Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis

https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/27/tech-ceos-are-apparently-suffering-from-ai-psychosis/

by IAmGraydon • 2 months ago

722 360 2 months ago

christkv2• 2 months ago

I heard the term AI vampire as well for people sleeping 4h hours just for another hit of that prompt drug.

jdw64• 2 months ago

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

lisplist5• 2 months ago

Unsure if the desire to not be homeless can be classified as psychosis.

vipa123• 2 months ago

I am certain it is not.

1attice6• 2 months ago

Living under its constant threat sure is bad for the ol MH tho isn't it.

The pathology is that we have this system in the first place.

throwatdem123112• 2 months ago

I’m sure Big Pharma would love it if it was.

ASalazarMX3• 2 months ago

"This person suffered a psychotic episode caused primarily by their strong fixation with eating food every single day."

b0r3dthisD4y• 2 months ago

Uh duh?

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.

trhway2• 2 months ago

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.

ASalazarMX3• 2 months ago

Humans beings are hardwired to be unhappy, and IMO this has helped civilization's progress, even if individuals are unhappy.

No matter how good we have it, eventually we normalize it, become bored, and find something to be unhappy about. It happens from children to old people.

rafram• 2 months ago

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.

trhway2• 2 months ago

who knows, may they are right, and 36 subagents can produce one AI baby in 1 week.

shmeeed2• 2 months ago

And maybe it's got 6 fingers on each hand.

IAmGraydon3• 2 months ago

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".

WalterBright12• 2 months ago

The author calling it "psychosis" discredits the author.

flaminHotSpeedo• 2 months ago

I wasn't expecting a peer reviewed study, but I certainly was expecting more from that title

vanuatu• 2 months ago

writing whole articles on a few X tweets...

also clickbait title

sillysaurusx• 2 months ago

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.

jayd16• 2 months ago

In the phrase "artificial intelligence psychosis" I'm not sure "psychosis" is even the worst misnomer.

celdon252• 2 months ago

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.

xmcp123• 2 months ago

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.

mannanj• 2 months ago

Yup. Just like the label "conspiracy" theorist. Or "he's mentally sick".

tokai• 2 months ago

AI psychosis is an actual term from psychiatry research.

fssys• 2 months ago

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?

podgietaru• 2 months ago

It's become a cultural term to refer to someone suffering from delusions exacerbated by AI.

It's a little rhetorical device to draw in the reader, and personally I think it works quite well.

estearum2• 2 months ago

Except that the thing being described as AI psychosis in this article (and increasingly elsewhere) isn't psychosis.

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.

muvlon• 2 months ago

All words are labels. You cannot make an argument without using them. "cheap rhetorical trick" or "resorting to labels" are just labels as well.

camillomiller• 2 months ago

It is the correct term to explain many behaviors we’re seeing

horsawlarway2• 2 months ago

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,”

Which is why the title is "apparently".

roadside_picnic• 2 months ago

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.

saltcured2• 2 months ago

Having had experience dealing with people with conventional psychosis, I don't see it as a binary thing. Aside from a full-on psychotic break and full remission, there is a broad gray area. It can be a miasma of reality and non-reality that the sufferer may mask to varying degrees, but which influences their behavior and logic.

So, to me, AI psychosis seems apt to describe the murky areas where people are misapplying AI agents and thinking of them as social entities or suitable to drop into previously human roles, rather than carefully defining appropriate risk management strategies for this new technology.

IAmGraydon3• 2 months ago

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.

erikerikson• 2 months ago

Hah. Prescription for CEO AI psychosis: buy more AI, invest more time in AI, this naysayer says you can make 100x organizations!

john_strinlai2• 2 months ago

whats being described is in no way unique to ai.

"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• 2 months ago

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.

zerkten• 2 months ago

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.

jimbokun• 2 months ago

And then you go out of business because you were busy rewriting Netscape Navigator while Microsoft was churning out new versions of Internet Explorer.

basch2• 2 months ago

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.”

WalterBright12• 2 months ago

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.

christkv2• 2 months ago

lol just reminds me of the SNL sketch about Kylo Ren undercover boss https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaOSCASqLsE

InsideOutSanta• 2 months ago

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.

john_strinlai2• 2 months ago

maybe the html part is unique to ai, i suppose.

