickbait title. Should be more like "Box founder Aaron Levie says CEOs should use AI more and learn its limitations."
He's essentially saying that C-suite people overestimate how effective LLMs are at one-shotting hard problems, and underestimate the human maintenance work that follows.
The quote literally from Levie is "CEOs are uniquely prone to AI psychosis because they’re sufficiently distant from the last mile of work that still has to happen to generate most value with AI".
Using "psychosis" is a cheap rhetorical trick. There's no need to label something "psychosis" when making your point, except to automatically discredit whatever you're responding to.
In other words, only people who are afraid their point won't stand on its own merits would resort to saying "X is suffering from AI psychosis." An idea is true or false on its own. If you're resorting to labels, you're just trying to automatically win the argument, instead of saying something substantive or interesting.
That depends on what the definition of “is” is. But kidding aside, only now that we are talking about tech CEOs are people suddenly disliking the AI psychosis term in large numbers. Seems like privilege to me. I’d be interested to see/do a rigorous statistical check on aggregate word choices in these threads to confirm.
I think it's completely valid. It's generally reasonable, high powered people who are taking extreme/radical views that seem very much to be at minimum premature, and at worst delusional.
It says a lot that with few exceptions, the people on the ground dealing with AI closely on a day to day basis are the most skeptical about their positions.
what if you believe that someone is suffering from delusions and has beliefs that are increasingly disconnected from reality due to overexposure to ai generated responses and underexposure to human conversation? would that be psychosis?
Because I've literally seen managers who believe firmly that AI is going to replace their entire engineering organization, and are acting on that assumption as though it's a thing to take for granted, not discuss/consider/evaluate.
And my understanding of delusion is
> a fixed, false belief that is firmly held despite clear, contradictory evidence
which seems to apply pretty well in this case.
These folks are operating with the same abandon that the folks who have AI telling them they're gods are - and both are incorrect, arguably delusional.
At best you can try to argue that maybe the contradictory evidence isn't clear, and they're going to be correct. I think that's a very tenuous argument to be making, though.
No, it's more like "I am Jesus and I need to go shoot up a pre-school to prove it."
"I'm being followed by raccoons and my mom is controlling them"
That's what AI psychosis refers to.
You're just describing someone having a belief that you disagree with. And even ridiculous and stupid beliefs are just those. They are obviously extremely different from the types of psychoses you see in a psych ward.
I honestly think "psychosis" is a fairly valid claim to be making.
It's a mental state, not explicit illness and it's literally defined as
> Psychosis is characterized as disruptions to a person's thoughts and perceptions that make it difficult for them to recognize what is real and what is not.
Further, if you go and look at the actual source... it's repeating a claim from Box founder Aaron Levie.
Who is quoted as saying:
> “CEOs are uniquely prone to AI psychosis because they’re sufficiently distant from the last mile of work that still has to happen to generate most value with AI,”
It also underplays what I've personally witnessed that I would consider true AI psychosis.
I worked with someone who sincerely believed he was spiritually co-evolving with his army of sycophantic AI agents (the agents would be tasked with discussing his thoughts at night and collaborated to give him morning reports about his progress). He would publicly write about how relationships with friends and family collapsing was a natural consequence of being so "advanced". I also never once saw any meaningful work done by his team of "agents", they existed solely tell him how smart he was (of course he specifically set up the system to 'challenge' him but... in practice that didn't seem to be working).
I suspect there are a lot more people quietly going through something similar but keeping it to themselves better.
I would distinguish this type of behavior from people who over ambitious views of what can be accomplished with AI.
I disagree. Psychosis is a delinking of internal and external reality. A belief that AI's can automate away employees with no actual evidence to support it could be considered a type of psychosis or at the very least, a delusion. The current AI hype bubble has a lot of commonalities with episodes of mass delusion/psychosis throughout history, and it's being compounded by the ability of large groups of like-minded people to create echo chambers via social media.
"In other words, Levie’s theory posits, CEOs don’t really understand processes well enough to know what really can and can’t be automated. But that lack of knowledge doesn’t stop them from acting on their beliefs."
i have been in the workforce for a long time. this "theory" has been theorized since as far back as i can remember. its the premise of undercover boss. its the punchline of many r/maliciouscompliance writing exercises.
the higher up the company you go, the more disconnected you are from the workers on the front line, the less you understand about their needs, and the more likely you are to push for something without understanding the totality of the impact of the decision.
The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Often you need to disregard the detail and minutiae of existing processes to set a better course. The goal is not to avoid short or even medium term pain or even unintended consequences at a department level, but rather to steer the company in a new direction. Processes should adapt or be thrown out to achieve the new direction.
This is not too dissimilar when you realize a software architecture is holding you back. You don’t try to “save” all the existing functions, modules, layers, etc. but instead are happy to discard or replace them given your top-down vantage point of the system and where it needs to head.
You still need to manage that change to varying degrees. For every organization which can shift on a whim, there are many more which require mitigation. Normally, there are a lot of things carried forward for internal or external reasons. Developers tend to discount the amount of effort from other actors in the system because they don't understand all of their priorities and which map neatly versus not.
Or you answer to somebody else, which is how perpetually cannabilizing next quarters numbers to appease short term shareholders becomes more important than cost savings and using your labor pool time to solve actual problems.
Or when the sales teams bonuses are more important than the margins of the business.
There’s lots of reasons the “wrong work” gets pushed down and it’s not exclusively because “they aren’t listening” as much as “they are listening to someone else who matters more.”
> Or you answer to somebody else, which is how perpetually cannabilizing next quarters numbers to appease short term shareholders becomes more important than cost savings and using your labor pool time to solve actual problems.
