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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

#51

Post by zasz »

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…

Yeah, the "ancient techniques" thing is a joke.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#52

Post by lioeters »

zkmon wrote: post #18

You are basically calling out the fact that the Emperor has no clothes. Many said this before. While it is a true statement, it is not going to help. Because, as you rightly said, it is a mania - like the tulip mania of 17th century or the manias of many forms today. The mania continues to evolve and flourish through it's peak and then go down. For that matter, there is hardly anything that is not a mania. Think of a…

This mania can also be called "herd behavior" or "crowd psychology". There was that book a while ago about the intelligence of crowds, but far more common is the stupidity and insanity of crowds. Business and politics are mainly driven by it, but the tech industry routinely falls to hype, trends, and decades-long mistakes that seem obvious in hindsight.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#53

Post by MagicMoonlight »

darth_avocado wrote: post #44
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…

> And who hasn't seen productivity gains from more established AI technology You have to be very careful about claiming productivity gains. There may have been some instances of gains in a specific part of a workflow but does it slow down others or result in overall gains is yet to be empirically measured and validated. We’re seeing metrics like more lines of code, better unit tests, documentation, faster PRs etc. bu…

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Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#54

Post by jdlshore »

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

As @simonw said, the Ford example isn’t a good one.

As for AI-assisted engineering going well, I think the jury is still out. Here on HN and with the engineers I know, you see people claiming multiples of productivity on coding tasks. But you also see people complaining about drowning in slop PRs.

I think there’s a lot of confounding factors to these reports. The type of work matters a lot: bug fixing good, prototyping good, big legacy codebases not so much, but maybe good for increased understanding. The type of automation matters: aggressive autocomplete good, vibe coding bad, dark factory (vibe coding with fancy harnesses and auto-“correcting” eval loops) questionable.

And then finally, the perennial mistake our industry makes, which is to value speed of creation over maintenance costs. Personally, I think this is where AI-assisted engineering is going to fall down really hard, but the jury’s still out on that one.

Anyway, there’s a really big spread in experiences with AI, that I think chalk up more to all this context rather than religion and belief. OP didn’t address it at all, which I think is a big gap in their essay, but I do think think they describe the executive-level mania pretty well.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#55

Post by jdlshore »

skydhash wrote: post #9
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 (…

> I disagree about the success of chatbots, if the problem is narrowly-defined and chosen properly. If you can narrow the problem down, then you could design a much better interface for it than a text box and free form text (unless that's the better solution). As for as AI assisted engineering goes, the thing is that after some time with a project, you already have much of the workflows and routines nailed down as sc…

> If you can narrow the problem down, then you could design a much better interface for it than a text box and free form text (unless that's the better solution).

Yes, I agree, in that the chatbot we built probably would have worked just as well with a traditional UI, and would have been done a lot faster. But it would have been a lot less sexy (actually important for the bottom line!) and there are future directions that could take advantage of the conversational interface that’s potentially better than a traditional UI.

On the down side, good chatbots are really frikkin difficult to write. These things (LLMs) are not reliable at scale. The basic functionality came together in weeks. Getting it to behave consistently and obey guardrails took months, and even then we had to accept a low level of failed conversations.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#57

Post by K0balt »

Aurornis wrote: post #40
Retric wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s some selection bias involved especially based on their marking, but you’re misreading what they are saying. > even within projects that we have observed in passing while doing totally unrelated work. The kind of companies with failing projects seem to be very bad at using AI. That’s different from the normal mix of success and failures at most large companies.

Companies with projects that are doing well don't try to hire consultants who specialized in saving failing projects. No company with a good AI strategy is going to go to the Hermit Tech website where text written in Ye Olde Font explains that they'll use ancient techniques from the 80s and 90s to make your software work and thinks, "These are the right people for our AI job!" These people are trying to carve out a n…

I think you are right on target. I’ve seen this pattern:

Company does x. X sucks, and is largely derided as being a bad idea, but it’s important-employee-bobs baby. No one wants to be the guy that tells bob that x is killing the company in some small or large way, because bob can get them fired or is protected by someone who can, so you hire consultants xyz who specialize in “transforming productivity through x management” and they come in and “transform” x into something less lovecraftian, or just explain why it’s bad in a way that makes bob look like a genius.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#58

Post by ogvorbin »

LOCNE55 wrote: post #13

This post feels like its correct but also doesn't align with my own personal usage of claude for writing advanced sql and python code. I haven't with my own eyes seen an AI chatbot actually deliver a user experience that lets them query data with natural language BUT I have personally experienced writing extremely advanced queries using natural language and it is absolutely able to get close to (by my estimate) 80-90…

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Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#59

Post by mafro »

The author doesn't distinguish whether these projects failed because of technology and execution, or failed because product market-fit. They simply blame AI being involved.

AI will only help if you use rapid iteration to cheaply/quickly produce ideas. All the normal project failure modes still exist.. Blaming AI because AI is dumb.

I only read up to point 3 because the hyperbole and frothing fervour was overwhelming.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#60

Post by [deleted] »

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…

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