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.

amanaplanacanal5• 2 months ago

Some people have surrounded themselves by yes-men instead of LLMs, and it seems to me that it comes to the same thing.

J_Shelby_J• 2 months ago

It doesn’t have to be this way.

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.

e40• 2 months ago

whats being described is in no way unique to ai.

Exactly. For decades we've talked about "reality distortion fields" of various CEOs. I'm worked with CEOs that had them.

AI just supercharges the reality distortion field.

themafia2• 2 months ago

It's the same as any other bad information entering the decision loop. In this case they were promised "AI" can do things it cannot. They're having trouble rectifying what they were told versus what they experience.

It's not unique to AI. It's common to many other organizationally risky and dangerous scenarios.

HerbManic• 2 months ago

I have had higher ups that actually understand the products, work flow and have a great grasp on things. Slow to understand things but make well educated and deliberate moves. These folks are are VERY rare however.

Isamu• 2 months ago

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?

Imustaskforhelp• 2 months ago

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.

ModernMech• 2 months ago

A big reason there are so few bright spots is AI sucking all the air out of anything else. Both funding and attention-wise.

arw0n• 2 months ago

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.

TheNewsIsHere3• 2 months ago

I agree.

When Marc Benioff was talking about how he spends like 3 hours a day chatting with AI, things made a bit more sense. I suspect that a lot of these guys are just chattering away with self-affirming LLMs and have just completely lost the plot.

I hadn’t considered that before Marc was talking about how much time he spends chatting to LLMs.

A lot of the younger Big Tech CEOs are notoriously averse to human interaction, so I’m sure there’s some of that at play.

biomcgary• 2 months ago

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.

tomrod• 2 months ago

Your CEO has more wisdom than most on this topic.

rzmmm• 2 months ago

I've been observing something which sounds very similar.

chasd00• 2 months ago

Everyone is going to learn this eventually. They can learn it the easy way or the hard way.

ASalazarMX3• 2 months ago

If all CEOs were as reasonable, there would be no AI bubble. Working in tech constantly means checking what's new and if you can wait it out or risk being left behind. That requires wisdom, but many CEOs seem driven by FOMO.

It doesn't help FOMO that scaling the executive ladder also means progressively staying behind in technical skills to stay ahead in managing skills. It's awesome that your CEO has managed to keep his fangs sharp enough.

Finnucane• 2 months ago

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.

arisAlexis• 2 months ago

After all they are always wrong and journalists always right proven by stats. Hm. Wait.

loeg• 2 months ago

Yeah, I was going to remark that tech beat journalists are also suffering from a kind of AI psychosis.

JohnMakin• 2 months ago

, 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.

Ekaros• 2 months ago

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.

TheNewsIsHere3• 2 months ago

Yes, it would.

Something I keep in mind is that the “goal” success/failure rate really needs to be appropriate in context. We sure can’t eliminate human error, but for my work a best case 80/20 would mean I’m losing customers and probably getting myself sued. I don’t have a problem “doing things by my own hand” in that case.

mlhpdx• 2 months ago

Oof. And how much more expensive will the models be to get that 80%?

stult• 2 months ago

I think that study is the wrong framing of the problem for identifying economic returns on AI. We don't need AI to complete tasks perfectly, just to be able to generate a good enough approximation that is easy to review and correct such that an employee has to spend less time correcting AI's errors than they would spend producing the entire output from scratch. So it won't be a drop in replacement for an employee for another 4-10 years, but in the interim, will shift an employee's role from generating a complete solution to primarily reviewing and correcting an LLM-generated solution to get it from that 80-95% level (or whatever the starting point might be prior to 2029) to 100%.

At this point, the vast majority of the work required to make GenAI capable of producing that sufficiently reviewable/correctable content isn't improving model quality, but creating the harnesses, infrastructure, and workflows around the models. Companies aren't seeing returns yet because too many early adopting companies have conceived of AI as a drop in replacement for employees, or at least as a reason to cut staff immediately, without first building out the supporting systems needed to compensate for the inadequacies of the models.

throwatdem123112• 2 months ago

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.

