Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 383 posts

Re: Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis

#81

Post by lisplist »

SoftTalker wrote: post #61
1attice wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, living under survival pressure is good for mental health. It's what we're evolved to do. Why does it feel good to crack a tough bug, or finish a project, or win a game? It's the same achievement reward a hunter feels bagging a deer.

I know lots of people struggling to get by and I can assure you their situation doesn't improve their mental health.

Re: Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis

#82

Post by CSSer »

glaslong wrote: post #63
gopalv wrote: post #53

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 de…

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 tha…

It's practically karmic how rich this is.

Re: Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis

#83

Post by SoftTalker »

lisplist wrote: post #81
SoftTalker wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, living under survival pressure is good for mental health. It's what we're evolved to do. Why does it feel good to crack a tough bug, or finish a project, or win a game? It's the same achievement reward a hunter feels bagging a deer.

I know lots of people struggling to get by and I can assure you their situation doesn't improve their mental health.

Agreed, struggling and not ever winning is bad, I should have clarified that.

Re: Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis

#84

Post by prerok »

gopalv wrote: post #53

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 de…

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.

Re: Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis

#85

Post by WalterBright »

basch wrote: post #39
john_strinlai wrote: post #12

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. it…

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 liste…

> 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.

Re: Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis

#87

Post by fullmoon »

spprashant wrote: post #47
Brendinooo wrote: post #36

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:…

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.

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

Re: Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis

#88

Post by ModernMech »

Isamu wrote: post #13

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?

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

Re: Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis

#89

Post by joshstrange »

> 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.

Re: Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis

#90

Post by muwtyhg »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #64
gopalv wrote: post #53

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 de…

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.

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...

Post reply on HN