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AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

ludic.mataroa.blog

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Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#21

Post by Aurornis »

A1kmm wrote: post #16

> All of the AI projects we have observed as a team are failing. Every single one – we have seen 0% success in a year and a half, not only amongst projects we have been asked to participate in, but even within projects that we have observed in passing while doing totally unrelated work. That's got to be hyperbole, which blows out their credibility. They chose to say 'AI' rather than, for example, LLM, or Transformer…

If you read the footnote, they follow up to say they've rejected 100% of the AI projects brought to them.

Go to their home page and one of their consulting selling points is recovering struggling projects.

One of their front-page selling points is that they use "ancient techniques" from books written prior to the year 2000, because presumably everything newer than that is bad?

> For non-executive management who might be struggling to deliver things that feel beyond their control, we have ancient techniques (see: books written between 1986 and 1999) to turn your team into the envy of the organisation, and we can drop in directly to get your team the resources it needs to save a struggling project.

This is entirely a selection bias issue that they've created for themselves: Advertise a consulting service for saving failing projects to companies that don't have internal expertise to handle it, then write blog posts that 100% of the projects you see are failing. Also refuse to help them, to guarantee they can't be converted to successful projects to keep the success number at 0%.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#22

Post by Aurornis »

azakai wrote: post #3

> All of the AI projects we have observed as a team are failing. Every single one – we have seen 0% success in a year and a half, What is an "AI project"? The post doesn't define it. Is it writing some software from scratch? Using an LLM chatbot by non-coders, either internally or externally? Or something else entirely? Some examples would really help.

They run a consulting company called "Hermit Tech". Their websites has an olde style font.

They boast about "ancient techniques" from books written prior to the year 2000

> For non-executive management who might be struggling to deliver things that feel beyond their control, we have ancient techniques (see: books written between 1986 and 1999) to turn your team into the envy of the organisation, and we can drop in directly to get your team the resources it needs to save a struggling project.

So yeah, of course these people hate AI and everything about it.

No serious company is reaching out to these people for help with their AI project.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#23

Post by teravor »

Aurornis wrote: post #21
A1kmm wrote: post #16

> All of the AI projects we have observed as a team are failing. Every single one – we have seen 0% success in a year and a half, not only amongst projects we have been asked to participate in, but even within projects that we have observed in passing while doing totally unrelated work. That's got to be hyperbole, which blows out their credibility. They chose to say 'AI' rather than, for example, LLM, or Transformer…

If you read the footnote, they follow up to say they've rejected 100% of the AI projects brought to them. Go to their home page and one of their consulting selling points is recovering struggling projects. One of their front-page selling points is that they use "ancient techniques" from books written prior to the year 2000, because presumably everything newer than that is bad? > For non-executive management who might…

it's not surprising as LLM's will generally fail you when you yourself don't know what you want. it's surprising how many people and organizations just blunder around scribbling code without clear goals in mind - for such people LLM's are a net negative as they will just end up with even more scribbles and no hope to make sense of it all.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#24

Post by j45 »

A1kmm wrote: post #16

> All of the AI projects we have observed as a team are failing. Every single one – we have seen 0% success in a year and a half, not only amongst projects we have been asked to participate in, but even within projects that we have observed in passing while doing totally unrelated work. That's got to be hyperbole, which blows out their credibility. They chose to say 'AI' rather than, for example, LLM, or Transformer…

I would love to learn about and from the details of their projects.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#25

Post by dash2 »

> Checking out a parallel copy of our Go repository and telling the AI to rewrite the whole thing in Zig while I work on something else just so I can keep my job.

> Was it just sales fluff? The answer was a lot more interesting.... Executives at their customers were saying absurd things about achieving 100x productivity, and this meant that if any executive at the vendor said that these gains were not plausible, it would undermine the credibility of the customer’s executive, be perceived as an attack (or heresy), and possibly result in an enterprise contract cancellation.