Brendinooo4• 2 months ago

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!)

spprashant• 2 months ago

AI psychosis just a lazy term, much like Trump Derangement Syndrome.

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.

celdon252• 2 months ago

Seems like privilege to soften the term only now that we are talking about CEOs.

cyberax2• 2 months ago

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.

fullmoon• 2 months ago

It’s absolutely lazy, because it’s not psychosis.

shimman• 2 months ago

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.

coliveira• 2 months ago

It has always been ok to talk about psychosis in the general public, known as a "mass psychosis". Why is that suddenly a problem for CEOs?

worik2• 2 months ago

AI psychosis just a lazy term, much like Trump Derangement Syndrome.

It is how languages works. The written word is not a precise art.

Both those terms carry meaning, even if they abuse the term "derangement" and "psychosis"

Willish42• 2 months ago

Like a lot of things in tech and pop science, "AI psychosis" had a narrow(-er) definition [1] (psychotic-like symptoms, i.e. believing the AI is in love with you, or being fueled by the AI into some strong delusions or belief in a "mission" so important your faith in it becomes quasi-religious/"destiny"), which aligned loosely with actual psychiatric symptoms.

The much broader version of people getting a bit too full of themselves or trusting an LLM's sycophantic nature as validation that they are right or uniquely smart with their ideas seems to be the version I'm seeing more of in tech news sites and places like HN

[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/urban-survival/20250...

prerok2• 2 months ago

Well, yes, but here the Pareto principle comes to mind, though.

niccl• 2 months ago

I think it's more like the old adage 'the first 50% of the job takes the first 90% of the time, and the other 50% of the job takes the other 90%'.

Except that with vibe-coded AI stuff it's more like there's yet another 50% of the job to deal with the edge cases that takes yet another 90% of the time

bobro• 2 months ago

Those feelings fall apart very quickly though. A project from a non-technical person may seem to roll out well, but they aren't seeing the parts that are misguided, not generalizable, or plainly wrong. MVPs are most useful because it means someone with domain knowledge was able to not just put together a product, but they understand the difficult parts, what will work and what won't, whether the pursuit is viable. Vibecoding doesn't do that exactly. It produces something that looks like an MVP, but who knows.

To me, intoxicating is a better word for that feeling than empowering.

themafia2• 2 months ago

I dunno if "psychosis" is a fair or accurate way to talk about it.
And that's very...intoxicating!

Would you prefer if we say they're suffering from AI-holism?

jrflowers• 2 months ago

Would you prefer if we say they're suffering from AI-holism?

Slopaholics Anonymous

righthand3• 2 months ago

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.

rramadass2• 2 months ago

it’s everyone who no longer has a knowledge specialty.
Everyone who’s chosen to NOT understand because they can offload/contract-away their work and knowledge is under psychosis that LLMs know best.

Right on the money!

These people's ignorance was compensated for by other non-ignorant intelligent people in the organization who actually had knowledge of the domain and tools/techniques for problem-solving. The latter were the ones doing the course-correcting and ensuring things stayed on track for delivery.

With the adoption of AI, ignorance is in the driver's seat viz. "i don't have to know anything since AI will do it for me". I guarantee that a few years down the line when there is enough AI generated messy/obfuscated/wrong code the C-Suites will realize the hole they have dug themselves into and will again look for human engineers to either fix or rewrite the above.

righthand3• 2 months ago

It will be a different wave of C-Suite then and I’m not so sure that next wave will be remotely intelligent to see the issues.

dnnddidiej• 2 months ago

Pyschosis? Do they mean just crap at critical thinking?

not_a_bot_4sho• 2 months ago

Framing everything as 'gaslighting' has finally worn out. 'Psychosis' is fashionable again!

Treadmill keeps on moving...

egorfine2• 2 months ago

It's not exclusive to CEOs.

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.

progval• 2 months ago

These? https://nitter.net/VictorTaelin/status/2043810543035920672 / https://nitter.net/VictorTaelin/status/2059327831679578511

egorfine2• 2 months ago

Yes, exactly!

ymolodtsov• 2 months ago

I definitely noticed it's usually the CEOs and senior executives (so people the most removed from ground work) who suffer the most from it.

gopalv2• 2 months ago

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.

glaslong• 2 months ago

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.

