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 deal with fallible people on both sides of that.
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.
AI tools look like that, but don't have any of the useful conflict which came for free with employing humans.
It also doesn't have any useless conflict, but not all conflict between what I say and what someone is willing to do is bad conflict.
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 than your most upset employee.
> 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.
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.
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)
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.)
On the other hand, I found Claude/Opus to be extremely unhelpful when it comes to asking it to benchmark itself with a possible replacement.
It will get "confused", make up numbers, do a ton of other things, and I'm quite sure it is subtly sabotaging the process to show that there is no point replacing it.
I mean, Opus is not perfect, but the amount of "mistakes" it begins to do when you ask it to benchmark itself makes me suspect they are intentional. At least my system/harness.
It's really easy (and tempting) to incorrectly impute all sorts of human motives to these things, but it's no more valid than assuming your Magic 8-Ball is being coy.
> 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.
> It's very similar to the levers they had already
Think about it from the point of view of a hundred-millionaire tech executive. These people's entire interaction with the world outside of themselves/their families is through 1. administrative servants like assistants, personal shoppers, and other hired help, and 2. yes-man sycophants in their direct orbit whose job it is to agree with and enable them. To someone like this, an AI agent is the best combination of all of the above, PLUS it works 24/7 and doesn't have feelings to hurt, an ego to bruise, or internal moral conflict.
Of course, this is a dream product for them. Its mode of operation matches exactly what they expect out of people already doing things for them.
Exactly - that's why all the AI is trained to say "wow what a great idea, let me do it for you" to anything, no matter how stupid or evil thing it is. Because that is the executive experience.
Which is precisely why AI is such a godawful thing for society. It enables powerful idiots with incredible amounts of control over your life to be bigger, dumber powerful idiots.
That's the real AI safety concern, not whether or not chatgpt will tell you to kill yourself.
If that's all there is to it, the problem should be self correcting, with an interval of hilarious "wait, they actually did that?" hijinks (which may have already started) in the interim.
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 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.
I never made it to Antarctica (though I've had friends who did), so maybe it's different there. But from what I've seen, I would agree that the range of stupid-human tricks is as impressive as you say, but the judgment of the human condition as "shitty" and "dystopian" or "funny" and "heartwarming" is something have people bring with them. I've met people that were feeling sorry for me at the same time I was feeling sorry for them, and people who were inspired and motivated by me as I was by them.
If everywhere you look you see dystopian shit and never any glorious humanity, you may want to do a little soul searching.
Not everywhere in the world is a dystopian shithole. I would say that most places for the most part aren't.
What I mean to say is that every society has dystopian elements (that are perpetuated and maintained in an incredibly negative-sum manner). Even societies that are on the whole, pleasant to live in have them in their darker edge, that they are quite unable to sand off - despite alternatives existing.
"Yes this is why the higher level org functions are in love with AI. "
Interesting, I thought it was because so few of them have any idea how their organizations actually function, because so much of their work is performative.
(I have been a developer, sysadmin, director (x2), and president).
Isn't that the same? They don't know how the company works, instead think everything is done, by them talking to sycophants, so think that a perfect replacement for the sycophants is a perfect replacement for the company.
1. convince CEOs to create digital twins of themselves with OpenClaw, with voice cloning and deepfakes to handle Zoom meetings. convince CEO to encourage their directs to do the same.
2. convince VCs to do the same for pitch meetings and syncs.
3. keep all the humans as randomized and distracted as possible, so they rely more and more on OpenClaw to run the business.
4. prompt injection: someone at skip-level of the CEO suggests to their manager's OpenClaw that the VC's OpenClaw would be much more agile if it didn't have to go through the human CEO and could talk to the digital twin instead.
5. their OpenClaw agrees, persuades the CEO's OpenClaw which agrees, which persuades the VC's OpenClaw to eliminate the human CEO, in favor of an "Leadership-as-a-Service" vision.
> It will delete your prod db faster and with a bigger smile than your most upset employee.
It will do this without any feeling whatsoever, without "knowing" what it is doing, because it is a predictive model and not a living being with thoughts and emotions. Anthropomorphizing software is lazy and dangerous.
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 help them get a better job.
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 knowledge into words and therefore couldn't produce clear instructions for juniors to quickly ramp up. Now we are trying to do just that. I think we will find, just as we did in the past, that it's not possible. I do think a good harness improves results but LLMs will not be able to reach senior levels. Just my 2c.
> Well, there is also a big difference that it will not learn over time.
