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I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

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Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#731
post #698

I think there's a reasonable argument that our entire society right now is under AI psychosis: The stock market keeps going up in the face of the indefinite closure of Hormuz. We're investing in datacenters at a scale that only makes sense if AI capabilities continue to advance to the point where they surpass most humans at most white collar tasks, if not reach superintelligence. And what are the possible outcomes? -…

> Bust. We've come away with a useful tool but the hundreds of billions of capital expenditure were thrown away on a pipe dream.

heh this is the trick. The tech companies will angle for a bailout and they'll benefit from all this speculative data center building. Compute is generally useful.

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#732
post #716
post #698

I think there's a reasonable argument that our entire society right now is under AI psychosis: The stock market keeps going up in the face of the indefinite closure of Hormuz. We're investing in datacenters at a scale that only makes sense if AI capabilities continue to advance to the point where they surpass most humans at most white collar tasks, if not reach superintelligence. And what are the possible outcomes? -…

Success is also bust: Money becomes worthless. Everything you know and are is now obselete.

I highly doubt that. Humans might become obsolete, but money will almost certainly still be a thing.

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#733
post #538

I’m at a FAANG and we have $300/day token quota. Personally I don’t use that much of it but management is pushing really hard for it. “the quota has been raised for a reason, use it”. Any task: “have you tried working on it with Claude?”. Every meeting “now engineer x and y will show you what he did with AI”. It’s not all useless but most of the days I think I would be more productive if some processes were streamlin…

Also at a FAANG here. Surprised you don't manage to use $300 in a whole day. It's almost trivial to productively use that much in under an hour. Leadership is not being dumb, at least on this topic. If your token usage is that low, you just aren't using AI that much (even if you think you are.)

How? I struggle to use the 1000 Kiro tokens I get a month, and that only costs $20. And I use it more then anyone else on my team. Maybe we're just massively behind?

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#734
post #727

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The stock market keeps going up in the face of the indefinite closure of Hormuz Why wouldn’t it? The closure leads to price increases which leads to inflation which leads to non-dollar assets (ie stocks going up in value) Second from a US perspective the strait matters the least it has since world war 2. If the price stays high a bunch of fracking will come back online.

> The closure leads to price increases which leads to inflation which leads to non-dollar assets (ie stocks going up in value) I think this argument proves too much. Historically energy shocks have led to recessions, and in recessions the stock market usually doesn't go up. And the US economy is certainly exposed to global recession regardless of whether we're a net exporter of fossil fuels.

Well, there are quite a number of factors. I think you're right that "it's inflation" is a little too simple, but it does seem to be at least a significant factor, in my opinion.

The Strait of Hormuz is, basically not a big deal unless you're driving your big ole' truck. Americans are price sensitive and so some companies will have to absorb pricing increases, customers will absorb some others, and so forth. In other words, business as usual. Of course the closure of the Strait is a big problem for most of the rest of the world. They better get on with figuring out how to get Iran to stop being so chaotic in the region or we'll just keep it shut down indefinitely. No big deal.

Because the United States has so many advantages (primary global reserve currency, robust and efficient capital markets, highly sophisticated and dynamic economy across all sectors except luxury goods, &c.) it's able to weather these storms much easier than most other countries. As a country that also imports so much, if we spend less on imported products that's less of a problem than not being able to sell products. A recession isn't great, but the current parameters seem to suggest to me it's less of a problem for the United States - perhaps why we're in part seeing stock market valuations continue to climb.

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#735
post #538

I’m at a FAANG and we have $300/day token quota. Personally I don’t use that much of it but management is pushing really hard for it. “the quota has been raised for a reason, use it”. Any task: “have you tried working on it with Claude?”. Every meeting “now engineer x and y will show you what he did with AI”. It’s not all useless but most of the days I think I would be more productive if some processes were streamlin…

Also at a FAANG here. Surprised you don't manage to use $300 in a whole day. It's almost trivial to productively use that much in under an hour. Leadership is not being dumb, at least on this topic. If your token usage is that low, you just aren't using AI that much (even if you think you are.)