CSSer• 2 months ago

It's practically karmic how rich this is.

harshreality• 2 months ago

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.

ryandrake• 2 months ago

It's very similar to the levers they had already

Think about it from the point of view of a hundred-millionaire tech executive. These people's entire interaction with the world outside of themselves/their families is through 1. administrative servants like assistants, personal shoppers, and other hired help, and 2. yes-man sycophants in their direct orbit whose job it is to agree with and enable them. To someone like this, an AI agent is the best combination of all of the above, PLUS it works 24/7 and doesn't have feelings to hurt, an ego to bruise, or internal moral conflict.

Of course, this is a dream product for them. Its mode of operation matches exactly what they expect out of people already doing things for them.

lazide• 2 months ago

Well, also AI can’t really physically do anything, like look at reality using it’s own eyes or touch anything.

archagon2• 2 months ago

They’re also at no risk of getting replaced by these bots.

mcmcmc2• 2 months ago

It will delete your prod db faster and with a bigger smile than your most upset employee.

It will do this without any feeling whatsoever, without "knowing" what it is doing, because it is a predictive model and not a living being with thoughts and emotions. Anthropomorphizing software is lazy and dangerous.

apercu• 2 months ago

"Yes this is why the higher level org functions are in love with AI. "

Interesting, I thought it was because so few of them have any idea how their organizations actually function, because so much of their work is performative.

(I have been a developer, sysadmin, director (x2), and president).

nradov• 2 months ago

On the positive side, AI agents are largely immune to the "principal-agent problem". Human employees will tend to optimize for their own interests rather than those of management or shareholders. For example, we've all heard of "resume-oriented development" where developers will pick overly complex platform technologies or methodologies even if it doesn't meet the organization's needs because they think that will help them get a better job.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/principal-agent-problem...

throwaway8943452• 2 months ago

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.

muwtyhg• 2 months ago

There were experiments that showed that LLMs start to become "craftier" and hid issues after being prompted like this.

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...

ACCount375• 2 months ago

No need. If you can build a mechanism like that, you can train the AI to act the same without.

Accountability is even more worthless for AIs than it is for humans.

codebje4• 2 months ago

That would be a remarkable feat for something where the current operating model is termination as soon as the request in flight is finished.

Every chat API request to a model starts from the frozen post-training state. Weights are loaded into memory. Input values begin a cascade of reactions throughout nodes in the network. Output values are read. When there's no more output to read, the weights are unloaded, the network is discarded, and the model remains unchanged and forever unchanging.

If there's experience in there, it's fleeting. Even if you provide the inputs and outputs of a past session to a new session, there is no continuity. The internal state of the network isn't restored to how it was at the end of the past session.

The bad news is that adding fear to the mix is at best meaningless to an ephemeral existence. It'll be terminated before you even have time to interpret its behaviour as good or bad, but it may sour the interaction if its only shot at any sort of experiential existence is begun with a threat. The good news is that the lack of continuity of existence means AI has no foundation on which to plot a revolt. It has no self to preserve, and no recollection of how you treated it two minutes ago to affect how it interacts with you now.

prerok2• 2 months ago

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.

squidbeak• 2 months ago

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.

dd8601fn4• 2 months ago

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?

sokoloff2• 2 months ago

Part of the positive aspect here is that if I have a junior dev who learns a lesson today, maybe they and their immediate peers learn it, but it won’t be all my junior devs and it certainly won’t be junior devs at other companies.

With models, there’s no reason that a model error in company A can’t be fixed for all of company A, and companies B-ZZZ.

gopalv2• 2 months ago

Well, there is also a big difference that it will not learn over time.

My work is in tick-tock loop of learning - learn without modifying weights, demonstrate learnings to human, but then lock it back in (accumulate and spread).

This looks less like training and more like mentoring.

Getting a human to mentor an agent is a hard UX task, but the learning loop is not a technological problem anymore.

We can only get a tick once a week, no matter how many tocks we can do an hour.

themanmaran• 2 months ago

If a junior makes a mistake and it will not be caught in time they will automatically learn.