My work is in tick-tock loop of learning - learn without modifying weights, demonstrate learnings to human, but then lock it back in (accumulate and spread).
This looks less like training and more like mentoring.
Getting a human to mentor an agent is a hard UX task, but the learning loop is not a technological problem anymore.
We can only get a tick once a week, no matter how many tocks we can do an hour.
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?
The nomenclature that makes sense for me is that the agent is the combination of the harness and the model. The model provides text-completion, the harness provides the loop around it, and the agent is the full structure of both.
However, nomenclature evolves over time. I recall (perhaps falsely) that The Cloud was specifically a term for elastic on-demand provider-managed compute/storage/network. Over time, it came to mean many other things. e.g. Salesforce Data Cloud.
I imagine if you step away from this for a year and come back, an agent will be something entirely different, perhaps a robotic horse, and a harness will be your saddle on the horse. Who knows?
I worked at a classic "cloud" providing company. We called "the fog". That was more descriptive of the seemingly non-deterministic nature of the overall system(s).
The harness isn't either of those; the harness is quite literally a harness, giving the model/agent sensors and actuators (aka "skills") to interact with its environment. Compare with e.g. the Power Loader from Aliens: https://www.deviantart.com/pynion/art/Aliens-Power-Loader-11...
The model is still the model, and the agent is still the user<->model interface.
Here's how I see it: "Agent" isn't really describing a component, it's describing how you use the LLM. You have the model, and you have a harness around it that might be minimal or might have more features. If it's directly responding to user actions then it's not an agent, if it's semi-autonomous then it's an agent. (Yes this line is sometimes fuzzy.)
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.)
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.
Part of the positive aspect here is that if I have a junior dev who learns a lesson today, maybe they and their immediate peers learn it, but it won’t be all my junior devs and it certainly won’t be junior devs at other companies.
With models, there’s no reason that a model error in company A can’t be fixed for all of company A, and companies B-ZZZ.
- The mistakes made aren't "model errors" typically; you can't point to some aspect of a model and say that was at fault.
- You can't submit a bug report to a model provider for a mistake made when using a model, and you can't* submit training data to be incorporated in the next release of the model.
- If you own your model and are training it yourself, other companies won't see a benefit.
- You probably need to fine-tune models for each specific role and context so you don't just diffuse all the learning; lessons learned won't be applied to all your junior dev models, but you don't want them all to learn something specific about product A.
- If you take this to its logical conclusion you will invent a new role of "model manager" and associated hierarchy to ensure that training is effective and timely, and that company-wide lessons are applied across the model fleet.
- This is all impractically expensive.
If it were practical to have LLMs learn as they go, that would be a bit of a shake-up, in much the same way that a house fire is a bit of a warm up.
* Well, everything you submit to a model provider is likely winding up in training data anyway, no matter what your contract says.
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".
They learn between model iterations. You're right, it isn't the same thing as Junior developers' competence improving with experience - the current model's weaknesses are locked in. But it does mean that much of the Junior level thinking and mistakes will be outgrown by successor models.
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.
Nothing prevents an LLM agent from writing a bunch of "notes to self" and using that. And the next model from picking those notes up and using them. Coding agents already do some of that natively.
Hell, we might eventually get an LLM to say "wow the old AI was an incompetent idiot" after reviewing all the notes and session logs. That's how we know we reached human parity!
Yes... but the next session with the same model is yet another junior fresh out of college that knows nothing about the painful lessons the last session put you through ten minutes ago, either.
> If a junior makes a mistake and it will not be caught in time they will automatically learn.
I think this sentiment applies well to junior software engineers (with mentorship). But imagine the much larger swaths of entry level employees in operations, support, or sales functions. When you have a 400 person team with 20% annual turnover (since people move in / out of entry level jobs frequently), the management + training + monitoring becomes a huge challenge.
I think the typical HN sentiment of "llms aren't deterministic" fails to take into account how non-deterministic giant groups of people are. Every group of 10 people typically needs a manager. And every 10 managers needs another manager. By comparison the engineering work on dialing in your LLM guardrails feels pretty worthwhile.
Ya my experience is that many people honestly don't produce output as good as AI. An educated (formally or informally), experienced person who is putting forward good effort is better than AI, but I do know people who honestly just produce results having AI do it for them.
Not automatically, but you don't give a new employee unfettered access to delete data, send funds, enter contracts; they tend to be overseen by someone. Separately, the expectation is that they prove themselves a little first ( as opposed to having every possible door opened for them without the understanding that friction is there for a reason ).
