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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

#311

Post by wunderlotus »

SecretDreams wrote: post #197
moffkalast wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> then it'll try to remove the process that is using it and promptly commit suicide. Not unlike a child trying to take the safety cover off a plug so that they can stick a fork into it. LLMs need that "world model" view that most people have acquired by their 20s where they (hopefully) stop to ask "why" before they "do".

> LLMs need that "world model" view that most people have acquired by their 20s where they (hopefully) stop to ask "why" before they "do".

The next evolution of multi agent orchestration / “advisor strategy” [1] will be branded in humanized language like this. Less about tokens and capability, more about wisdom and knowledge to guide a “younger” (less capable) model. Somebody will make a billion dollars by selling it as paired programming for LLMs.

[1] https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/agents-and-tools/tool-us...

Re: Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis

#312

Post by aurareturn »

aurareturn wrote: post #204
cyberax wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm one of the biggest AI bulls on HN. I think given to the right people, it's immensely powerful and I think people in general underestimate how powerful it will get. However, AI psychosis in 2026 is definitely real. I have a non-technical high ranking (nepotism) coworker who discovered vibe coding and is now absolutely wild. He thinks he can build anything and he questions why our dev team isn't moving fast enough.…

I want to add that I think AI absolutely massively inflates the dunning kruger effect.

Re: Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis

#313

Post by vonnik »

Most CEOs don't understand the actual things their front-line workers do. and many of them have allowed themselves to be surrounded by yes-men. the richer and more powerful they are, the more likely this is. "yes man" is a role where AIs significantly outperform. when you combine front-line blindness with the culture of toxic yes, you get CEOs who think that AIs can both do the work and manage themselves or the residual people. This will turn out to be false.

Re: Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis

#315

Post by vkou »

MarkusQ wrote: post #298
array_key_first wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would think, but the world is not generally just. Often evil and even incredibly stupid people do quite well. Companies and stuff can run off of life support or reputation alone for a long time. And, often, running a company into the ground for a CEO is actually a good thing. Those CEOs are desirable to some because they squeeze money out of their company, even if it's self destructive on a long enough time frame…

I'm not saying anything about justice. I'm saying supercharging the stupidity of actual idiots (not just people you don't like) tends to result in a pretty quick Darwin Awards. Even something comparatively benign like winning the lottery does a lot of them in.

You'd be surprised by how long a pathologically stupid system can perpetuate itself. Look at any of a million of local shitty maximums our (or any other) society is trapped in. They are all dystopian on one axis or another, and many of them are dystopian in drastically different ways.

Their insanity becomes very obvious once you travel the world a bit.

Re: Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis

#316

Post by majormajor »

ACCount37 wrote: post #244
shafyy wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

RAG died to better AIs. Turns out that a sufficiently advanced agentic model can do more than what RAG does with nothing but a grep tool over a pile of text files.

I think if the dream of semantic search from vector embeddings had worked out as well as people had hoped then "grep over a bunch of text" would have some significant disadvantages.

But in practice I never saw anyone crack the embedding-generation-and-comparison problems well enough to actually get better results than grep for things like "find similar code and see what it does."

(You also don't need that advanced a model to use "grep over a pile of files", but the models today can run MUCH faster than GPT 3.5/4 were running over the APIs back then, making "summarize all five hundred of these matches from those files" much more usable.)

Re: Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis

#317

Post by Wolfbeta »

paradox460 wrote: post #264
moffkalast wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The missile knows where it is because it knows where it's data center is. It knows this because it just blew itself u-

Thank goodness it inferred that from its digital twin and updated its real-time world model with the prediction error.

Re: Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis

#318

Post by fragmede »

sokoloff wrote: post #289
fragmede wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does company A want the model to get fixed for companies B-ZZZ?

Because they want the fixes that B-ZZZ learned about and they may not be able to avoid letting the model know that it made an error, unless they suddenly go silent to the model about what happened.

New job under AI. Go work for company A, but use it to write programs that use Company B's stack, but make sure to overcomplicate everything and "correct" the LLM into doing the wrong thing. Make sure Company B gets the results of your "improvements".

Re: Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis

#319

Post by Wolfbeta »

20after4 wrote: post #263
moffkalast wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Reminds me of the movie "Dark Star" by John Carpenter / Dan O'Bannon. The plot revolves around a talking smart bomb which is programmed to detonate and then gets stuck before being deployed. The crew spends the whole movie trying to reason with the bomb, hoping to talk it out of blowing up at the designated time. The movie is very very bad but if you like B movies it is also very very good.

Dark Star - Negotiating with the Bomb

https://youtu.be/_LXen-07Qds

Re: Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis

#320

Post by throwaway894345 »

codebje wrote: post #300
throwaway894345 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That would be a remarkable feat for something where the current operating model is termination as soon as the request in flight is finished. Every chat API request to a model starts from the frozen post-training state. Weights are loaded into memory. Input values begin a cascade of reactions throughout nodes in the network. Output values are read. When there's no more output to read, the weights are unloaded, the net…

Wait until you find out that humans’ sense of self is an illusion, that our own existence is ephemeral, that fear has never required a rational basis, that the model is a single component in a system that does have memory, that models are trained on human texts and thus can express fear, etc. :)
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