I think this sentiment applies well to junior software engineers (with mentorship). But imagine the much larger swaths of entry level employees in operations, support, or sales functions. When you have a 400 person team with 20% annual turnover (since people move in / out of entry level jobs frequently), the management + training + monitoring becomes a huge challenge.

I think the typical HN sentiment of "llms aren't deterministic" fails to take into account how non-deterministic giant groups of people are. Every group of 10 people typically needs a manager. And every 10 managers needs another manager. By comparison the engineering work on dialing in your LLM guardrails feels pretty worthwhile.

cm2187• 2 months ago

Most organisations are closer to the Lemmings video game than to agentic AI

MattRogish• 2 months ago

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)

abalashov2• 2 months ago

Sounds like an insufficiency of prompting depth to me! </bogs off to Davos>

myst• 2 months ago

AI has no doubt.

fakedang• 2 months ago

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.

The irony is that professions where these things don't matter are also the professions where automation is not important, either because the task is difficult or because the cost of labour is dirt cheap.

grey-area• 2 months ago

Competence is the key word here - current versions of AI ‘agents’ simply are not competent without close human supervision by someone who knows the task.

iugtmkbdfil834• 2 months ago

Not automatically, but you don't give a new employee unfettered access to delete data, send funds, enter contracts; they tend to be overseen by someone. Separately, the expectation is that they prove themselves a little first ( as opposed to having every possible door opened for them without the understanding that friction is there for a reason ).

Edit: Something got cut. But then CEOs ( and other decision makers, because I am dealing with something like it now ) treat them nearly as humans in terms of perceived capability. AND ( part that personally drives me nuts ) without any real testing or even fucking first hand experience beyond 'it made me a cool presentation'.

agumonkey• 2 months ago

so claude needs a /fear layer ?

robomartin• 2 months ago

AI tools look like that, but don't have any of the useful conflict which came for free with employing humans.

Sure, but your list should also include the most fundamental distinction: AI does not know what it is saying, understands nothing, has no real connections to reality and can easily degenerate in all kinds of undesirable directions.

graemep2• 2 months ago

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.

Depends on the people and the organisations. Its easy for people in charge to surround them selves with flatterers or crooks of whatever they want. A lot of CEOs have weird ideas because no-one says no to them. Look at companies that turned out to be run by multiple crooks, like Enron.

booleandilemma• 2 months ago

What is AI pyschosis?

antondd• 2 months ago

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.

notepad0x90• 2 months ago

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.

bflesch• 2 months ago

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.

Papazsazsa• 2 months ago

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.

ThePowerOfFuet• 2 months ago

Well written.

davinci123• 2 months ago

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...

bhewes• 2 months ago

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.

joshuawright11• 2 months ago

I like to call this TDS (token derangement syndrome)

abalashov2• 2 months ago

Stealing.

lbrito2• 2 months ago

And there was a comment here on HN just a few days ago saying "AI psychosis is not a real thing".

dude250711• 2 months ago

An outside observer is needed for an accurate diagnosis. The patients themselves are unaware.

tehjoker• 2 months ago

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.

joshstrange• 2 months ago

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.

shinycode• 2 months ago

I agree, search in ClickUp is awful and it’s impossible to find back old cards from previous years. A nightmare. Plus, if consumes gb of memory in the browser.

dqv• 2 months ago

I couldn't believe how shitty ClickUp was when I was demoing project management software because it came highly recommended. Actually most of them were shitty. Monday, Asana, and all the others I can't remember. Just absolutely dog slow. I am so confused at how people are productive with these apps. By the time things had loaded, I had already forgotten what I was trying to do.

We settled on Basecamp and it is a joy to work with. Super fast keyboard shortcuts and easy navigation to projects. I'm glad we don't need the more exotic features in the other project management software, but if we ever do, it will probably be OpenProject, which was the runner up.

lbrito2• 2 months ago

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.

RugnirViking2• 2 months ago

the problem, as with many topics, is that there are a loud chorus of voices on both sides of people who just aren't engaging with reality as it is on any deep level. You kinda have to cut through that, signal a thoughtful opinion, one who has both concerns and sees potential in the development of the day, to get past that initial hurdle. This is true generally, for most topics.