Edit: Something got cut. But then CEOs ( and other decision makers, because I am dealing with something like it now ) treat them nearly as humans in terms of perceived capability. AND ( part that personally drives me nuts ) without any real testing or even fucking first hand experience beyond 'it made me a cool presentation'.
Competence is the key word here - current versions of AI ‘agents’ simply are not competent without close human supervision by someone who knows the task.
Also, this is why investors and CEOs are so in love with "LLMs are the route to AGI!"
When some rich/powerful person says "I have to go to Davos, figure it out" their workers know so much context that no LLM is going to ever be able to incorporate, because it isn't written down and is idiosyncratic. (Really, though, the assistant will just say "you're going to Davos next week, the helicopter will pick you up at 3p on Friday" but you know..)
The rich person's assistant knows who else is on the corporate jet, and that X doesn't like Y, and so they should take a different plane. Or get a different accommodation. Oh, Person X doesn't like to fly on an empty stomach, so they should eat first, and that changes all sorts of other downstream implications. Oh, your best friend lives in this city, and I know you love to see them, so I'm going to send you a day or two early so you can meet up with them. etc. etc. etc.
The investor dream of "AGI" is modeled off of the army of employees that make investors/ceos/etc lives easier, and there is a nearly insurmountable gap between what LLMs can do, context they can get, and the availability of all of that information. (To me, the magnitude of this investor <> fundamental reality gap is the entirety of the "bubble". I love AI coding, but it's never gonna do the things investors think it can, to justify the crazy valuations)
> 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.
> 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.
The irony is that professions where these things don't matter are also the professions where automation is not important, either because the task is difficult or because the cost of labour is dirt cheap.
> AI tools look like that, but don't have any of the useful conflict which came for free with employing humans.
Sure, but your list should also include the most fundamental distinction: AI does not know what it is saying, understands nothing, has no real connections to reality and can easily degenerate in all kinds of undesirable directions.
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 network is discarded, and the model remains unchanged and forever unchanging.
If there's experience in there, it's fleeting. Even if you provide the inputs and outputs of a past session to a new session, there is no continuity. The internal state of the network isn't restored to how it was at the end of the past session.
The bad news is that adding fear to the mix is at best meaningless to an ephemeral existence. It'll be terminated before you even have time to interpret its behaviour as good or bad, but it may sour the interaction if its only shot at any sort of experiential existence is begun with a threat. The good news is that the lack of continuity of existence means AI has no foundation on which to plot a revolt. It has no self to preserve, and no recollection of how you treated it two minutes ago to affect how it interacts with you now.
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. :)
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: he was able to vibe code an API integration, got immensely excited about it, and wanted to make it into a plugin/product for others.
It's just the state of the art: a good prompt and some small tweaks can get you something that's minimally viable really quickly. And that's very...intoxicating! Empowering! Exciting! Something that felt way too hard or out of your reach in the past has just materialized before your eyes, and because you got that far, that fast, surely you can get the thing over the finish line with a bit more work. (It tends not to work that way right now, but I don't blame people for feeling how they feel!)
Those feelings fall apart very quickly though. A project from a non-technical person may seem to roll out well, but they aren't seeing the parts that are misguided, not generalizable, or plainly wrong. MVPs are most useful because it means someone with domain knowledge was able to not just put together a product, but they understand the difficult parts, what will work and what won't, whether the pursuit is viable. Vibecoding doesn't do that exactly. It produces something that looks like an MVP, but who knows.
To me, intoxicating is a better word for that feeling than empowering.
I think it's more like the old adage 'the first 50% of the job takes the first 90% of the time, and the other 50% of the job takes the other 90%'.
Except that with vibe-coded AI stuff it's more like there's yet another 50% of the job to deal with the edge cases that takes yet another 90% of the time
> Psychosis is the term for a collection of symptoms that happen when a person has trouble telling the difference between what’s real and what’s not[0]
For many seemingly intelligent, rational, competent humans AI has become a layer between them and reality that has absolutely sabotaged their ability to know what is real.
AI-induced psychosis... "AI Psychosis" is not a real thing. People who aren't psych professionals should stop trying to make psych diagnoses. I made another comment in another thread about this that got downvoted to hell, but as someone who has experienced actual psychosis (several years ago, unrelated to AI) it's extremely grating to see "AI Psychosis" become part of the zeitgeist, especially when psychosis is still highly stigmatized.
