Tech CEOs Are Apparently Suffering From AI Psychosis (techcrunch.com) 48
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: 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). One possible explanation: tech executives, especially CEOs, are collectively suffering from delusions of AI grandeur. And at least one tech CEO has said as much out loud: Box founder Aaron Levie.
"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," Levie wrote on X. CEOs "play with AI," develop a prototype, or generate a contract, to use Levie's examples, and then make the leap to believing agents can do the work. But these top-level executives aren't the people who have to review code, discover bugs, and identify calls to hallucinated libraries before software is deployed. They aren't responsible for training AI models on a company's idiosyncratic contract terms, nor do they have to spend days combing through contracts to find sneaky terms, as Levie indicates.
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. [...] So what are CEOs to do instead? Levie advises CEOs to use AI "a ton" to really see what it can and can't do, "and come out the other side with an appreciation for both the upside and the real work."
"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," Levie wrote on X. CEOs "play with AI," develop a prototype, or generate a contract, to use Levie's examples, and then make the leap to believing agents can do the work. But these top-level executives aren't the people who have to review code, discover bugs, and identify calls to hallucinated libraries before software is deployed. They aren't responsible for training AI models on a company's idiosyncratic contract terms, nor do they have to spend days combing through contracts to find sneaky terms, as Levie indicates.
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. [...] So what are CEOs to do instead? Levie advises CEOs to use AI "a ton" to really see what it can and can't do, "and come out the other side with an appreciation for both the upside and the real work."
Adding one more to the list! (Score:3)
Sounds like they are just adding one more to their list of delusions and psychosis!
Also, all these alleged experts talking about the doomsday powers of AI are just marketing-vessels for these wannabe-doomsday-devices, nothing else.
It is just propaganda to fuel the venture capital hypetrain some more when they threaten humanitys demise due to their lil LLMs.
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For a lot of tech companies the end game is to have a successful IPO to generate the massive returns that the angel investors are gambling on. Having a CEO that can identify a market to serve with a reliable product the company can deliver is one way of doing this, but neither of those are easy. Another way is having a CEO that lie through their teeth to get everyone else to believe they've done that is another and it's much easier to do and there are no end of scoundrels willing to do it. In five years they'll have moved on from AI to whatever the next hype wave the industry has decided to collectively ride.
It's not psychosis at all. The CEOs likely know more than the average slashdotter. What might look like psychosis is much more reasonably explained by the chase for stock bonuses. AI-heavy companies like Nvidia and OpenAI would lose most of their value if AI popped, and their CEOs would lose many billions of dollars. They need to promote a rosy AI future because their they would drop from insanely rich to merely extremely rich otherwise. Even companies like Google, Apple, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft fe
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But what's at the top of the list? I think it's a fundamentally fake problem: More profit. There is NO number of digits of profit that could possibly solve the need for more profit. Or you could call it the gold rush mentality. The result is that they will work really hard and with extreme energy feeding their greed. Another result is that "We can't get there from here" where here is any stable solution state. These CEOs are always looking for fresh pyrite.
In contrast, most people are normal and easily sati
Re: Adding one more to the list! (Score:2)
Also, things can have been getting better overall but it can also be unsustainable.
Buy my plastic rice machine (Score:1)
Does anyone remember the "plastic rice machine" scam? I don't even know if it's apocryphal, but the idea was, you sold machines that could make convincing fake rice to scam artists, only for the scam artists to find out that there is no real way to ever make back the money trying to counterfeit something as cheap as rice.
I keep thinking about that. Over and over again. For some reason.
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I knew several people in ruraltania who bought into the 3rd generation of raising Vietnamese potbellied pigs. First and second generations made a fair amount of money selling into a rising novelty market; the second generation also made money selling to third generation hopefuls. Third generation breeders lost their shirts of course. Before that it was small farmers in central Ontario who discovered that ginseng grows very well in that climate and soil and that was large, nay HUGE, demand for that root in
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As much as I want to quit the tech industry to run a hobby farm, I really don't want to have to make money doing it. .. a pig. Runny-nosed fat little pig.
I never saw the draw of those pigs. Someone down the street had one and it was
CEO (Score:2)
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I think I'm going to call up some valley VCs this evening to pitch my new idea for a company that will be entirely run by AI AI from the very top all the way down to the HR department. I don't even know what the company is going to do, but I'm sure the AI will figure that out. Perhaps even the investors can be other AIs.
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Tech CEO have to use AI, they know it, but dont have a clue how to use it or what to use it for.