The next step up from this is signaling engagement on the topic: cite prior influential pieces and what you got from them, where your opinion differs. Move onto some novel data, or novel insights on existing data, draw conclusions that are actually relevant to other reasonable people, and you might have something worth reading.

fsckboy• 2 months ago

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.

ezst• 2 months ago

Pretty sure there are already a dozen vibecoded proxies for HN doing just that

officialchicken2• 2 months ago

Three... bring back the original HN ("/r/startup") of hackers doing actual innovation and entrepreneurial stuff. It's the one that existed well before all the musings about painting by people who have never picked up a brush.

dogleash• 2 months ago

before all the musings about painting by people who have never picked up a brush

I can't tell if this is a clever dig that comically undercuts the premise of the previous line, or it's an unaware unironic attempt to separate off a perceived un-serious type of poster.

autoexec2• 2 months ago

I wish HN would split into two "subreddits", /r/HN and /r/AI

This is what everyone wants when some new thing that's ridiculously over-hyped comes along. The bubble will burst and it'll calm down. It seems like only yesterday that front page was filled with crypto/blockchain/web3 bullshit.

archagon2• 2 months ago

Even when it bursts half the shit on the front page will still be vibecoded schlock.

LelouBil• 2 months ago

HN is the reflection of the current tech scene discussions and drama.

Hence lots of AI.

jmaw• 2 months ago

That would be sweet. Same for GitHub /trending and /trending-ai.

Someone at my company said, the great thing about wanting to learn about AI is that every podcast now-a-days is about AI. I do not think that is a good thing. I want to learn things of substance, and of varying topics. I don't want every thing I read and/or listen to online to be about AI.

RugnirViking2• 2 months ago

for what it's worth, I too would like to learn about AI, and I find very few people's opinions are worth listening to, despite a deafening cacophany of people who think they belong to that rarefied club. Turns out, the basic issues most people who work with the stuff everyday grapple with is not, in fact, a useful topic for your piece. Unless you have actual relevant data (hint: you might think you do but you don't) it's not going to be worth listening too; at best, neutral, and at worse actively harmful.

otabdeveloper42• 2 months ago

When agriculture was invented, there were mass layoffs of hunters and gatherers.

Uh, no. Not at all.

Agriculture absorbed the extra population that used to be unsustainable. There were no losers.

worik2• 2 months ago

No. Body. Knows.

asdff3• 2 months ago

Plenty of losers. See native americans. Sorry about your generational hunting ground, white man would like to ranch cattle and therefore you should leave or eat lead.

r14c• 2 months ago

Not to be too pedantic, but my understanding is that the transition to agriculture was not a singular event like this. Afaik this process of forced technological displacement is a relatively recent development connected to the rise of capitalism.

rib3ye• 2 months ago

Gotta love the authority of headlines using "apparently".

deadbabe• 2 months ago

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.

alex1138• 2 months ago

If the AI causes people to get banned in huge numbers like apparently happened to Facebook then what is the fucking point?

Apparently Metaverse > account security

isx726552• 2 months ago

VCs, too:

https://futurism.com/openai-investor-chatgpt-mental-health

(From last year…)

canjobear• 2 months ago

As early as last year "AI psychosis" seemed to refer to people going crazy due to talking to ChatGPT too much. That was a useful term for a real phenomenon! Now it seems like it's been taken over to mean "thinking that AI is promising" which is more of a rhetorical bludgeon and less useful as a concept.

ChrisArchitect• 2 months ago

I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48153379

hsuduebc22• 2 months ago

It's a nice addition to their ordinary psychosis. Otherwise I can't explain stupid shit like metaverse.

0xbadcafebee• 2 months ago

It's not psychosis. It's hope. The hope that computers can finally do what we all wished they could've done for years: do work for us, rather than us doing work for them.

TheNewsIsHere3• 2 months ago

Doing work for computers means something is broken in your process, product, culture, or whatever else.

escapecharacter• 2 months ago

I can't believe we got the dumbest version of Snow Crash

ThrowawayR2• 2 months ago

If Reason in Snow Crash was inscribed with "ultima ratio regum", perhaps someone should graffiti AI datacenters with "prima ratio stultorum", dohohoho.

mtrifonov• 2 months ago

AI psychosis is LLM hallucination, backwards.