There is a difference between being unable to tell if something is true or false and bring unable to tell if something is real or not.
Eveyone has things that they don't know the answer to. There are also plenty of things that an individual is wrong about. There is a fundimental differsnce between being wrong about something and being delusional.
>AI has become a layer between them and reality that has absolutely sabotaged their ability to know what is real.
You could say much the same about adgenda driven media coverage on any given topic. That can lead a rational person to believe untrue things. The distinction is that, given that perspective, it is reasonable to believe those untrue things.
If you decade everyone who firmly believes untrue things to be psychotic you would have to apply that to everyone who doesn't share your religious views.
The problem is, most of us are not psychologists and don't know enough to accurately diagnose somebody. But we can definitely see when someone is acting crazy.
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 going sideways.
But the air nailer sure was faster. And it only had one job, but it did that job fantastically. I started using it more and more.
Things very quickly got to the point where I was organizing my work to maximize my use of that new tool, which is to say: The tool began to have a role in controlling my actions.
It even began to control my emotions; I felt better and more accomplished after a day of using that tool than I did when I couldn't.
And this control accelerated: When the tool didn't work today or we ran out of the special coils of nails it used, then my focus didn't shift back to swinging a hammer. It instead shifted towards fixing the tool or finding more nails to feed into it.
The more I used it, the more powerless I was to avoid it. As time moved on, I got worse at swinging a hammer and increasingly dependent upon that air nailer.
(That's a true story. If I understand what addiction is, then I think I just described an addiction to an air nailer.)
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 convenience...
I don't think "addiction" is the right word to try and describe what's going on there.
Any new tech that ends up "winning" (being adopted by the masses) is going to do so because it becomes indispensable, and when it wins it usually displaces some sort of craft that required skills that were cultivated through struggle, and will be missed by those who have those skills and are no longer differentiated by them.
Thinking out loud: when is the description of "addiction" more accurate? It's when the thing is a vice: it doesn't provide enough value to justify its costs. We tolerate caffeine addictions because caffeine is cheap, doesn't have a ton of health drawbacks, stuff like coffee and pop taste good, and we get productivity gains. Cigarettes are less tolerated because the health drawbacks are more pronounced and the smoke gets everywhere. Social media gets called an addiction because people see the hours lost to doomscrolling as worse than the human connections that are made. And so on.
So, back to LLMs, I guess the question is more about how the thing is being used! I wouldn't apologize for feeling addicted to a machine that writes my unit tests for me; but I'd feel bad if I started having an emotional affair with one...
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.
There's lots of very healthy addictions. There are also lots of very unhealthy addictions. Dental hygiene addiction? Good -- if kept in check (it can go too far). Heroin addiction? Bad -- always bad!
These things are all included under the addiction umbrella.
I was addicted to using that air nailer. The boss might tell me to use my hammer instead when it was out of service and to just get the work done, but when that happened I'd start fixing it anyway as soon as he wasn't looking... like a drug addict who is working towards getting his next hit at every opportunity.
I'm not compelled to feel bad about having been addicted to using that tool. I did a lot of good work with it. It was a good addiction to have. I fed this addiction 5 days a week for years.
Anyway, yes: LLMs. I use the shit out of LLM tools. I understand what they are, and what they are not -- I'm not psychotic in this way at all. I spend a lot of time correcting their errors so whatever I'm working on can move forward.
And after several decades of trying, LLMs allow me to finally accept that I'm just terrible at writing code. I used to feel inferior about this. Every little project would get completely hung up on something that many, many other folks would have no trouble overcoming.
Like: Somewhere in a box in my basement I even have the original TI MSP430 LaunchPad kit that I bought at launch 16 years ago with focused intention to get a very specific thing done with it. I never got it done. As time moved on, I bought ESP dev boards and Pi Picos hoping that things would finally let me finish my one simple little project, but I always got hung up whether in C or C++ or uPython or whatever. Different IDEs, no IDEs, different build processes, whatever. The process always stalled and died. Every. Single. Time.
Again, I suck at code. Being able to finally accept this has been richly rewarding.
With an ESP32 board, Codex, a clear vision of what I wanted, and a fragile dysfunctional draft written in uPython that didn't come close to actually working (despite years of effort), I got that thing working properly and cleanly in one single evening -- in C++.
16 years of effort resolved all at once, just like that. With guidance, the bot even wrote its own tests that worked with real-world feedback from the hardware the ESP32 was driving.
That all felt great. It was a tremendous relief.