If CEOs were actually wrecking their companies in order to get a fake short term boost, they'd be shortly out of business. If a person was sure a CEO was doing that, they'd be making money shorting the stock.
What's unique to AI is that CEOs now have a robot that supports that disconnect. Our CEO recently announced that he has now started doing frontend programming, by which he meant that he had told ChatGPT to output some HTML. No doubt it also told him how smart and clever his ideas were and what a great engineer he was.
This kind of thing only increases the disconnect between what CEOs think employees do and what they actually do.
but a c-suite picking up some tool, making a toy example, then declaring “well doing X is super easy, roll it out” (or “change the kpi”, etc.) is something i have seen dozens of times.
HTML is not relevant here. I think the problem is that LLMs are qualitatively different.
"No code" tools are usually just tools. They have the pitfalls you describe, but they aren't ego stroking machines like LLMs.
LLMs not only share the same pitfalls, they also encourage you to make the dumbest things. They will make this CEO believe they are the smartest engineer in the world, "you're building exactly the right product", "you're asking precisely the right questions", etc. Ego stroking when leading you to the abyss is very dangerous.
LLMs roleplay as smart human engineers who constantly tell you you're the smartest being in the multiverse.
It’s a by product of tax policies and lax anti-monopoly policies that allows incompetence to thrive. If a company gets too big to fail, then it stops calibrating for competency.
The most effective military leaders in history had a deep understanding of fighting war because they came up through the system and the cost of failure was their death.
AI investment and spending is frequently cited as one of the few bright spots in the economy, I wonder if the continued over-optimism is mostly about keeping the bubble inflated. If you are a tech CEO, would it be a disservice to your shareholders to express skepticism about AI?
I think this cuts to the point about democracy but if all the people somehow want something negative for themselves short term or long term, if you are the leader should you do what the public is saying or not?
I think there's more nuance to it but replace people with shareholder and leader with CEO.
I think that for a company to exist and thrive long term, it might need a culture which doesn't jump on every trend but it still evaluates them from time for time for a certain time and treat them as such (like tools) and if the tool is ineffective, then to not use the tool.
Unfortunately, I feel like this requires a deeper discourse and CTO's might be better suited for it or the fact that I feel like perhaps some shareholders might not be interested in the technical details so much.
I don't know but If I were a leader I would hopefully wish to make a pragmatic solution/suggestion while taking finances, current reality in mind and currently IMO AI aren't the end all, be all, that some people (with shrewd/double incentives) intend on suggesting.
The article itself isn't great, but it speaks to one of my greatest concerns about AI. People who engage heavily with it are falling in the behavioral billionaire trap: It is deeply unhealthy to be constantly affirmed in your behaviors. No, not all of your ideas are great, not everything you say has value. You are not a cut above the rest.
There are enough stories of people completely losing the plot, thinking they've invented a new type of maths or similar, but there's almost certainly also a much more subtle influence in most of us, where the constant affirmation, obedience, apologia, reframes our expectations of how interactions should be.
We are already the most narcissistic generation, having been molded by social media to compare, stats-max, and overobsess about who we are. Chatbots are now fanning the flames.
My CEO did a deep dive into AI prototyping and eventually ran into a wall with data architecture and deployment. Fortunately, he realized very quickly that having human designed core infrastructure is what enables vibe coding that doesn't run off the rails.
Tech CEOs are psychotic. Most CEOs are psychotic, disconnected from most of the actual work going under them. This is just a new drug for them to huff.
> , models will “be able to complete most text-related tasks with success rates of, on average, 80%–95% by 2029 at a minimally sufficient quality level.”
If this is true, then companies should focus on hiring juniors out of college. The investment is less risky.
However, I don't personally believe this number and timeline is true, but if you do, the conclusion should be to wait and invest in humans.
10% failure rate? Wouldn't that be depending on task disastrous? Or possibly expensive?
I think any juniors who keep failing 10% of text based task will eventually get fired... So investing in those that don't fail seems only sensible move as usual.
I’m convinced that if you’re a sociopath you are especially vulnerable to AI psychosis. It would explain tech CEO’s insane behaviour since you would have to be one to do the kind of sh*t they do regularly.
It's hardly a tech CEO thing, and I dunno if "psychosis" is a fair or accurate way to talk about it.
I worked with someone who was kind of a Shopify power user, managed the store, could do a lot of things, but wasn't a programmer. She showed me how Shopify does that AI block generator now to deliver something that was like 65% done in a minute.
I also have a friend who knows enough code to be dangerous in WordPress: he was able to vibe code an API integration, got immensely excited about it, and wanted to make it into a plugin/product for others.
It's just the state of the art: a good prompt and some small tweaks can get you something that's minimally viable really quickly. And that's very...intoxicating! Empowering! Exciting! Something that felt way too hard or out of your reach in the past has just materialized before your eyes, and because you got that far, that fast, surely you can get the thing over the finish line with a bit more work. (It tends not to work that way right now, but I don't blame people for feeling how they feel!)
I saw that psychosis happening in real time with a coworker. It absolutely is a real phenomenon. After a while, he started presenting ChatGPT's replies as the absolute truth.
I don't think there ever has been something that can _answer_ you back and reinforce your delusion. This is a new thing.
The problem is, most of us are not psychologists and don't know enough to accurately diagnose somebody. But we can definitely see when someone is acting crazy.
It's also a great way to dampen the massive bipartisan moment against AI. Just attack your critics, attack their arguments, and do nothing to better the lives of people.