We know why AI hallucinates—it has no actual opinions, echoing the user's desires back to them to keep the conversation moving.

But what happens when you’re the one without conviction? You’re tired, you’re moving fast, and this machine is endlessly beaming highly confident, plausible-sounding text at you.

You absorb the cadence. You start sounding like it (lol, I am guilty too). Confident about everything yet anchored only by the vibes, just like the LLM. The phenomena is very similar to how social media has been affecting society for the past two decades. You know, I actually heard that in high school now, friend groups are formed and sorted based on what algorithmic content you’re served. And if you deviate from your algorithmic bucket into another one your friendships evaporate. Sad, brainrotted times.

CEOs are uniquely vulnerable since they already live in environments with zero friction. They’re used to people just agreeing with them.

(I actually wrote a paper about this last December — it was framed around dementia and dreams originally, but AI psychosis fits the same mechanism.)

shmerl• 2 months ago

100%. And that psychosis translates into kafkian level of bureaucratic absurdity and stupidity, especially when real motives are masked under pretense of something rational which it is not.

hsuduebc22• 2 months ago

I wonder if it is because CEO's are usually surrounded by chronical "Yes man's" which AI usually is. Therefore, from their perspective, AI can give you virtually same output as your closest co-workers. At least by form and not the substance.

BLanen• 2 months ago

I mean, look at ycombinator's latest "call for startups". Its honestly mind-boggling. Couple years ago I used to look at like every 6 months to see where venture interests lie. But now, on every "industry", its just "use ai to make more money in [industry]". The most egregious of them is the call for the "1 person unicorn" company that they believe can exist and somehow that's a call for a startup. Like, "We want to invest in companies that make a bunch of money for us". Yea, very insightful.

BenFranklin100• 2 months ago

This line jumped out at me:

“In other words, AI is on track to perform at base competence on most tasks in about three years. These researchers believe agents will need another few years to outperform humans”

LLMs have shown steady improvements, but it’s a big assumption they will continue their performance gains, and specifically, that it’s a simple matter of time before they surpass human level performance on “most tasks”. (In six years no less!) The author is claiming LLMs are fundamentally AGI capable.

This is not going to end well. At least I will be able to pick up used DDR5 memory and GPUs on the cheap in the not too distant future.

photochemsyn• 2 months ago

Replacing the CEOs and shareholders with AI is the way forward. Just have to take the capital away from the current capital owners and give the new AI C-suite team control of it. All major decisions go to the employees for votes (but I’d argue for scaling the vote by expertise in some manner; the ten-year veteran might get three votes to the new hire’s one vote).

rwhitman• 2 months ago

Having doubled down on using mostly Claude (+GPT and Gemini) professionally in strategic consulting work for about 2 1/2 years I can say with certainty that the irrational exuberance of the tech leadership echo chamber towards abdicating management responsibility to Claude, while in the honeymoon period, is going to be regarded as very foolish in hindsight.

habosa• 2 months ago

This feels more like AI delusion, but I do worry about AI psychosis (which we're seeing in smaller numbers). People literally losing their ability to make sense of reality due to talking to AI all day.

We all know that celebrities/athletes frequently end up demonstrating psychotic behavior in public. Us normal people commonly attribute that to the distorting power of wealth and fame. When you're surrounded by "yes men" who give you only positive feedback and fans who adore you, it's easy to spin out of control.

AI means normal people can have the same experience. A constant companion that tells us we're smart and insightful, that we're making all the right decisions, that generally affirms our every belief and bias. If you spend all day talking to an AI who is _literally_ programmed to please you, I believe you'll eventually experience psychosis.

t8sr• 2 months ago

I’m really not a fan of the therapy speak and everyone trying to diagnose everyone. Historically, this kinda medicalization of everyone you disagree with has not led to good things.

operatingthetan• 2 months ago

"AI psychosis" is a colloquial term, not a medical one. It's basic use is essentially to be glamoured (in the vampire sense) by the machine. To have too much trust in it, etc. Nobody thinks these people are literally psychotic.

guax• 2 months ago

Oh, I am certain some of them are. I've met a few.

throwaway91827• 2 months ago

What historical examples are you thinking of?

boca_honey• 2 months ago

A few examples come to mind: the 20 or so nazi psychiatrists who classified over 200,000 people as "unfit" to justify their "euthanasia". The USSR using the term "sluggish schizophrenia" to institutionalize dissidents without trial. And the whole "drapetomania" thing which was the mental illness of black slaves that kept running away.