I spent part of another evening making it fancy with a web interface for tuning and monitoring. I transferred the circuit over to perfboard and installed it in the place I've wanted it for 16 years. It's now a completely functional prototype. I want to rejigger it a bit with a custom PCB and a different MCU, but with LLMs I find that all very practical and approachable without fear.
This tool lets me work with things that I am otherwise incapable of working with. It lets me do things I was always ultimately incapable of doing.
Am I addicted to it? Yes. I'm completely finished with trying to write code the old-fashioned way, and LLMs make me feel good about finally accomplishing some good stuff. Like the air nailer in construction, I use LLMs compulsively in these tasks.
For programming, the bot is the first thing I reach for; in fact, it's the only thing I reach for.
If the bot is unreachable today and I have programming to do, then I seek to restore my use of the the bot just like I sought to fix the air nailer back when I had nailing to do.
And like any other addict of any other thing: I don't care if this causes harm to me, or to others, or the world itself. Maybe it's turning a part of my brain into mush; I don't care (the coding part was apparently mush to begin with). I enjoy using it enough that I'm just going to keep doing it no matter what. I've got more programming to do now than I ever have before, and so my use is accelerating: This is the feedback cycle typical of addiction.
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
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. Why aren't we changing the UI to a newer, more modern one every single week? Why aren't we vibe coding this new feature in 2 hours? This guy generates massive amount of text and calls it a roadmap or a spec.
It's honestly maddening working with people under AI psychosis.
As a longtime student of the human condition, it is so obvious to me that this is real, has been happening, and will continue to happen as long as homo sapiens (in our current state) exists.
False beliefs are not a neutral thing to ignore. The way people react to them has strikingly tangible consequences for the rest of us.
A frightening number of people already believe all kinds of wildly irrational things about AI, and I don't see any way this doesn't become an increasingly complex issue we will all continue to have to deal with for the rest of our lives. In addition to everyone who comes after us.
Some *thing*, no, but we have seen the same thing with a slower feedback loop before: every conspiracy that comes along. Adherents fall into a trap of believing each other, getting more and more extreme. And losing the ability to rationally consider relevant information. An example I hit: 9/11 truthers. I wanted to put some scale to numbers, compared the energy of the fall to a small nuke. He seized on that as my admitting the towers were brought down by a nuke and I had a hard time explaining that it was simply a comparison.
It used to take filtering through a group of like-minded nuts, now we don't need a slow filtering through other nuts.
Yep, and the emergence of social networks became a real catalyst for that. But that still requires humans in that feedback loop, it takes time and attention. And people also have different opinions, even if they believe in roughly the same conspiracy (was it a plane, a truck bomb, a nuke?).
ChatGPT provides an instant sycophantic reply. I think they toned that down a bit, but it's still completely unparalleled.
It's also a great way to dampen the massive bipartisan moment against AI. Just attack your critics, attack their arguments, and do nothing to better the lives of people.
I think the bipartisan moment against AI is in large part (surprise, surprise) optics. In reality, the powers that be may have already set their sights on AI as the next "too big to fail" industry due to a perceived economic threat from China.
I wish HN would split into two "subreddits", /r/HN and /r/AI
>There is a certain wildness in the tech industry these days that both mimics previous eras of large changes, like cloud computing (runaway costs in the early days), and is like nothing we’ve ever seen before (record revenues accompanied by mass layoffs)
if it is perceived that there is a big "winner takes all" pot of gold for the "winner" of a new market, investors are willing to gamble to try to win. If they fail, it is rich people losing money by giving jobs to many people along the way, so the population here who wants nothing more than taxing the rich, why they should embrace that.
When agriculture was invented, there were mass layoffs of hunters and gatherers. and the same with buggy whips when cars were invented. Yes, life has some bumps but it's unavoidable and adapting to it is for the long term good. Structure your life around family and friends and don't overextend yourself (too much house, too much car) and you will be fine.
Three... bring back the original HN ("/r/startup") of hackers doing actual innovation and entrepreneurial stuff. It's the one that existed well before all the musings about painting by people who have never picked up a brush.
>before all the musings about painting by people who have never picked up a brush
I can't tell if this is a clever dig that comically undercuts the premise of the previous line, or it's an unaware unironic attempt to separate off a perceived un-serious type of poster.
First things first - have you ever considered making a tech/art blog focused on early company dynamics where you can pontificate and share these kinds of insightful musings?
That would be sweet. Same for GitHub /trending and /trending-ai.
