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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

#331

Post by daemin »

Brendinooo wrote: post #171
ssl-3 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to have a job that involved swinging a hammer over and over again. I got pretty good at it. Then the boss-man bought a minty-new Senco 650 air nailer for me to use. At first, I could take it or leave it. After all, I was proud at the skill I gained in driving nails with a hammer, and the ways my muscles seemed to automatically steer the nail straight into a board without missing a beat even if things started g…

I'm gonna disagree, but before I do: love this story, thanks for typing it up. I guess my point is: tools are like this. A moldboard plow was better than a straight plow, and therefore...what, people became addicted to them? I'm addicted to grocery stores and dollars as a means to acquire the food I need to survive? Hey, even your hand nailing pushed out the mortise-and-tenon people! Talk about sacrificing craft for…

There's definitely some form of addictive behaviour going on in a similar vein to poker/slot machines. There are studies and anecdotes that I've heard where the most thrill and reward comes not from the wins at gambling but from the near-wins, those close calls and near misses. It seems very similar to the kind of output that an LLM generates where it looks like what you want but is not quite there so you try to fix it by going again.

Re: Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis

#332

Post by guax »

operatingthetan wrote: post #231
t8sr wrote: post #229

I’m really not a fan of the therapy speak and everyone trying to diagnose everyone. Historically, this kinda medicalization of everyone you disagree with has not led to good things.

"AI psychosis" is a colloquial term, not a medical one. It's basic use is essentially to be glamoured (in the vampire sense) by the machine. To have too much trust in it, etc. Nobody thinks these people are literally psychotic.

Oh, I am certain some of them are. I've met a few.

Re: Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis

#333

Post by finghin »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #256
drngdds wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not psychosis, that's just being wrong. Perhaps read something: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychosis

"Being wrong" versus "loss of contact with reality" is simply a matter of degree.

There is a huge difference between being incorrigibly wrong (delusion) and psychosis (much more encompassing). There is not a difference by degrees because being incorrigibly out of touch on a range of issues does not mean you are psychotic.

Re: Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis

#334

Post by iririririr »

Wolfbeta wrote: post #319
20after4 wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> Sign in to confirm you’re not a bot

You cannot be as funny as google trying to be responsible! Ha! I'm still laughing at this. A person was forbidden to see humans reasoning with a computer bomb because the cost cutting computer at google want me to talk him into believing i'm a human!

(And then I got "You're posting too fast" on THIS website AFTER i've written the comment lol. It's all a joke. But i'm bored so I will keep this comment open until the computer is pleased)

Re: Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis

#336

Post by flaminHotSpeedo »

rafram wrote: post #4

Clickbait title. Should be more like "Box founder Aaron Levie says CEOs should use AI more and learn its limitations." He's essentially saying that C-suite people overestimate how effective LLMs are at one-shotting hard problems, and underestimate the human maintenance work that follows.

I wasn't expecting a peer reviewed study, but I certainly was expecting more from that title

Re: Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis

#337

Post by graemep »

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…

> The fundamental difference is that the humans are good consequence predictors, have built up reputations they are not willing to trash, can say no to things and in general don't want to go jail.

Depends on the people and the organisations. Its easy for people in charge to surround them selves with flatterers or crooks of whatever they want. A lot of CEOs have weird ideas because no-one says no to them. Look at companies that turned out to be run by multiple crooks, like Enron.

Re: Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis

#338

Post by graemep »

nradov wrote: post #296
glaslong wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

On the positive side, AI agents are largely immune to the "principal-agent problem". Human employees will tend to optimize for their own interests rather than those of management or shareholders. For example, we've all heard of "resume-oriented development" where developers will pick overly complex platform technologies or methodologies even if it doesn't meet the organization's needs because they think that will hel…

Except the people using the AIs still suffer from the problem. Using AI itself is very likely to be a technology picked for resume stuffing.

Re: Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis

#339

Post by stult »

JohnMakin wrote: post #31

> , models will “be able to complete most text-related tasks with success rates of, on average, 80%–95% by 2029 at a minimally sufficient quality level.” If this is true, then companies should focus on hiring juniors out of college. The investment is less risky. However, I don't personally believe this number and timeline is true, but if you do, the conclusion should be to wait and invest in humans.

I think that study is the wrong framing of the problem for identifying economic returns on AI. We don't need AI to complete tasks perfectly, just to be able to generate a good enough approximation that is easy to review and correct such that an employee has to spend less time correcting AI's errors than they would spend producing the entire output from scratch. So it won't be a drop in replacement for an employee for another 4-10 years, but in the interim, will shift an employee's role from generating a complete solution to primarily reviewing and correcting an LLM-generated solution to get it from that 80-95% level (or whatever the starting point might be prior to 2029) to 100%.

At this point, the vast majority of the work required to make GenAI capable of producing that sufficiently reviewable/correctable content isn't improving model quality, but creating the harnesses, infrastructure, and workflows around the models. Companies aren't seeing returns yet because too many early adopting companies have conceived of AI as a drop in replacement for employees, or at least as a reason to cut staff immediately, without first building out the supporting systems needed to compensate for the inadequacies of the models.

Re: Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis

#340

Post by ACCount37 »

dd8601fn wrote: post #329
majormajor wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I’ve had very good luck having my system search for available tool functions with natural language (ultimately against Qdrant). I’m surprised to hear that people are trying to grep files, instead.

People? No, that's what AI agents themselves do.

There are theoretical gains from using a vector search engine in an agentic loop, but grep is the lowest common denominator of agentic search.

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