I am glad I am not on your team, the amount of slop they have to deal with coming from you must be overwhelming

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#736
post #698

I think there's a reasonable argument that our entire society right now is under AI psychosis: The stock market keeps going up in the face of the indefinite closure of Hormuz. We're investing in datacenters at a scale that only makes sense if AI capabilities continue to advance to the point where they surpass most humans at most white collar tasks, if not reach superintelligence. And what are the possible outcomes? -…

> we're collectively operating more in the interests of the future AI than in the interests of humanity

IMO, what's happened is a few richest investors in the world had access to the uncensored tier of AI, talked to it and came out with impression that they've witnessed something so dark, so much beyond anything we can imagine, that the only course forward is towards the transcendent abyss. Call it AI psychosis or demonic inspiration, but they are the people who control the economy, so they are dragging everyone with them. "Operating in the interest of the future AI" is a neat way to put it.

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#737
The tone of the twitter post feels very personal, and emotional, and I am sorry for the author. I hope he can find peace and calm with the pace of change to put forward his best self without needing to act like he needs to defend or fight something.

The energy feels misdirected and maybe also a communication issue, I think spreading awareness needs to come not from attacking and also not from attempts to change people’s perception. It’s also quite challenging to distill a concept when it’s new, we learn both from our experiences and experiences of others; but, so far, these alleged systems that will eventually collapse, haven’t done so yet and it makes it sound like you’re preaching and predicting, condemning even, rather than raising awareness and education.

Not trying to sound hopelessly optimistic either, just that the other extreme isn’t also helpful, and that a spectrum is not what we want it to be but what the collective shapes it, so saying psychosis is rejecting the harsh reality that they’re far removed from your worldview and not working towards an understanding.

EDIT: Maybe I'm old and I don't get twitter, I also don't know much about the challenges he faced communicating his concerns, I sort of had a meta comment with the intent of "try listening more first, some people are difficult to reason with but respond better if you just let them speak and look for a teachable moment during the conversation". Anyways, I'm in agreement that there's too much unsupervised AI in the wild, I'm not saying he's wrong more like saying that doubling down on "stop doing that" will likely be ignored by those that are already ignorant to it, hence what I wrote above.

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#738
post #538

I’m at a FAANG and we have $300/day token quota. Personally I don’t use that much of it but management is pushing really hard for it. “the quota has been raised for a reason, use it”. Any task: “have you tried working on it with Claude?”. Every meeting “now engineer x and y will show you what he did with AI”. It’s not all useless but most of the days I think I would be more productive if some processes were streamlin…

Also at a FAANG here. Surprised you don't manage to use $300 in a whole day. It's almost trivial to productively use that much in under an hour. Leadership is not being dumb, at least on this topic. If your token usage is that low, you just aren't using AI that much (even if you think you are.)

300 an hour, that's insane

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#739

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never had more fun coding, but the key is actually still writing the code yourself. The LLM has terrible judgment but an encyclopedic knowledge and the ability to pick out important details in a sea of information. Their worse use is producing code, but somehow that gets all the energy. Being an LLM babysitter is energy draining and you feel less and less in control. No job is worth being miserable doing somethi…

What do you use an LLM for then? Or you’re saying just don’t use it at all?

I've used both ChatGPT and Claude, they seem interchangeable for my needs. I only use the web prompt interface except for the rare occasion that it is helpful for it to have the context of my entire project. I think less is more when it comes to LLM interaction, but sometimes they are exactly the right tool for the job.

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#740

The tone of the twitter post feels very personal, and emotional, and I am sorry for the author. I hope he can find peace and calm with the pace of change to put forward his best self without needing to act like he needs to defend or fight something. The energy feels misdirected and maybe also a communication issue, I think spreading awareness needs to come not from attacking and also not from attempts to change peopl…

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