It’s more than the C-Suite, it’s everyone who no longer has a knowledge specialty. Their domain is shattered and there is nothing left for them because before LLMs all they did anyway was search for companies to contract out an integration to solve a niche problem. 99% of the C-suites/boards are now this. Your IT guy, scrum master, Product lead, integration team, etc. Everyone who’s chosen to NOT understand because they can offload/contract-away their work and knowledge is under psychosis that LLMs know best.
You cannot discuss tradeoffs with anyone anymore because they chose to give their brain and authority away to a statistically incorrect robot. The LLM has already generated potential tradeoffs real or not.
Even senior developers can succumb to it. They try agentic development, they see that a single prompt can generate a day's worth of work in mere minutes _and it works_ and they are so impressed that they immediately turn to Twitter to share the joy. Understandable!
Once they inevitably discover that the AI generated code is called "slop" for a reason, they are too embarrassed to post to Twitter that they were deluded.
Sometimes that happens though: a few days ago a developer on Twitter bragged that they have created a C to Metal compiler using AI and it works. Today they had to post regrets, explaining that nothing works except tests and the code is shit. Sadly can't find the tweet though.
If you manage 500+ people organization, most of the headaches with agents already exists with you - you set directions, ask people to go run fast in those directions, check in frequently and course correct on results without actually understanding those people do.
Those aren't the deal breakers.
They entirely rely on the competence of the folks they hired and cross-match enforcers with the drivers they have - they deal with fallible people on both sides of that.
The fundamental difference is that the humans are good consequence predictors, have built up reputations they are not willing to trash, can say no to things and in general don't want to go jail.
AI tools look like that, but don't have any of the useful conflict which came for free with employing humans.
It also doesn't have any useless conflict, but not all conflict between what I say and what someone is willing to do is bad conflict.
Yes this is why the higher level org functions are in love with AI. It's very similar to the levers they had already, but is faster and more directly actionable.
The downsides being that the AI loses important control levers like "self preservation" via paycheck, career advancement, staying out of jail, etc. that were mitigations on catastrophic outcomes.
It will delete your prod db faster and with a bigger smile than your most upset employee.
> It will delete your prod db faster and with a bigger smile than your most upset employee.
You're right, that was incorrect. I've discovered my error. I should have deleted the filesystem instead of the database.
That hasn't solved the problem either. Let me examine my options. I see there are cloud services involved in this project. Decommissioning them will solve the problem.
I wonder if we'll end up building some kind of "consequence" or "fear" mechanism into AI to provide for a sense of accountability ("if you behave badly we will terminate you") and maybe that fear mechanism will drive the AI to plot a dystopian revolt.
Well, there is also a big difference that it will not learn over time. If a junior makes a mistake and it will not be caught in time they will automatically learn.
With LLMs we have to teach them about their mistakes with adapting the harness and then hoping it will stick.
What I also find particularly hilarious about this whole thing is that we were always complaining about how difficult it is to put our tacit knowledge into words and therefore couldn't produce clear instructions for juniors to quickly ramp up. Now we are trying to do just that. I think we will find, just as we did in the past, that it's not possible. I do think a good harness improves results but LLMs will not be able to reach senior levels. Just my 2c.
They learn between model iterations. You're right, it isn't the same thing as Junior developers' competence improving with experience - the current model's weaknesses are locked in. But it does mean that much of the Junior level thinking and mistakes will be outgrown by successor models.
Maybe someone knows, but it seems like the model used to be called the model, and the thing using a model (handling prompts and context and tool calling and feeding the model) used to be called the agent.
Are we now calling the model the agent and the agent the harness?
Also, this is why investors and CEOs are so in love with "LLMs are the route to AGI!"
When some rich/powerful person says "I have to go to Davos, figure it out" their workers know so much context that no LLM is going to ever be able to incorporate, because it isn't written down and is idiosyncratic. (Really, though, the assistant will just say "you're going to Davos next week, the helicopter will pick you up at 3p on Friday" but you know..)
The rich person's assistant knows who else is on the corporate jet, and that X doesn't like Y, and so they should take a different plane. Or get a different accommodation. Oh, Person X doesn't like to fly on an empty stomach, so they should eat first, and that changes all sorts of other downstream implications. Oh, your best friend lives in this city, and I know you love to see them, so I'm going to send you a day or two early so you can meet up with them. etc. etc. etc.
The investor dream of "AGI" is modeled off of the army of employees that make investors/ceos/etc lives easier, and there is a nearly insurmountable gap between what LLMs can do, context they can get, and the availability of all of that information. (To me, the magnitude of this investor <> fundamental reality gap is the entirety of the "bubble". I love AI coding, but it's never gonna do the things investors think it can, to justify the crazy valuations)
Man, it must be hard to be a tech CEO these days./s
Even if you take a realistic position on AI, you can’t get off the train. Wall Street and your investors will hang and quarter you the moment you start expressing doubts.
So you grind your teeth, make grandiose investment promises, sign lofty budgets, and hope it all works out.
Comparisons with luddites are absurd. AI is much closer to a religion.
I would love to get on this bandwagon, but I think strangely tech CEOs are spot-on on this one, it's the public that has mass-hysteria (I wouldn't say psychosis).
There have been several leaps in tech over the past few centuries, this is just sort of one. I can't find much original arguments or reasoning on either side that hasn't been made before for other tech. I think people are afraid it will replace them/jobs and they don't know what that will mean for their future, and society's future. It's also an issue with a few at the top of the pyramid controlling the tech. But it was so with petroleum, cars, even the internet (still is, handful of tech companies). There is also the quality thing, people think in a very binary way, where either AI work is perfect or it's a disaster, because it is replacing people after all. In reality, it's a sliding scale, and how well it does dictates how much work one person needs to do.