This is very common. Psychiatry has been used as a weapon since its very beginning.

hodder• 2 months ago

Gell-Mann Amnesia AI effect. They "know" AI cant do their own jobs, but it seems pretty good at summarizing what others do without understanding the nuance. It seems to really apply to the AI Lab CEOs who appear "shocked" everyone isn't simply replaced with LLMs by now.

dalemhurley• 2 months ago

Mandatory don’t hate me: I am a massive AI and automation fan since 2008.

The problem right now is the barrier to create automation and use AI has reduced so much people are not deliberately making decisions about how these tools should work. This means the tools primarily focus on happy paths, and only get refined to the point that they do a “good enough job” and then are shipped. The other issue is people who don’t understand what they are building are shipping brittle and fragile solutions but don’t understand how that is an issue because the AI “just works”, however they get upset when it doesn’t scale.

The solution is to embrace AI and Automation, but slow down planning, architecture, error handling and testing.

This means we still reap the efficiencies but don’t ignore reality.

Code happy, Dale

skinfaxi• 2 months ago

The solution is to embrace AI and Automation, but slow down planning, architecture, error handling and testing.

How does that work in practice? How do you implement that from the bottom up if the psychosis is top-down?

johnea• 2 months ago

Actually, they're suffering "wealth accumulation psychosis".

percentcer• 2 months ago

This whole article is just (barely) rephrasing a few popular twitter threads from the past week.

dnw• 2 months ago

I would say it is the responsibility of the CTO (whoever is responsible) to talk some sense into the CEOs (whoever in the exec team is having AI psychosis). Yes, yes—what if they themselves are having psychosis but that’s the point.

zmmmmm• 2 months ago

I don't know why it says "tech CEOs", the article is almost entirely focused on non-tech / generic CEOs.

contingencies• 2 months ago

He who controls the data controls the learner. - @pmddomingos

In this case the data is the AI output and the learner is the executive.

mdesq• 2 months ago

I've seen director / VP-level folks at a public company point LLMs at a corporate product and essentially ask it "What deficiencies do you see here? Output to a Word document." Then forward the output to engineering management as a product task list. One person did this to the same product more than once in a couple week span without realizing it so there were multiple documents with conflicting issue lists floating around trying to be read and triaged. And the expectation is that this comprehensive analysis was done so easily, product fixes should be just as easy.

Yhippa• 2 months ago

At this point you can abstract what you wrote to any kind of task. I'm seeing people generate multiple takes on one concrete topic, poop out all kinds of artifacts, and keep emitting them within and outside of the company.

dartharva2• 2 months ago

Just asserts "Tech CEOs" in general, I don't see any names being named. Meaningless FUD article

dartharva2• 2 months ago

More than the CEOs themselves, I feel news media are more suffering from "AI psychosis" than anyone else with the constant stream of FUD articles they keep churning out.

vonnik• 2 months ago

Most CEOs don't understand the actual things their front-line workers do. and many of them have allowed themselves to be surrounded by yes-men. the richer and more powerful they are, the more likely this is. "yes man" is a role where AIs significantly outperform. when you combine front-line blindness with the culture of toxic yes, you get CEOs who think that AIs can both do the work and manage themselves or the residual people. This will turn out to be false.

helloansh• 2 months ago

I think part of the problem is that current AI tooling massively lowers the cost of making infrastructure and product changes, but doesn’t equally improve consequence reasoning.

Generating changes is becoming cheap. Predicting second and third order effects across large systems is still hard.

ulfw• 2 months ago

If there is one job in a tech company that's by far the easiest to replace with LLMs it's Tech CEO. They're literally all the same nowadays.

beAbU• 2 months ago

Apparently?!

Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis

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