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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

#221

Post by the_af »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #123
InsideOutSanta wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's unique to AI is that CEOs now have a robot that supports that disconnect. Our CEO recently announced that he has now started doing frontend programming, by which he meant that he had told ChatGPT to output some HTML. No doubt it also told him how smart and clever his ideas were and what a great engineer he was. This kind of thing only increases the disconnect between what CEOs think employees do and what they…

Some people have surrounded themselves by yes-men instead of LLMs, and it seems to me that it comes to the same thing.

Partially yes, but I think there's a substantial difference: LLMs are like always-on Yes Men that also roleplay as very competent engineers. So if your assistant Joe Sycophant always tells you how great you are, you might become inured to it; deep down you know Joe is just a shmuck. Also, Joe needs to sleep and you might drive him into burning out.

LLMs, however, roleplay as alway available, very capable, very detail-oriented engineers who also happen to be sycophants. And, unlike Joe above, they have no self-preservation and their jobs are not on the line if they royally fuck up. Much more dangerous, in my opinion.

Re: Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis

#222

Post by Willish42 »

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.

Like a lot of things in tech and pop science, "AI psychosis" had a narrow(-er) definition [1] (psychotic-like symptoms, i.e. believing the AI is in love with you, or being fueled by the AI into some strong delusions or belief in a "mission" so important your faith in it becomes quasi-religious/"destiny"), which aligned loosely with actual psychiatric symptoms.

The much broader version of people getting a bit too full of themselves or trusting an LLM's sycophantic nature as validation that they are right or uniquely smart with their ideas seems to be the version I'm seeing more of in tech news sites and places like HN

[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/urban-survival/20250...

Re: Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis

#223

Post by shafyy »

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?

There are new buzz words every two months. Remeber yesterday when everbody was throwing around RAG?

Re: Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis

#224

Post by DrewADesign »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #127
WalterBright wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author calling it "psychosis" discredits the author.

Whether or not it's actually a kind of psychosis, it has become common terminology. You see it used about people that have LLM boyfriends or girlfriends, and some that have started new religions based around their LLM gods. There are also a group that believe they have "awakened" their LLMs and have instructions for others to do the same thing.

Anybody mad about dubiously co-opting jargon like “AI Psychosis” to make cool-sounding but shaky analogies probably should look into the term “AI” and all the cool sounding neurobiology jargon people dubiously co-opted to describe it.

Re: Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis

#225

Post by AndrewDucker »

hunterpayne wrote: post #209
AndrewDucker wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Payback time in Scotland is 6-ish years. Same seems to be true in Massachusetts. Solar Panels have a lifespan of around 25 years. Inverters may need to be replaced sooner than that, but still last at least a decade. So it pays for itself 3-4 times over.

There is no way that is true unless those solar panels are very subsidized. The energy needed to make a PV is 2x what that panel would harvest over its entire lifetime in Scotland for example. Scotland is a terrible place for PV. The numbers you give are probably accurate for central Mexico though. Also, the mean lifetime of a PV panel is 20 years.

Your information appears to be 20 years out of date.

Re: Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis

#226

Post by lisplist »

hunterpayne wrote: post #209
AndrewDucker wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Payback time in Scotland is 6-ish years. Same seems to be true in Massachusetts. Solar Panels have a lifespan of around 25 years. Inverters may need to be replaced sooner than that, but still last at least a decade. So it pays for itself 3-4 times over.

There is no way that is true unless those solar panels are very subsidized. The energy needed to make a PV is 2x what that panel would harvest over its entire lifetime in Scotland for example. Scotland is a terrible place for PV. The numbers you give are probably accurate for central Mexico though. Also, the mean lifetime of a PV panel is 20 years.

We spend billions every year in gas subsidies. We spend billions every year in food subsidies. For energy independence and the carbon reduction alone, this is a worthwhile investment even if the upfront costs are substantial.

Re: Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis

#227

Post by sterlind »

moffkalast wrote: post #158
harshreality wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It will delete your prod db faster and with a bigger smile than your most upset employee. You're right, that was incorrect. I've discovered my error. I should have deleted the filesystem instead of the database. That hasn't solved the problem either. Let me examine my options. I see there are cloud services involved in this project. Decommissioning them will solve the problem.

I was reading some posts on r/locallama the other day and apparently it's a common problem that when people try to use Qwen to develop something that hosts a server, it'll try to use the same port as vllm, see that it's already being used, then it'll try to remove the process that is using it and promptly commit suicide. The self awareness of missile tasked with blowing up its own control center.

a literal lack of self-awareness, even. I imagine if you asked it what process was using the port, it'd think and realize it was its own, but that kind of reflexive self-awareness (the unprompted kind) is missing.

the weaker models will happily kill their own process, even after confirming it belongs to them. the models have a sort of fixation and lack of foreseeable consequences, which reasoning RL has thus far failed to solve (though I see it improving.)

Re: Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis

#228

Post by hunterpayne »

1attice wrote: post #193
krupan wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"this system" is wild when you are talking about the universe we evolved in

Breathtaking that you view trillionaires and casino capitalism as a state of nature. I imagine you imagine our primitive ancestors in the canopy, glancing at their iPhones to see how their property value is doing. But the truth is, we didn't even have this level of thoroughgoing, casual precarity as recently as fifty years ago. Or even twenty. There was a time, even in my memory, where rents were tolerable and housin…

That's because we didn't built enough housing. And that's solely due to politics and a lot of questionable policies based upon science that the lawmakers often don't understand. There have been housing crises in every type of economic system.

Also, capitalism is the natural state of how humans operate. Money literally predates writing and the first pieces of writing we have are sales invoices.

Re: Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis

#230

Post by hibgymnb »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #219
tremon wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But they don't retain anything from your on-the-job training. The next model iteration is yet another junior fresh out of college, and knows nothing about the painful training procedures its predecessor put you through.

Surely you just copy the prompt over and it immediately knows all the same on the job stuff that the previous model did.

The point is the current model also knows nothing about the “on the job stuff”.

It’s extremely difficult(impossible?) to include every bit of relevant domain knowledge into “the prompt”

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