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Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis

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Re: Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis

#141

Post by g8oz »

WalterBright wrote: post #106
lisplist wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe slightly unrelated, but I've done a lot of road trips throughout the US, and there is so much land that is used unproductively, it's really incredible. Land that could be used for energy, food, or housing, just sitting empty or with abandoned structures. Imagine if we just paid people to coat their properties in solar panels - throw them on your roof, lawn, wherever you have the space. We could drive energy pri…

> We could drive energy prices down to nothing. Not when you're paying people to coat their properties in solar panels. As you noted, that would cost plenty. Solar panels also degrade over time. By the time the "free" electricity has paid for the installation, you'll need to replace it.

>>By the time the "free" electricity has paid for the installation, you'll need to replace it.

You are going to have to back this up with credible citations. Otherwise it sounds like skepticism from 2008.

Re: Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis

#142

Post by arjie »

dd8601fn wrote: post #115
prerok wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 knowl…

Maybe someone knows, but it seems like the model used to be called the model, and the thing using a model (handling prompts and context and tool calling and feeding the model) used to be called the agent. Are we now calling the model the agent and the agent the harness?

The nomenclature that makes sense for me is that the agent is the combination of the harness and the model. The model provides text-completion, the harness provides the loop around it, and the agent is the full structure of both.

However, nomenclature evolves over time. I recall (perhaps falsely) that The Cloud was specifically a term for elastic on-demand provider-managed compute/storage/network. Over time, it came to mean many other things. e.g. Salesforce Data Cloud.

I imagine if you step away from this for a year and come back, an agent will be something entirely different, perhaps a robotic horse, and a harness will be your saddle on the horse. Who knows?

Re: Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis

#143

Post by abalashov »

MattRogish wrote: post #121
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…

Also, this is why investors and CEOs are so in love with "LLMs are the route to AGI!" When some rich/powerful person says "I have to go to Davos, figure it out" their workers know so much context that no LLM is going to ever be able to incorporate, because it isn't written down and is idiosyncratic. (Really, though, the assistant will just say "you're going to Davos next week, the helicopter will pick you up at 3p on…

Sounds like an insufficiency of prompting depth to me!

Re: Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis

#144

Post by slfnflctd »

cyberax wrote: post #73
spprashant wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I saw that psychosis happening in real time with a coworker. It absolutely is a real phenomenon. After a while, he started presenting ChatGPT's replies as the absolute truth. I don't think there ever has been something that can _answer_ you back and reinforce your delusion. This is a new thing.

As a longtime student of the human condition, it is so obvious to me that this is real, has been happening, and will continue to happen as long as homo sapiens (in our current state) exists.

False beliefs are not a neutral thing to ignore. The way people react to them has strikingly tangible consequences for the rest of us.

A frightening number of people already believe all kinds of wildly irrational things about AI, and I don't see any way this doesn't become an increasingly complex issue we will all continue to have to deal with for the rest of our lives. In addition to everyone who comes after us.

Re: Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis

#145

Post by prerok »

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:…

Well, yes, but here the Pareto principle comes to mind, though.

Re: Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis

#146

Post by LelouBil »

fsckboy wrote: post #102

I wish HN would split into two "subreddits", /r/HN and /r/AI > There is a certain wildness in the tech industry these days that both mimics previous eras of large changes, like cloud computing (runaway costs in the early days), and is like nothing we’ve ever seen before (record revenues accompanied by mass layoffs) if it is perceived that there is a big "winner takes all" pot of gold for the "winner" of a new market,…

HN is the reflection of the current tech scene discussions and drama.

Hence lots of AI.

Re: Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis

#147

Post by gopalv »

prerok wrote: post #84
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 knowl…

> Well, there is also a big difference that it will not learn over time.

My work is in tick-tock loop of learning - learn without modifying weights, demonstrate learnings to human, but then lock it back in (accumulate and spread).

This looks less like training and more like mentoring.

Getting a human to mentor an agent is a hard UX task, but the learning loop is not a technological problem anymore.

We can only get a tick once a week, no matter how many tocks we can do an hour.

Re: Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis

#148

Post by ryandrake »

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 very similar to the levers they had already

Think about it from the point of view of a hundred-millionaire tech executive. These people's entire interaction with the world outside of themselves/their families is through 1. administrative servants like assistants, personal shoppers, and other hired help, and 2. yes-man sycophants in their direct orbit whose job it is to agree with and enable them. To someone like this, an AI agent is the best combination of all of the above, PLUS it works 24/7 and doesn't have feelings to hurt, an ego to bruise, or internal moral conflict.

Of course, this is a dream product for them. Its mode of operation matches exactly what they expect out of people already doing things for them.

Re: Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis

#149

Post by saltcured »

ssl-3 wrote: post #139
causal wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might be psychosis. > Psychosis is the term for a collection of symptoms that happen when a person has trouble telling the difference between what’s real and what’s not[0] For many seemingly intelligent, rational, competent humans AI has become a layer between them and reality that has absolutely sabotaged their ability to know what is real. [0] https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/symptoms/23012-psychos...

There probably are a non-zero number of people in the world who are afflicted with real-live AI psychosis. For everyone else, that term is being applied with disingenuous levels of incompetence.

It's a subtlety of context that distinguishes hyperbole from delusion...
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