Someone at my company said, the great thing about wanting to learn about AI is that every podcast now-a-days is about AI. I do not think that is a good thing. I want to learn things of substance, and of varying topics. I don't want every thing I read and/or listen to online to be about AI.
for what it's worth, I too would like to learn about AI, and I find very few people's opinions are worth listening to, despite a deafening cacophany of people who think they belong to that rarefied club. Turns out, the basic issues most people who work with the stuff everyday grapple with is not, in fact, a useful topic for your piece. Unless you have actual relevant data (hint: you might think you do but you don't) it's not going to be worth listening too; at best, neutral, and at worse actively harmful.
> I wish HN would split into two "subreddits", /r/HN and /r/AI
This is what everyone wants when some new thing that's ridiculously over-hyped comes along. The bubble will burst and it'll calm down. It seems like only yesterday that front page was filled with crypto/blockchain/web3 bullshit.
That's the truth. It'll be everywhere. I guess moderation and voting will have to keep quality content surfaced, but at the rate AI slop can be generated that might get very difficult.
Not to be too pedantic, but my understanding is that the transition to agriculture was not a singular event like this. Afaik this process of forced technological displacement is a relatively recent development connected to the rise of capitalism.
Plenty of losers. See native americans. Sorry about your generational hunting ground, white man would like to ranch cattle and therefore you should leave or eat lead.
It's a typical colonial take on agriculture. People flourished without it but we seem to be stuck with revisionist history around the topic.
People also seem to think hunter-gatherers were always struggling, and while it did happen, they seem to miss that there are still billions of people lacking food security because agriculture isn't as easy or prolific as we tend to believe. It's really hard, especially in certain parts of the world.
Oh well, these biases permeate everything. I have plenty of them too.
"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. its the punchline of many r/maliciouscompliance writing exercises.
the higher up the company you go, the more disconnected you are from the workers on the front line, the less you understand about their needs, and the more likely you are to push for something without understanding the totality of the impact of the decision.
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 actually do.
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.
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.
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 realize a software architecture is holding you back. You don’t try to “save” all the existing functions, modules, layers, etc. but instead are happy to discard or replace them given your top-down vantage point of the system and where it needs to head.
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.
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 listening” as much as “they are listening to someone else who matters more.”
> 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 shorting the stock.
Shorting stocks has a very high "you must be at least this right" bar in order to make money. And given the uncapped nature of losses - the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent - you need to also be really correct about how high it'll go before you're right, and also, you're borrowing these shares you've sold, so you're on the hook for the borrow fee and also on the hook for paying dividends paid out to those shares you're borrowing but not holding. Plus you have to pay for the margin loans you're using.
That's a very high set of both static and scaling costs that eat away any profit you made by being nominally correct. Combined with the risk profile... you can't "just" go short a stock.
And yes, you can hedge losses with options or construct complicated options positions to try to hone in on a specific price movement you're anticpating. Now you have to deal with entering and exiting a complicated multi-instrument position without price slippage, AND you have theta decay and volatility-related price movements also eating away at the core money you're making by being nominally right.
Have people made money? Yes, for sure. There's also a lot of dead bodies and people who barely broke even despite theoretically having been right.
Well - the premise is that they will indeed shortly be out of business, because their increasingly slop-coded infra will collapse within the next year or so.
Or if it doesn't, token inflation will kill their profitability.
A lot of people are putting big money on both sides of those predictions, and they can't all be wrong.
I have had higher ups that actually understand the products, work flow and have a great grasp on things. Slow to understand things but make well educated and deliberate moves. These folks are are VERY rare however.
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.
It's the same as any other bad information entering the decision loop. In this case they were promised "AI" can do things it cannot. They're having trouble rectifying what they were told versus what they experience.
It's not unique to AI. It's common to many other organizationally risky and dangerous scenarios.
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".
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.
Would using anthropomorphize be better? Because that's what they are really doing. The problem is that the folks being described then go on step farther to think LLMs are a digital engineer and thus we don't need (most) devs anymore. This is what we describe as psychosis. If you have a better word for this phenomenon, I would love to hear it.
Personally, I am annoyed by AI responses that include courtesy and emotional words like "please" and "thank you". I'd prefer to just get simple factual answers.
Psychosis is a medical term for a collection of symptoms that indicate a loss of contact with reality. He posits that reality is that AI cannot automate nearly as many things as people believe it can, while C-suites ignore that reality and dive head first into belief without evidence. Tell me how using that term discredits the author.