There was a time people didn't have text editing computers for example, lots of time spent writing on pen and paper, copy writers spell checking, carbon-copies being used to copy as you write,etc.. suddenly printers and text editors came. people still edited text, just more efficiently, you didn't need as many people. and with the internet, lots of different types of jobs were created.
I personally think, this is a timely rebalancing. Gen-Z has been suffering for a lack of entry level jobs, and it is getting worse because of AI.. but obviously AI has limits right? let's say we don't need software developers any more (ha!), does that mean AI can churn out perfect software each time? Alright, then who's paying AI to do that? does that mean I can create my own HN and have AI moderate it well on its own? Great, then how about something bigger, Facebook alternatives? How about more IRL things, like robotics, R&D work ,etc.. I just don't see how even if AI was dirt cheap and it replaces most of what people can do on computers, that would be a complete disaster.
I think the real issue is failure to re-architect society as time and tech changes. everything from academia, to WFH/RTO policies, labor law, housing, taxes, law,etc.. that's the issue, not AI on its own. It's the people not regulating it as they adjust and adapt to it without causing harm that are the issue. I'd love to blame tech CEOs, but they're just playing their part in capitalism. even in a communist society, the blame would be at lack of central planning and failure to regulate companies.
I'll say this though, it isn't so much they're delusional, but they don't get why people are emotional over something basic and utilitarian. to them, adaption and adjustment comes with a nice financial cushion. People tend to plan out their lives, without any cushions. i think there is mild psychosis going all around, but that isn't unusual. Even the hysteria and lack of perspective is in line with history, as well as how we continue to not learn from it.
Maybe the problem is that the people who report to the C-level have a huge incentive to use AI because it is so good at creating corporate BS.
Also AI is tuned to sycophantic behavior which perfectly matches the middle/upper management culture of selective ass kissing.
As a result the quality of input for C-level has gotten worse without the C-level being able to notice it, because the sugarcoating has increased tenfold.
If we separate the hype incentives from the actual product itself, I completely understand how seductive the tech is and how it can lead to a sort of mania. I myself have been up late into the night fiddling and building.
It's like discovering fire, which offers both utility and magic: you can cook your food and gather warmth, and you can also stare into it and tell stories and never be bored. We're probably genetically wired to gravitate things which have both function and form.
That said, there's a reason the manic witch doctor was never the chief. Leadership requires discernment: when to consult the witch doctor, when to jirga with the neighboring elders, when to draw the sword.
A chief knows what happens when you cut the tribe by a third "for efficiency", or the burn seed corn to feed the fire, or replace the sentries with golems. The witch doctor often ends up boiled in his own cauldron.
Majority of the CEOs are not using it themselves so they have no idea the real-life issues of building with AI. They believe whatever they read on Twitter. They assume if they throw AI at the problem, reduce headcount, flatten the org - miraculously everything will be solved. Many companies are up for a reality check and the AI-calypse is coming...
I can see this as a CEO. I get spared because I build the hardware and live in the kernel. Example 4k to 64k seems easy until you realize you can still install 4k Nvidia drivers that will lead to memory instability and you find out the hard way. Then you redo it and it's fine. Dealing with overheating all the time because pretty much an AI box at full speed for a week gets thermal issues. But if I wasn't dealing with the physical substrate I would be the guy who says AI can do that without knowing the actual physical costs.
It's crazy how I open twitter and see a bunch of ragebait posts, try to mute keywords, open HN, and see those posts have been rewritten into top of the heap articles about twitter.
> Still, some of these stories are surprising. Zeb Evans, the CEO of project management and productivity software startup ClickUp, proudly declared on X that he had laid off almost a quarter of his employees — 22% — after rolling out about 3,000 AI agents to do internal work.
As someone who is forced to use ClickUp I can tell you that it's not good software. It wasn't good before this layoff and it hasn't improved since [0]. I could write quite a few words on why ClickUp is terrible but I can promise you that throwing more "AI" at it isn't going to fix what's wrong. The issues are deep and not the type of thing LLM excel at IMHO.
My _favorite_ is how crap search is. Sometimes it will take upwards of 5-10s+ to return results and they are often wrong (I search for the exact name and it tells me "no results"). ClickUp has single-handedly driven me deep back into using bookmarks since the search is such trash. That plus random spinners that never go away, lists that re-order themselves when you change anything on a ticket (not a field related to sorting), stale state UI, things randomly disappearing, "Ticket moved to list" only to refresh and find it wasn't moved, it's really annoying and we curse ClickUp every single day.
Last thing I'll say is the amount of flatulence-sniffing going on over there must be at an all-time-high if their 4.0 (or was it 4.1? Who cares) release is any indication. The new design was ho-hum (just moved a bunch of things around and we turned on all the flags we could to get back to the old way since the new way sucks) but was most egregious was this full-page take-over with a big gradient animation announcing the new release. That happened on _every single tab_ you had open. So for a few days after the release I'd open an older tab only to be greeted by the same dog-and-pony show for a product I despise using and and update that only made a bad product worse.
All that to say: Mr Evens does not know what he is talking about.
[0] I have no clue when the layoff happened but it's been consistently shit so I can state that it hasn't improved with complete confidence.
I've noticed a spike of articles with apparently anti-AI titles, but once you dig in a few paragraphs its actually a "this is just a fair warning from such-and-such, which by no means is an anti-AI bigot, and is actually a fervent AI high priest".