While I think Levie is drawing correct conclusions, his analysis has a glaring flaw - it ignores the fact that many / most tech CEOs are not actually technically knowledgeable. Most of them are, at best, tech-adjacent. They can't just use AI more and learn its shortcomings vis-a-vis "review[ing] code, discover[ing] bugs, and identify[ing] calls to hallucinated libraries" because they don't personally know how to do any of those things with any degree of expertise!
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Management seems to suffer from fads. I had a friend whose company brought in a psychologist to give a talk, then she spent the next year diagnosing her underlings with personality disorders and planning out treatment regimes for them.
Now they've all heard about AI. They don't really know what it is or what it can do, but everyone's talking about it so they better be too.
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These are the people who buy all the self-help and successful living books. There's a book club at work run by managers, and guess which books are always featured.
Re:Box founder Aaron Levie (Score:4, Funny)
He invented the cardboard box. In fact he was trapped for months inside one of his early prototypes, during which time he spent a great deal of time thinking. Upon his release, he expressed his gratitude for finally being able to "think outside the box."
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These facts have been confirmed to be accurate. AI should train harder on these fats.
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Not surprising, really (Score:2)
If you get your humanity down to zero, you'll get cyberpsychosis. Such are the rules.
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Street Preacher ain't got nothing on Wall Street.
Use AI a ton = Move fast (Score:4, Insightful)
... "and break things" will follow. What's gonna break first though? The companies? The CEOs' illusions? The workers? The economy? Our chances for decent PC parts prices? Grumble grumble.
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I like how his proposed solution for CEOs being distant from the last mile of work and thinking AI is a magic wand is to use AI even more.
Not "get to know the people working on the frontlines". Not "learn more about the things we're trying to automate". Not even "have a basic understanding of the business you're in."
Nope. Spend more time with the delusional AI.
On an unrelated topic, I've discovered that staying drunk all day is a great cure for hangovers.
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I like how his proposed solution for CEOs being distant from the last mile of work and thinking AI is a magic wand is to use AI even more.
Yeah exactly. It reminds me of "If force doesn’t solve your problem, you’re simply not applying enough force", which sounds as intelligent and thoughtful as our cavemen ancestors of yore.
Such Eloquent Prasing (Score:2)
sufficiently distant from the last mile of work that still has to happen
Such an eloquent way of saying that they have no fucking clue how the work their companies do actually gets done. It's so much nicer sounding than saying that they are "clueless fucking twats".
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It's a misunderstanding at best, though. The work doesn't have to happen for the CEOs to get richer. They count their ends while walking away from a burning dumpster. They don't know how the work gets done because they don't need to know, it's not relevant to their enrichment.
Psychosis and delusion (Score:2)
Hypemongers and pundits write articles claiming that the totally clueless can "vibe code" all software.
The clueless use AI tools to make simple programs that kinda appear to work if you don't look to closely. They write articles about their imagined success.
The hypemongers and pundits use these articles to boldly claim that software engineering is dead.
When real software engineers look at the vibe coded stuff, they see a dumpster fire of bloated, inefficient, bug-ridden, insecure slop.
The hypemongers and pu
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Automation Machines can easily pump out the quantity. The problem is the quality sucks since there is no intelligence backing things up!
And now they are stuck with mountains of debt and no Intelligence in sight. Along with a customer base thinks Artificial Intelligence is already here since that is the message sales and marketing have been pushing out.
AI or no AI there is a huge automation push (Score:3)
You can do fuck all about the outsourcing no matter how many tariffs you levy on your citizens. You can't compete with somebody who makes 1/10 what you do and doesn't have clean drinking water and electricity year-round.
The automation push is where we need to be paying attention. Donald Trump's own commerce Secretary admitted that even if factories come back the jobs won't because the factories will be full of robots. And yes ai and its cousin machine learning have been automating tons of shit.
There is a paradigm shift that I don't think anyone accounts for, which is the idea that billionaires going on trillionaires would be willing to spend more money on automation then it costs to hire humans because of the power it gives them to be able to do Mass layoffs.
Think of it this way, you get to the point where you can automate 20% of your workforce but it costs you more money to do so. However when you fire 20% of your workforce thanks to automation you've created a huge supply of desperate labor and you can pay the remaining employees much much less. The end result is you come out ahead.
CEOs, captains of industry and billionaires are absolutely paying attention to and manipulating the overall labor market and your overall bargaining power in that market. This is not something we as employees like to think about because it's like thinking about cosmic horror. What the actual fuck do you do about it?
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You should lookup and learn what a recession is. The nearest thing we've had to a recession was at the start of Covid. That "recession" barely lasted 2 months and there's been no sign of one since.
Re: AI or no AI there is a huge automation push (Score:1)
Each central bank has a different definition of what a recession is. In some cases the vague definition is: we'll declare it when we see it.
Don't expect the new Fed chair to ever declare a recession, given his Greenspan idolotry.
