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I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

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Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#121

Post by andybak »

elktown wrote: post #106
mitchellh wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct. I use AI a ton and I'm having more fun every day than I ever did before thanks to it (on average, highs are higher, lows are lower). Your characterization is all very accurate. Thank you. Here's some other topics I've written on it: - https://mitchellh.com/writing/my-ai-adoption-journey - https://mitchellh.com/writing/building-block-economy - https://mitchellh.com/writing/simdutf-no-libcxx (complex change th…

I thinking that it’s quite a different experience going all Jackson Pollock with AI in your own studio on your own terms, compared to the sorry state of affairs of having 100s of Pollocks throwing paint around wildly within a corp to meet a paint quota.

I very much like this metaphor.

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#122

Post by mvanbaak »

sph wrote: post #80
nialse wrote: post #8

I'm starting to long for the age after AI. When the generative euphoria has settled and all outputs are formally verified based on exquisite architectures and standards.

> When [...] all outputs are formally verified based on exquisite architectures and standards and we all live in a green utopia of flying cars and peace upon the world.

if all the resources spent in useless wars were poured into working towards this goal, we would be there for some time already

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#123

Post by throw310822 »

caconym_ wrote: post #30
woeirua wrote: post #17

This doesn’t constitute AI psychosis. His argument is that we need to retain understanding of the systems we use, but there’s no compelling argument as to why that is the case. (I get that people are going to be offended by that statement, but agents are already better than the average software engineer. I don’t see why we need to fight this, except for economic insecurity caused by mass layoffs.) It all just feels l…

I am sure you will feel that this is missing the point of your analogy, but we would not have gotten very far with automobiles if we didn't know how they worked.

You are breaking the analogy because automobiles are machines for transportation, and understanding them is important to make them move. LLMs are machines to understand, and well, if they do the understanding you don't need to.

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#124

Post by leoc »

zmmmmm wrote: post #113

I think AI rescue consulting is going to be come a significant mode of high value consulting, similar to specialists who come in to try and deal with a security breach or do data recovery. Purely AI written systems will scale to a point of complexity that no human can ever understand and the defect close rate will taper down and the token burn per defect rate scale up and eventually AI changes will cause on average m…

> Purely AI written systems will scale to a point of complexity that no human can ever understand and the defect close rate will taper down and the token burn per defect rate scale up and eventually AI changes will cause on average more defects than they close and the whole system will be unstable.

Wow, it’s true, AI really is set to match human performance on large, complex software systems! ;)

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#125

Post by LogicFailsMe »

I shut down AI Agent fanatics on the regular. But chop one head off there and two take its place. And I say that as someone working with Claude and Codex daily. While they are both incredibly good at clearly described and defined atomic tasks, application scope makes them lose their minds and the slop ensues.

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#126

Post by blipvert »

zmmmmm wrote: post #113

I think AI rescue consulting is going to be come a significant mode of high value consulting, similar to specialists who come in to try and deal with a security breach or do data recovery. Purely AI written systems will scale to a point of complexity that no human can ever understand and the defect close rate will taper down and the token burn per defect rate scale up and eventually AI changes will cause on average m…

Reminds me of the quote in the original Westworld movie:

“ These are highly complicated pieces of equipment… almost as complicated as living organisms.

In some cases, they’ve been designed by other computers.

We don’t know exactly how they work.”

Now how did that work out ;-)

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#127

Post by kristjansson »

impulser_ wrote: post #48

I'm pretty sure he's talking about companies and people outsourcing their decision making and thinking to AI and not really about using AI itself. I don't think using AI to write code is AI psychosis or bad at all, but if you just prompt the AI and believe what it tell you then you have AI psychosis. You see this a lot with financial people and VC on twitter. They literally post screenshots of ChatGPT as their thinki…

> if you just prompt the AI and believe what it tell you then you have AI psychosis

This is the right definition. LLM outputs have undefined truth value. They’re mechanized Frankfurtian Bullshiters. Which can be valuable! If you have the tools or taste to filter the things that happen to be true from the rest of the dross.

However! We need a nicer word for it. Suggesting someone has “AI psychosis” feels a bit too impolitic.

Maybe we reclaim “toked out” from our misspent youths?

e.g. “This piece feels a little toked out. Let’s verify a few of Claude’s claims”

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#128

Post by Brian_K_White »

uuyy wrote: post #118
zmmmmm wrote: post #113

I think AI rescue consulting is going to be come a significant mode of high value consulting, similar to specialists who come in to try and deal with a security breach or do data recovery. Purely AI written systems will scale to a point of complexity that no human can ever understand and the defect close rate will taper down and the token burn per defect rate scale up and eventually AI changes will cause on average m…

AI janitors

It's kind of like producing code is becoming more like farming.

We didn't create the dna we rely on to produce food and lumber, we just set up the conditions and hope the process produces something we want instead of deleting all the bannannas.

Farming is a fine an honorable and valuable function for society, but I have no interest in being a farmer. I build things, I don't plant seeds and pray to the gods and hope they grow into something I want.

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#129

Post by orev »

zmmmmm wrote: post #113

I think AI rescue consulting is going to be come a significant mode of high value consulting, similar to specialists who come in to try and deal with a security breach or do data recovery. Purely AI written systems will scale to a point of complexity that no human can ever understand and the defect close rate will taper down and the token burn per defect rate scale up and eventually AI changes will cause on average m…

As the models keep improving, wouldn’t you be able to task a newer AI to “clean up this mess”?
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