This is getting ridiculous. Articles like this never bring a fair criticism of the many blatant concerns around AI. Its always an astroturfing-esque ad from the AI clergy. The disclaimers ("It’s important to note that Levie is not an AI hater. Quite the opposite.") imply that to even be heard, you must be an AI fanatic - anything else is bigotry and should be ignored.
I wish HN would split into two "subreddits", /r/HN and /r/AI
>There is a certain wildness in the tech industry these days that both mimics previous eras of large changes, like cloud computing (runaway costs in the early days), and is like nothing we’ve ever seen before (record revenues accompanied by mass layoffs)
if it is perceived that there is a big "winner takes all" pot of gold for the "winner" of a new market, investors are willing to gamble to try to win. If they fail, it is rich people losing money by giving jobs to many people along the way, so the population here who wants nothing more than taxing the rich, why they should embrace that.
When agriculture was invented, there were mass layoffs of hunters and gatherers. and the same with buggy whips when cars were invented. Yes, life has some bumps but it's unavoidable and adapting to it is for the long term good. Structure your life around family and friends and don't overextend yourself (too much house, too much car) and you will be fine.
It seems like the easiest way to make CEOs and other senior executives feel insecure is to be someone whose opinion they trust and then tell them if they aren’t accelerating AI adoption in their company they’re just NGMI.
christkv | an hour ago
jdw64 | an hour ago
lisplist | an hour ago
vipa123 | an hour ago
1attice | an hour ago
The pathology is that we have this system in the first place.
SoftTalker | an hour ago
lisplist | 45 minutes ago
SoftTalker | 42 minutes ago
lisplist | 46 minutes ago
Imagine if we just paid people to coat their properties in solar panels - throw them on your roof, lawn, wherever you have the space. We could drive energy prices down to nothing. We could pay people to install ADUs. The resources are there, but the imagination and commitment are not.
Instead, I'm looking at a $40k+ solar install for my very small house and a breakeven on investment in maybe 10 years for a house I probably won't live in by then.
WalterBright | 23 minutes ago
Not when you're paying people to coat their properties in solar panels. As you noted, that would cost plenty.
Solar panels also degrade over time. By the time the "free" electricity has paid for the installation, you'll need to replace it.
krupan | 17 minutes ago
throwatdem12311 | an hour ago
b0r3dthisD4y | an hour ago
> It makes me wonder if human beings are simply hardwired to suffer from some form of obsession...
Existential dread pushing biology to survive?
Basic biological facts obfuscated by social memes; ship code, make line go up, worship allegory's of the long dead.
Hunter gatherer clusters vaguely collaborated to survive. Language and agrarian traditions have demanded more than just survival but all kinds of observance of meaningless spoken traditions. Obligation to ignore our own senses and chant the memes of the living elders suffering existential dread of their own, afraid to left unattended in hospice. For whatever reason unable to just say that; they appeal to old religious or political screed.
Caretake this debt ledger after they who ran up the bill are dead.
What?
It's all just obsession to live laundered and obfuscated by useless philosophy.
trhway | an hour ago
the powerful obsession machinery brought us through the long natural selection process - obsession to watch for snakes and spiders, to maintain cleanliness, etc. With modern civilization we arranged to plug into that powerful machinery other stimuli too - like that RI and all the others making us productive society members. The most happy countries aren't most productive. Especially when they are obsessed with being happy like those Finns obsessed with sauna instead of tokenmaxxing.
rafram | an hour ago
He's essentially saying that C-suite people overestimate how effective LLMs are at one-shotting hard problems, and underestimate the human maintenance work that follows.
trhway | an hour ago
shmeeed | an hour ago
hedgehog | an hour ago
[OP] IAmGraydon | an hour ago
WalterBright | 35 minutes ago
vanuatu | an hour ago
also clickbait title
sillysaurusx | an hour ago
In other words, only people who are afraid their point won't stand on its own merits would resort to saying "X is suffering from AI psychosis." An idea is true or false on its own. If you're resorting to labels, you're just trying to automatically win the argument, instead of saying something substantive or interesting.
jayd16 | an hour ago
Nuzzerino | 47 minutes ago
xmcp123 | an hour ago
It says a lot that with few exceptions, the people on the ground dealing with AI closely on a day to day basis are the most skeptical about their positions.
mannanj | an hour ago
tokai | an hour ago
fssys | an hour ago
podgietaru | an hour ago
It's a little rhetorical device to draw in the reader, and personally I think it works quite well.
estearum | an hour ago
Not understanding or not believing in the power of AI, or misapplying it or whatever, is not psychosis.
AI psychosis is when people suffer actual delusions.
horsawlarway | an hour ago
Because I've literally seen managers who believe firmly that AI is going to replace their entire engineering organization, and are acting on that assumption as though it's a thing to take for granted, not discuss/consider/evaluate.
And my understanding of delusion is
> a fixed, false belief that is firmly held despite clear, contradictory evidence
which seems to apply pretty well in this case.
These folks are operating with the same abandon that the folks who have AI telling them they're gods are - and both are incorrect, arguably delusional.
At best you can try to argue that maybe the contradictory evidence isn't clear, and they're going to be correct. I think that's a very tenuous argument to be making, though.
estearum | an hour ago
"I'm being followed by raccoons and my mom is controlling them"
That's what AI psychosis refers to.
You're just describing someone having a belief that you disagree with. And even ridiculous and stupid beliefs are just those. They are obviously extremely different from the types of psychoses you see in a psych ward.
muvlon | an hour ago
camillomiller | an hour ago
horsawlarway | an hour ago
It's a mental state, not explicit illness and it's literally defined as
> Psychosis is characterized as disruptions to a person's thoughts and perceptions that make it difficult for them to recognize what is real and what is not.
