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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

#911
post #538

I’m at a FAANG and we have $300/day token quota. Personally I don’t use that much of it but management is pushing really hard for it. “the quota has been raised for a reason, use it”. Any task: “have you tried working on it with Claude?”. Every meeting “now engineer x and y will show you what he did with AI”. It’s not all useless but most of the days I think I would be more productive if some processes were streamlin…

300 a day?? 7K dollars a month? No wonder they need to lay people off!

At Nvidia, we have no limit for Anthropic or Open AI models (for now) and are heavily encouraged to use them as much as possible.

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

#912
post #595

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also at a FAANG here. Surprised you don't manage to use $300 in a whole day. It's almost trivial to productively use that much in under an hour. Leadership is not being dumb, at least on this topic. If your token usage is that low, you just aren't using AI that much (even if you think you are.)

How are you able to get to $300/hr productively? (I’m assuming this isn’t fast mode tax).

not hard, massive elo stuff. every decision point needs to think up and implement 25 ideas and then rank them.

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

#913
post #538

I’m at a FAANG and we have $300/day token quota. Personally I don’t use that much of it but management is pushing really hard for it. “the quota has been raised for a reason, use it”. Any task: “have you tried working on it with Claude?”. Every meeting “now engineer x and y will show you what he did with AI”. It’s not all useless but most of the days I think I would be more productive if some processes were streamlin…

That’s funny I’ve been doing that too Trying to crank out all the tools I never had time to build because I think we’re going to get cut off eventually

This seems seductive, but how do you get past the wall of "fixing XYZ or adding convenience ABC isn't on our pre-planned roadmap" so you can't get buy in from people who have to sign-off or deploy stuff?

Maybe that type of awkwardness is specific to my firm, but that's sort of what killed my drive to try to do that. We used to have one day every second week for that sort of work, but since it was scattered around, the tasks ended up disappearing-- nobody reviewed them and they didn't get merged.

So now they're trying to do a week-long internal hackathon to recover that vision, but I feel like that's going to produce a handful of big-bang ideas and not the 25 tiny tools that would actually streamline things.

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

#914
Very general comment/sentiment/observation here for me personally is that about a year or two ago, everyone asked me ‘so ..where is the ai’. Nowadays it seems that this sentiment is already on its way out and I see more and more ‘no ai used’ statements and non-ai workshops popping up. I am in a weird place between art, technology and ecology so I get the best and worst of these worlds. But yeah, I feel the hype cycle is coming to an end in my personal bubble. I never cared or feared ai, I mainly fear the mania around it. Luckily I am in a position where I can afford to just observe. Sure I have used AI and it helped me a lot, mainly to get projects going when I am exhausted/stressed.

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

#915
I believe it. I've seen the cyber team in my org bend every rule just to get access to frontier security models.

Everyone has become like petulant children. Senior leaders want access to every shiny tool (CoWork/Codex/etc) that has some buzz around it. No one seems to care about the cost or whether we are actually realising benefits.

It's sheer madness, and you can't push back. I think AI can significantly help people be more productive, and I can see a future where they safely take on more autonomy. But we are far from that world.

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

#916
I’m at a large Fortune 500 company. On a recent call, a mandate came from the CEO himself - “we have to use more agentic AI”.

And I found it really funny, because for what? Use it for what? It’s a tool. Imagine a guy coming down to a construction site where everything is progressing fine and saying “We need to use more screwdrivers”.

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

#917

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe this is what will turn software engineering into an Engineering field. Oh man, I think you may have touched the third rail here. My first job out of high school was as an AutoCAD/network admin at a large Civil & Structural firm. I later got further into tech, but after my initial experience with real Engineering, "software engineering" always made my eyes roll. Without real enforced standards, without consequ…

Eh writing software for healthcare, or aircraft or self driving cars is more rigorous than an EE working on industrial lighting or toys. Im sure for the most part, engineers in physical space deal with the same kind of tradeoffs software engineers make, where you try your best based on industry standards, personal past experiences without some way to prove what youve done is right

> Eh writing software for healthcare, or aircraft or self driving cars is more rigorous than an EE working on industrial lighting or toys.

That’s a relatively small field within the software industry.

Most of the work being done (adding new fields to CRUD apps etc) is glorified clerical work, where the people doing it are rightfully fearful of being automated out of existence by AI.

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

#918
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn’t think just offloading your thinking to AI was AI psychosis. To me AI psychosis is the handful of friends I’ve had who have done things like have a full on mourning session when a model updates because they lost a friend/lover, the one guy who won’t speak to his family directly but has them talk to ChatGPT first and then has ChatGPT generate his response, or the two who are confident that they have discovered…

I'm going directly to the point here: those people have clearly mental issues that would and probably did already show in the past without AI as well.

I agree that these people had mental health issues. I think if they got to billionaire level and were surrounded by yes men they would have the same reaction.

The difference nowadays is you can get the same surrounded by yes men experience for only 20 dollars a month so a lot more of the people who are primed for this sort of breakdown are now being exposed to it due to the decrease in cost.

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

#920

Recently I had a request come through to allow finance analysts to vibe code their apps. During a discussion one of the finance managers let the cat out of the bag. Turns out our CFO had met fellow CFOs at a get together. They talked about how each of them were using AI. Our CFO was lagging behind and felt that we need to "accelerate" our usage of AI. He wants to push it just because he lost a bragging contest.

> He wants to push it just because he lost a bragging contest.

That is an uncharitable interpretation, IMO.

The CFO heard of a novel technique used by his peers in other companies, and they reported good results. He wants to try it within his organization too. As an executive, he is paid to (among other things) keep abreast of such developments in the industry and ensure that the organization he is leading is not caught flat footed in the market.

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