A lot of excellent anecdotes here.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#26

Post by simonw »

This is excellent.

> Employees don’t use internal chatbots because companies tend to have low-quality documentation and an LLM is not psychic – it can only know things that have been written down and made accessible.

Then later:

> In one extreme case, I have seen an executive confess that they had never even used ChatGPT or any AI tool in their life, immediately after producing a technical strategy for an organisation with $2B+ in revenue which was entirely centered around AI.

And:

> In fact, we have been forced to opt out of every sale where the lead has expressed anything beyond the most fleeting curiosity in the use of AI in their business. I don’t mean that we’ve heard that they’re interested in AI and elected to drop the contract on moral grounds. I mean that, over the course of the engagement, these people have exhibited a pattern of behavior that has made it near-impossible to sell to them without incurring reputational and legal risk, and are furthermore crafting management environments that I can only describe as cultish, ineffective, and “please dear God, do not let it be on earth as it is on LinkedIn”.

And:

> with one client, we uncovered that staff were totally unaware they had been given licenses for AI tooling, which cast into doubt all productivity claims.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#27

Post by BobbyTables2 »

teravor wrote: post #23
Aurornis wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you read the footnote, they follow up to say they've rejected 100% of the AI projects brought to them. Go to their home page and one of their consulting selling points is recovering struggling projects. One of their front-page selling points is that they use "ancient techniques" from books written prior to the year 2000, because presumably everything newer than that is bad? > For non-executive management who might…

it's not surprising as LLM's will generally fail you when you yourself don't know what you want. it's surprising how many people and organizations just blunder around scribbling code without clear goals in mind - for such people LLM's are a net negative as they will just end up with even more scribbles and no hope to make sense of it all.

Cheaper than consultants!

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#28

Post by edg5000 »

slopinthebag wrote: post #7

The AI mania has been really fascinating to witness because on the surface it’s surprising that so many otherwise intelligent people have fallen into it. But I suppose intelligence as a concept is multifaceted and doesn’t include wisdom. I also wonder if it has to do with personality, where the people whose personality best suits leadership roles are more susceptible to this psychosis. I think there is also an archet…

It's a very interesting technology, so it leaves some shockwaves while it's impacting the world. Over time this will be absorbed and the insanity will die out, but it's quite transformative, just like cars and the internet were (to name a few).

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#29

Post by simonw »

A1kmm wrote: post #16

> All of the AI projects we have observed as a team are failing. Every single one – we have seen 0% success in a year and a half, not only amongst projects we have been asked to participate in, but even within projects that we have observed in passing while doing totally unrelated work. That's got to be hyperbole, which blows out their credibility. They chose to say 'AI' rather than, for example, LLM, or Transformer…

I think there's a big difference between individual employees using AI tools to boost their productivity - with things like Claude Code and Codex - and "AI projects" where companies build custom software on top of LLMs.

The former is easy to get right. Any software engineer (at least provided they aren't actively resisting the technology )can get useful results out of Claude Code these days.

The latter is really hard. LLMs are a strange beast to build software on, and most of the obvious projects - like the internal chatbots described in this article - are easy to have over-promise and under-deliver.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#30

Post by prodigycorp »

listic wrote: post #12
jdlshore wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their company does data projects. That plus context makes me think they’re talking about internal work process automation type of work, although it also seems like they’re talking about conversational interfaces (chatbots). I completely buy the “emperor’s new clothes” argument for work process automation. I’m surprised they don’t address AI-assisted engineering, which seems to be going positively for a lot of folks (…

Do yo have links handy for AI-assisted engineering going positively? The case I have on my mind of it going negatively is this recent Ford case [1] It's not that I believe it couldn't go positively, of course. [1] Ford rehires human engineers after AI fails to match quality checks https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgrkd41n2v9o

The Ford case is not about AI coding. It's about computer vision processes that went wrong. This was less about AI and more about Ford being dumb.
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