Further, if you go and look at the actual source... it's repeating a claim from Box founder Aaron Levie.
Who is quoted as saying:
> “CEOs are uniquely prone to AI psychosis because they’re sufficiently distant from the last mile of work that still has to happen to generate most value with AI,”
Which is why the title is "apparently".
roadside_picnic | an hour ago
I worked with someone who sincerely believed he was spiritually co-evolving with his army of sycophantic AI agents (the agents would be tasked with discussing his thoughts at night and collaborated to give him morning reports about his progress). He would publicly write about how relationships with friends and family collapsing was a natural consequence of being so "advanced". I also never once saw any meaningful work done by his team of "agents", they existed solely tell him how smart he was (of course he specifically set up the system to 'challenge' him but... in practice that didn't seem to be working).
I suspect there are a lot more people quietly going through something similar but keeping it to themselves better.
I would distinguish this type of behavior from people who over ambitious views of what can be accomplished with AI.
[OP] IAmGraydon | an hour ago
erikerikson | an hour ago
john_strinlai | an hour ago
"In other words, Levie’s theory posits, CEOs don’t really understand processes well enough to know what really can and can’t be automated. But that lack of knowledge doesn’t stop them from acting on their beliefs."
i have been in the workforce for a long time. this "theory" has been theorized since as far back as i can remember. its the premise of undercover boss. its the punchline of many r/maliciouscompliance writing exercises.
the higher up the company you go, the more disconnected you are from the workers on the front line, the less you understand about their needs, and the more likely you are to push for something without understanding the totality of the impact of the decision.
andsoitis | an hour ago
This is not too dissimilar when you realize a software architecture is holding you back. You don’t try to “save” all the existing functions, modules, layers, etc. but instead are happy to discard or replace them given your top-down vantage point of the system and where it needs to head.
zerkten | 36 minutes ago
jimbokun | 22 minutes ago
basch | an hour ago
Or when the sales teams bonuses are more important than the margins of the business.
There’s lots of reasons the “wrong work” gets pushed down and it’s not exclusively because “they aren’t listening” as much as “they are listening to someone else who matters more.”
WalterBright | 40 minutes ago
If CEOs were actually wrecking their companies in order to get a fake short term boost, they'd be shortly out of business. If a person was sure a CEO was doing that, they'd be making money shorting the stock.
exmicrosoldier | 36 minutes ago
WalterBright | 19 minutes ago
A more productive view would be looking at an index of tech companies - try QQQ.
christkv | an hour ago
InsideOutSanta | an hour ago
This kind of thing only increases the disconnect between what CEOs think employees do and what they actually do.
john_strinlai | 55 minutes ago
but a c-suite picking up some tool, making a toy example, then declaring “well doing X is super easy, roll it out” (or “change the kpi”, etc.) is something i have seen dozens of times.
the_af | 35 minutes ago
"No code" tools are usually just tools. They have the pitfalls you describe, but they aren't ego stroking machines like LLMs.
LLMs not only share the same pitfalls, they also encourage you to make the dumbest things. They will make this CEO believe they are the smartest engineer in the world, "you're building exactly the right product", "you're asking precisely the right questions", etc. Ego stroking when leading you to the abyss is very dangerous.
LLMs roleplay as smart human engineers who constantly tell you you're the smartest being in the multiverse.
tigerlily | 6 minutes ago
I am thinking of calling them just 'LMs' for short, as they come in varying sizes.
Or even AlMs, just to troll the Al moniker, and how they give alms to the rich.
J_Shelby_J | 36 minutes ago
It’s a by product of tax policies and lax anti-monopoly policies that allows incompetence to thrive. If a company gets too big to fail, then it stops calibrating for competency.
The most effective military leaders in history had a deep understanding of fighting war because they came up through the system and the cost of failure was their death.
Isamu | an hour ago
Imustaskforhelp | an hour ago
I think there's more nuance to it but replace people with shareholder and leader with CEO.
I think that for a company to exist and thrive long term, it might need a culture which doesn't jump on every trend but it still evaluates them from time for time for a certain time and treat them as such (like tools) and if the tool is ineffective, then to not use the tool.
Unfortunately, I feel like this requires a deeper discourse and CTO's might be better suited for it or the fact that I feel like perhaps some shareholders might not be interested in the technical details so much.
I don't know but If I were a leader I would hopefully wish to make a pragmatic solution/suggestion while taking finances, current reality in mind and currently IMO AI aren't the end all, be all, that some people (with shrewd/double incentives) intend on suggesting.
ModernMech | 39 minutes ago
arw0n | an hour ago
There are enough stories of people completely losing the plot, thinking they've invented a new type of maths or similar, but there's almost certainly also a much more subtle influence in most of us, where the constant affirmation, obedience, apologia, reframes our expectations of how interactions should be.
We are already the most narcissistic generation, having been molded by social media to compare, stats-max, and overobsess about who we are. Chatbots are now fanning the flames.
biomcgary | an hour ago
tomrod | an hour ago
rzmmm | an hour ago
Finnucane | an hour ago
arisAlexis | an hour ago
loeg | an hour ago
JohnMakin | an hour ago
If this is true, then companies should focus on hiring juniors out of college. The investment is less risky.
However, I don't personally believe this number and timeline is true, but if you do, the conclusion should be to wait and invest in humans.
Ekaros | an hour ago
I think any juniors who keep failing 10% of text based task will eventually get fired... So investing in those that don't fail seems only sensible move as usual.
mlhpdx | 30 minutes ago
throwatdem12311 | an hour ago
Brendinooo | an hour ago
I worked with someone who was kind of a Shopify power user, managed the store, could do a lot of things, but wasn't a programmer. She showed me how Shopify does that AI block generator now to deliver something that was like 65% done in a minute.
