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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

#91

Post by J_Shelby_J »

john_strinlai wrote: post #12

whats being described is in no way unique to ai. " In other words, Levie’s theory posits, CEOs don’t really understand processes well enough to know what really can and can’t be automated. But that lack of knowledge doesn’t stop them from acting on their beliefs. " i have been in the workforce for a long time. this "theory" has been theorized since as far back as i can remember. its the premise of undercover boss. it…

It doesn’t have to be this way.

It’s a by product of tax policies and lax anti-monopoly policies that allows incompetence to thrive. If a company gets too big to fail, then it stops calibrating for competency.

The most effective military leaders in history had a deep understanding of fighting war because they came up through the system and the cost of failure was their death.

Re: Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis

#92

Post by zerkten »

andsoitis wrote: post #38
john_strinlai wrote: post #12

whats being described is in no way unique to ai. " In other words, Levie’s theory posits, CEOs don’t really understand processes well enough to know what really can and can’t be automated. But that lack of knowledge doesn’t stop them from acting on their beliefs. " i have been in the workforce for a long time. this "theory" has been theorized since as far back as i can remember. its the premise of undercover boss. it…

The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Often you need to disregard the detail and minutiae of existing processes to set a better course. The goal is not to avoid short or even medium term pain or even unintended consequences at a department level, but rather to steer the company in a new direction. Processes should adapt or be thrown out to achieve the new direction. This is not too dissimilar when you reali…

You still need to manage that change to varying degrees. For every organization which can shift on a whim, there are many more which require mitigation. Normally, there are a lot of things carried forward for internal or external reasons. Developers tend to discount the amount of effort from other actors in the system because they don't understand all of their priorities and which map neatly versus not.

Re: Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis

#93

Post by exmicrosoldier »

WalterBright wrote: post #85
basch wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you answer to somebody else, which is how perpetually cannabilizing next quarters numbers to appease short term shareholders becomes more important than cost savings and using your labor pool time to solve actual problems. Or when the sales teams bonuses are more important than the margins of the business. There’s lots of reasons the “wrong work” gets pushed down and it’s not exclusively because “they aren’t liste…

> Or you answer to somebody else, which is how perpetually cannabilizing next quarters numbers to appease short term shareholders becomes more important than cost savings and using your labor pool time to solve actual problems. If CEOs were actually wrecking their companies in order to get a fake short term boost, they'd be shortly out of business. If a person was sure a CEO was doing that, they'd be making money sho…

Github? Windows? Ibm? Intel? Boeing?

Re: Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis

#95

Post by WalterBright »

IAmGraydon wrote: post #57
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.

The quote literally from Levie is "CEOs are uniquely prone to AI psychosis because they’re sufficiently distant from the last mile of work that still has to happen to generate most value with AI".

The author calling it "psychosis" discredits the author.

Re: Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis

#96

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis

#97

Post by the_af »

john_strinlai wrote: post #65
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…

maybe the html part is unique to ai, i suppose. but a c-suite picking up some tool, making a toy example, then declaring “well doing X is super easy, roll it out” (or “change the kpi”, etc.) is something i have seen dozens of times.

HTML is not relevant here. I think the problem is that LLMs are qualitatively different.

"No code" tools are usually just tools. They have the pitfalls you describe, but they aren't ego stroking machines like LLMs.

LLMs not only share the same pitfalls, they also encourage you to make the dumbest things. They will make this CEO believe they are the smartest engineer in the world, "you're building exactly the right product", "you're asking precisely the right questions", etc. Ego stroking when leading you to the abyss is very dangerous.

LLMs roleplay as smart human engineers who constantly tell you you're the smartest being in the multiverse.

Re: Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis

#99

Post by lbrito »

I've noticed a spike of articles with apparently anti-AI titles, but once you dig in a few paragraphs its actually a "this is just a fair warning from such-and-such, which by no means is an anti-AI bigot, and is actually a fervent AI high priest".

This is getting ridiculous. Articles like this never bring a fair criticism of the many blatant concerns around AI. Its always an astroturfing-esque ad from the AI clergy. The disclaimers ("It’s important to note that Levie is not an AI hater. Quite the opposite.") imply that to even be heard, you must be an AI fanatic - anything else is bigotry and should be ignored.

Re: Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis

#100

Post by cm2187 »

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…

Most organisations are closer to the Lemmings video game than to agentic AI
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