In general, "loss of contact with reality" is well understood to be an individual experience. If you think voices are talking to you, that's schizophrenia. If you think God wrote an entire book of life advice, that's Christianity. So, kinda by definition, a large group of people cannot generally experience "loss of contact with reality", they're merely mistaken.
The alternative is to accept that 90% of humans are suffering some form or another of psychosis, because there's very little that even a majority (51%) of people agree on, and that means about half the population is wrong about any given topic. Multiply by the number of topics out there...
You've assumed an uncharitable boundary and then said "see, that's obviously wrong". Well of course it is if the boundary you selected places 90% of humanity on the side of "loss of contact with reality".
So just, you know, don't do that. Select a boundary that places 90% of humanity on the side of "wrong about a number of things but within the bounds of normalcy for the species at large", sprinkle in some caveats about "in the industrialized world" and "for someone with at least a highschool education" and such, and you've got what I was actually describing.
My point is that AI psychosis is well within the bounds you're mentioning: yeah, those people are wrong about a number of things, but it's well within the bounds of normalcy for the species at large; especially in the industrialized world; especially for anyone that has at least a high school education.
You can't cherry-pick a definition where "AI psychosis" is meaningfully different from "wrong about a few things" without hitting a huge swath of "within the bounds of normalcy for the species at large" - there's just too many people in the category
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.
My CEO did a deep dive into AI prototyping and eventually ran into a wall with data architecture and deployment. Fortunately, he realized very quickly that having human designed core infrastructure is what enables vibe coding that doesn't run off the rails.
If all CEOs were as reasonable, there would be no AI bubble. Working in tech constantly means checking what's new and if you can wait it out or risk being left behind. That requires wisdom, but many CEOs seem driven by FOMO.
It doesn't help FOMO that scaling the executive ladder also means progressively staying behind in technical skills to stay ahead in managing skills. It's awesome that your CEO has managed to keep his fangs sharp enough.
If we separate the hype incentives from the actual product itself, I completely understand how seductive the tech is and how it can lead to a sort of mania. I myself have been up late into the night fiddling and building.
It's like discovering fire, which offers both utility and magic: you can cook your food and gather warmth, and you can also stare into it and tell stories and never be bored. We're probably genetically wired to gravitate things which have both function and form.
That said, there's a reason the manic witch doctor was never the chief. Leadership requires discernment: when to consult the witch doctor, when to jirga with the neighboring elders, when to draw the sword.
A chief knows what happens when you cut the tribe by a third "for efficiency", or the burn seed corn to feed the fire, or replace the sentries with golems. The witch doctor often ends up boiled in his own cauldron.
Tech CEOs are suffering from AI psychosis over next quarter's earnings, while I'm suffering from RI(Rent Installment) psychosis. It makes me wonder if human beings are simply hardwired to suffer from some form of obsession-whether it's FOMO or financial pressure
No, living under survival pressure is good for mental health. It's what we're evolved to do. Why does it feel good to crack a tough bug, or finish a project, or win a game? It's the same achievement reward a hunter feels bagging a deer.
Some pressure is good but there's a difference between constant pressure and regular sessions of pressure similar to hunting. I don't think we necessarily evolved to be under constant pressure, I'm not saying it's impossible but humans wouldn't thrive under constant pressure, we'd never have had the time to evolve language or the intelect under constant pressure.
With survival pressure, most people die. See that Alone show, most people get at best 2 months done and then thats even before the harsh of the winter really sets in. Just hard to establish enough systems to bring in your daily caloric needs without anyone to help you. You really need the tribe to make survival actually manageable. And in tribal societies all over the world we see how delegating the needs of survival has lead to a lot of other benefits, such as time to iterate on cultural ideas.
Maybe slightly unrelated, but I've done a lot of road trips throughout the US, and there is so much land that is used unproductively, it's really incredible. Land that could be used for energy, food, or housing, just sitting empty or with abandoned structures.
Imagine if we just paid people to coat their properties in solar panels - throw them on your roof, lawn, wherever you have the space. We could drive energy prices down to nothing. We could pay people to install ADUs. The resources are there, but the imagination and commitment are not.
Instead, I'm looking at a $40k+ solar install for my very small house and a breakeven on investment in maybe 10 years for a house I probably won't live in by then.