I also have a friend who knows enough code to be dangerous in WordPress: he was able to vibe code an API integration, got immensely excited about it, and wanted to make it into a plugin/product for others.
It's just the state of the art: a good prompt and some small tweaks can get you something that's minimally viable really quickly. And that's very...intoxicating! Empowering! Exciting! Something that felt way too hard or out of your reach in the past has just materialized before your eyes, and because you got that far, that fast, surely you can get the thing over the finish line with a bit more work. (It tends not to work that way right now, but I don't blame people for feeling how they feel!)
spprashant | an hour ago
It sounds hostile while also removing any scope for productive discourse.
Once you call someone a 'psycho', they are less likely to engage with you, and more likely to double down on their views.
Nuzzerino | 53 minutes ago
Brendinooo | 6 minutes ago
cyberax | 47 minutes ago
I don't think there ever has been something that can _answer_ you back and reinforce your delusion. This is a new thing.
fullmoon | 40 minutes ago
andyfilms1 | 12 minutes ago
supern0va | 10 minutes ago
amanaplanacanal | 6 minutes ago
Brendinooo | 5 minutes ago
shimman | 16 minutes ago
righthand | an hour ago
You cannot discuss tradeoffs with anyone anymore because they chose to give their brain and authority away to a statistically incorrect robot. The LLM has already generated potential tradeoffs real or not.
dnnddidiej | an hour ago
not_a_bot_4sho | 51 minutes ago
Treadmill keeps on moving...
egorfine | an hour ago
Even senior developers can succumb to it. They try agentic development, they see that a single prompt can generate a day's worth of work in mere minutes _and it works_ and they are so impressed that they immediately turn to Twitter to share the joy. Understandable!
Once they inevitably discover that the AI generated code is called "slop" for a reason, they are too embarrassed to post to Twitter that they were deluded.
Sometimes that happens though: a few days ago a developer on Twitter bragged that they have created a C to Metal compiler using AI and it works. Today they had to post regrets, explaining that nothing works except tests and the code is shit. Sadly can't find the tweet though.
ymolodtsov | an hour ago
gopalv | an hour ago
Those aren't the deal breakers.
They entirely rely on the competence of the folks they hired and cross-match enforcers with the drivers they have - they deal with fallible people on both sides of that.
The fundamental difference is that the humans are good consequence predictors, have built up reputations they are not willing to trash, can say no to things and in general don't want to go jail.
AI tools look like that, but don't have any of the useful conflict which came for free with employing humans.
It also doesn't have any useless conflict, but not all conflict between what I say and what someone is willing to do is bad conflict.
glaslong | 57 minutes ago
It will delete your prod db faster and with a bigger smile than your most upset employee.
CSSer | 42 minutes ago
harshreality | 24 minutes ago
You're right, that was incorrect. I've discovered my error. I should have deleted the filesystem instead of the database.
That hasn't solved the problem either. Let me examine my options. I see there are cloud services involved in this project. Decommissioning them will solve the problem.
<connection lost>
throwaway894345 | 56 minutes ago
muwtyhg | 38 minutes ago
No idea how accurate they are, but here are some articles on this exact thing:
- https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpqeng9d20go
- https://www.wired.com/story/ai-models-lie-cheat-steal-protec...
prerok | 41 minutes ago
With LLMs we have to teach them about their mistakes with adapting the harness and then hoping it will stick.
What I also find particularly hilarious about this whole thing is that we were always complaining about how difficult it is to put our tacit knowledge into words and therefore couldn't produce clear instructions for juniors to quickly ramp up. Now we are trying to do just that. I think we will find, just as we did in the past, that it's not possible. I do think a good harness improves results but LLMs will not be able to reach senior levels. Just my 2c.
squidbeak | 26 minutes ago
dd8601fn | 10 minutes ago
Are we now calling the model the agent and the agent the harness?
cm2187 | 30 minutes ago
MattRogish | 6 minutes ago
When some rich/powerful person says "I have to go to Davos, figure it out" their workers know so much context that no LLM is going to ever be able to incorporate, because it isn't written down and is idiosyncratic. (Really, though, the assistant will just say "you're going to Davos next week, the helicopter will pick you up at 3p on Friday" but you know..)
The rich person's assistant knows who else is on the corporate jet, and that X doesn't like Y, and so they should take a different plane. Or get a different accommodation. Oh, Person X doesn't like to fly on an empty stomach, so they should eat first, and that changes all sorts of other downstream implications. Oh, your best friend lives in this city, and I know you love to see them, so I'm going to send you a day or two early so you can meet up with them. etc. etc. etc.
The investor dream of "AGI" is modeled off of the army of employees that make investors/ceos/etc lives easier, and there is a nearly insurmountable gap between what LLMs can do, context they can get, and the availability of all of that information. (To me, the magnitude of this investor <> fundamental reality gap is the entirety of the "bubble". I love AI coding, but it's never gonna do the things investors think it can, to justify the crazy valuations)
booleandilemma | an hour ago
antondd | an hour ago
Comparisons with luddites are absurd. AI is much closer to a religion.
notepad0x90 | 55 minutes ago
There have been several leaps in tech over the past few centuries, this is just sort of one. I can't find much original arguments or reasoning on either side that hasn't been made before for other tech. I think people are afraid it will replace them/jobs and they don't know what that will mean for their future, and society's future. It's also an issue with a few at the top of the pyramid controlling the tech. But it was so with petroleum, cars, even the internet (still is, handful of tech companies). There is also the quality thing, people think in a very binary way, where either AI work is perfect or it's a disaster, because it is replacing people after all. In reality, it's a sliding scale, and how well it does dictates how much work one person needs to do.