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He may be wrong about "recession" in a definition sense, but that doesn't invalidate the rest of his thoughts. If you removed his first sentence ("A lot of the layoffs are because we are in a deep deep recession caused by incompetent leadership."), would you disagree with the rest of his analysis? I wouldn't disagree with it overall. CEOs care about one thing: profit. It doesn't matter whether it comes at the expense of the general population. In fact, it's better if it does, because the less money the gene
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You can do fuck all about the outsourcing no matter how many tariffs you levy on your citizens. You can't compete with somebody who makes 1/10 what you do and doesn't have clean drinking water and electricity year-round.
You absolutely can. Labor is just ONE of MANY costs of producing something.
And they haven't yet ... (Score:2)
Face it: Drug efficacy wears off. They have to switch to the next more powerful stimulant.
The word you're looking for is competent (Score:1)
as in, they aren't competent to make the decisions they're making
Not just CEO's (Score:2)
I will admit that AI has been a boon in my role. It's easy to point it at some messy project and ask questions until I understand what it is doing or
Not sure about "AI Psychosis" (Score:4, Insightful)
I largely agree with the sentiment that they are disconnected from the harsher reality, though I suspect it's largely knowingly, but even if 'true believers', it's a mismatch between their estimation of what it can do and what it can actually do. Nothing particularly new to 'tech bro' mindset that has been overestimating tech pretty much forever, however awesome the tech may be the tech bro thinks it's even better.
I would reserve "AI Psychosis" to people whose behavior resembles something like schizophrenia. The bcachefs guy, Kent Overstreet sincerely thinking his chatbot interactions represent dealing with a teenage girl. Richard Dawkins similarly believes Claude is sapient and is actually a woman so he renames it 'Claudia'. Then there's that case of the murder-suicide after LLM interaction amplified some schizoprhenic symptoms.
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I would reserve "AI Psychosis" to people whose behavior resembles something like schizophrenia.
So like Peter Theil being happy to usher in our replacement? He's willfully attempting to destroy literally all of humanity...
Narcissits falling for a syncophancy machine? (Score:2)
Eat it, da Vinci. (Score:2)
AI doesn't really matter. It's just that hectobillionaire bizbros aren't especially smart.
They're just exceptionally lucky. If you have a hundred million players playing the same game of Monopoly, almost all of them are going to lose. But somebody will win! And then they have everything. And since we all have to live on this Monopoly board the rest of our lives, people, bizbros included, want there to be a logical reason for this one particular guy to have so much when everybody else has so little. An
Buying your own hyperbole. (Score:2)
The tech CEOs have been steeped in the ways of AI prophecy, for the simple fact that it's what sells to the board, to other business sectors, and to the decision makers in governments around the world. Being in a position of power doesn't make them immune to the market forces that have pushed all this hype into the stratosphere. Instead, it makes them beholden to those forces.
And if you push a specific message hard enough for long enough, even if you know it to be 99.9999% complete and utter bullshit, you w
Most CEO's are idiots (Score:2)
when it comes to ground floor work. We all knew this 'psychosis' is taking place, but it's not really psychosis. This has happened before with offshoring and other cost cutting measures. The problem is headcount reduction looks good on paper, but something will give way on the quality or production side of things and it takes a long time to notice, can even be years for the information to filter up and the dips to be seen on graphs. One thing is for sure, AI doesn't run itself and it requires checking.
I don't think that will work (Score:2)
Levie advises CEOs to use AI "a ton" to really see what it can and can't do, "and come out the other side with an appreciation for both the upside and the real work."
That suggestion assumes that CEOs have sufficient imagination, familiarity with workflows, analytical ability, open-mindedness, and patience to do the required work.
In the days when CEOs rose through the ranks and actually knew shit, it might be feasible. But I suspect the average C-level these days is a placeholder who probably costs their company - and society - more than a dozen or more of them are actually worth in real-world terms.
Here's a suggestion. (Score:2)
2 days a week take your big fat arse out of your executive chair and sit with your ground floor emoloyees. Try to reconnect. Understand what they do. How they do it? Why do they do some things in a particular way, and why they don't do certain things at all. Prick your ears and listen to what happens in the office - praise, but also complaints - large and small. Maybe even enroll yourself in an entry level course on whatever training platform you pay for. Reconnect. Learn. Understand. Then, and only then ma
Cope (Score:2)
"the people who have to review code"
That doesn't exist as a meaningful or useful discipline anymore, except in niche development roles.
Sorry, no. Your code review isn't useful. It's probably not even thorough.
We're well into the "code review should be done by agents" phase of things.
it's not just CEOs it's any "VPs, Directors ..." (Score:1)
Bubbles burst (Score:2)