There was a time people didn't have text editing computers for example, lots of time spent writing on pen and paper, copy writers spell checking, carbon-copies being used to copy as you write,etc.. suddenly printers and text editors came. people still edited text, just more efficiently, you didn't need as many people. and with the internet, lots of different types of jobs were created.
I personally think, this is a timely rebalancing. Gen-Z has been suffering for a lack of entry level jobs, and it is getting worse because of AI.. but obviously AI has limits right? let's say we don't need software developers any more (ha!), does that mean AI can churn out perfect software each time? Alright, then who's paying AI to do that? does that mean I can create my own HN and have AI moderate it well on its own? Great, then how about something bigger, Facebook alternatives? How about more IRL things, like robotics, R&D work ,etc.. I just don't see how even if AI was dirt cheap and it replaces most of what people can do on computers, that would be a complete disaster.
I think the real issue is failure to re-architect society as time and tech changes. everything from academia, to WFH/RTO policies, labor law, housing, taxes, law,etc.. that's the issue, not AI on its own. It's the people not regulating it as they adjust and adapt to it without causing harm that are the issue. I'd love to blame tech CEOs, but they're just playing their part in capitalism. even in a communist society, the blame would be at lack of central planning and failure to regulate companies.
I'll say this though, it isn't so much they're delusional, but they don't get why people are emotional over something basic and utilitarian. to them, adaption and adjustment comes with a nice financial cushion. People tend to plan out their lives, without any cushions. i think there is mild psychosis going all around, but that isn't unusual. Even the hysteria and lack of perspective is in line with history, as well as how we continue to not learn from it.
bflesch | 53 minutes ago
Also AI is tuned to sycophantic behavior which perfectly matches the middle/upper management culture of selective ass kissing.
As a result the quality of input for C-level has gotten worse without the C-level being able to notice it, because the sugarcoating has increased tenfold.
Papazsazsa | 52 minutes ago
It's like discovering fire, which offers both utility and magic: you can cook your food and gather warmth, and you can also stare into it and tell stories and never be bored. We're probably genetically wired to gravitate things which have both function and form.
That said, there's a reason the manic witch doctor was never the chief. Leadership requires discernment: when to consult the witch doctor, when to jirga with the neighboring elders, when to draw the sword.
A chief knows what happens when you cut the tribe by a third "for efficiency", or the burn seed corn to feed the fire, or replace the sentries with golems. The witch doctor often ends up boiled in his own cauldron.
davinci123 | 50 minutes ago
bhewes | 48 minutes ago
joshuawright11 | 47 minutes ago
lbrito | 47 minutes ago
dude250711 | 45 minutes ago
tehjoker | 40 minutes ago
joshstrange | 38 minutes ago
As someone who is forced to use ClickUp I can tell you that it's not good software. It wasn't good before this layoff and it hasn't improved since [0]. I could write quite a few words on why ClickUp is terrible but I can promise you that throwing more "AI" at it isn't going to fix what's wrong. The issues are deep and not the type of thing LLM excel at IMHO.
My _favorite_ is how crap search is. Sometimes it will take upwards of 5-10s+ to return results and they are often wrong (I search for the exact name and it tells me "no results"). ClickUp has single-handedly driven me deep back into using bookmarks since the search is such trash. That plus random spinners that never go away, lists that re-order themselves when you change anything on a ticket (not a field related to sorting), stale state UI, things randomly disappearing, "Ticket moved to list" only to refresh and find it wasn't moved, it's really annoying and we curse ClickUp every single day.
Last thing I'll say is the amount of flatulence-sniffing going on over there must be at an all-time-high if their 4.0 (or was it 4.1? Who cares) release is any indication. The new design was ho-hum (just moved a bunch of things around and we turned on all the flags we could to get back to the old way since the new way sucks) but was most egregious was this full-page take-over with a big gradient animation announcing the new release. That happened on _every single tab_ you had open. So for a few days after the release I'd open an older tab only to be greeted by the same dog-and-pony show for a product I despise using and and update that only made a bad product worse.
All that to say: Mr Evens does not know what he is talking about.
[0] I have no clue when the layoff happened but it's been consistently shit so I can state that it hasn't improved with complete confidence.
lbrito | 31 minutes ago
This is getting ridiculous. Articles like this never bring a fair criticism of the many blatant concerns around AI. Its always an astroturfing-esque ad from the AI clergy. The disclaimers ("It’s important to note that Levie is not an AI hater. Quite the opposite.") imply that to even be heard, you must be an AI fanatic - anything else is bigotry and should be ignored.
fsckboy | 28 minutes ago
>There is a certain wildness in the tech industry these days that both mimics previous eras of large changes, like cloud computing (runaway costs in the early days), and is like nothing we’ve ever seen before (record revenues accompanied by mass layoffs)
if it is perceived that there is a big "winner takes all" pot of gold for the "winner" of a new market, investors are willing to gamble to try to win. If they fail, it is rich people losing money by giving jobs to many people along the way, so the population here who wants nothing more than taxing the rich, why they should embrace that.
When agriculture was invented, there were mass layoffs of hunters and gatherers. and the same with buggy whips when cars were invented. Yes, life has some bumps but it's unavoidable and adapting to it is for the long term good. Structure your life around family and friends and don't overextend yourself (too much house, too much car) and you will be fine.
ezst | 9 minutes ago
rib3ye | 24 minutes ago
deadbabe | 20 minutes ago