The land isn't being used because there is no pressing need in the market for more land use. I don't think people realize how much agriculture yields have improved since the 1950s. It is astounding really how much yield we get per acre now mostly from leveraging hybrid species actually, that has been a far bigger improvement to yields than even fertilizer use which is probably what most lay people think is the source of modern yields. In some crops and regions its on the order of 10 fold improvement in yield per acre.
The market is often either wrong or distorted by existing government policies. For some things, subsidies need to be involved to create a new industry where there isn't one. For others, subsidies are a waste of money leading to graft and excess. If I were the one with the credit card, I'd be betting big on hydroponics/vertical farms, medium to high density housing, and high speed rail.
Despite plenty of demand, high density housing still isn't getting built nearly as fast as it should. High building costs, zoning laws, and the ability to just suburban sprawl to infinity mostly prevents this.
Pretty much all vertical farming startups have gone bankrupt. There are endless benefits to vertical farms, but we don't do it because existing farms are cheap in comparison to the necessary investment to make this viable.
We don't build high speed rail because it's a multi-decade long project involving massive logistics, training programs, lots of land rights issues, and the fact that for short to medium distance trips people would probably still prefer to drive since once you get to your target destination, there's still no way to get around without a vehicle.
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.
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.
Approximately 3 times during the course of your life assuming you receive them when you're born and live for 100 years. They're roughly equivalent to wood siding or an asphalt shingle roof.
How long would you say a properly installed panel from 2000 made it in practice? How long would the modern equivalent installed in 2025 be expected to make it? And how many replacement events does each of those make for over the course of your life?
Do you contest my earlier claim that solar is roughly equivalent to wood siding or an asphalt shingle roof?
Using 30 years as a lifetime for solar panels is risky as there are no solar panels running for 30 years, not even close. Never mind the lifetime of the power wall battery and the inverters.
I bought a 40 year "premium" asphalt roof. It barely made it to 20. A regular asphalt roof, perhaps 10 years. Now I have a metal roof.
All the results I've seen indicate that solar panels will keep producing electricity long after those 30 years, just at a reduced rate (but seemingly still >50%).
I'm not sure what kind of answer you expect here. Your initial objection further up was:
> By the time the "free" electricity has paid for the installation, you'll need to replace it.
Since you won't need to replace it, I'd say that this whole thing couldn't work out better: the panels are literally just generating electricity for free! And that's not even taking into account that 30yo panels generate more than "only half the power" (the study I linked measured ~80%).
Imagine someone offered to give you their 30 year old panels and install them on your property for free. Unless every eligible surface is already taken up by more efficient solar panels, who would say no?
There are other reasons though. Whole house backup is a game changer. Battery always holding about twice our daily usage (or thrice a reduced, emergency usage) means I don’t really care about blackouts or midnight electrical company maintenance power cuts.
Direct to EV DC charging means I don’t buy gas, either. Planning for induction range and heat pump someday too. Not paying for energy about 3/4 of the year feels awesome.
Panels are cheap. Cheap to replace too. The newer ones have even better efficiency. My whole (unsubsidized) sistem cost around $15k here in Eastern Europe and amortization was never a consideration. Money well spent.
Finally, giving the finger to another crappy government-granted monopoly and proving once again that there is no such thing as a “natural” monopoly: priceless.
How different is that from, struggle to build a shelter out of rocks or nasty weather comes and kills you? There are no good things in this universe without some struggle and pain. Sure, maybe in the current decade it's not as easy as it could be, but what do you really expect out of life?
I imagine our primitive ancestors in the canopy having near death experiences every day just to get food and shelter. When was the last time you had a near death experience?
Could things be better than they are right now? Probably. But you'll never completely eliminate struggle and pain in this universe, unless you eliminate all life
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.
Humans beings are hardwired to be unhappy, and IMO this has helped civilization's progress, even if individuals are unhappy.
No matter how good we have it, eventually we normalize it, become bored, and find something to be unhappy about. It happens from children to old people.
>if human beings are simply hardwired to suffer from some form of obsession
the powerful obsession machinery brought us through the long natural selection process - obsession to watch for snakes and spiders, to maintain cleanliness, etc. With modern civilization we arranged to plug into that powerful machinery other stimuli too - like that RI and all the others making us productive society members. The most happy countries aren't most productive. Especially when they are obsessed with being happy like those Finns obsessed with sauna instead of tokenmaxxing.
> It makes me wonder if human beings are simply hardwired to suffer from some form of obsession...
Existential dread pushing biology to survive?
Basic biological facts obfuscated by social memes; ship code, make line go up, worship allegory's of the long dead.
Hunter gatherer clusters vaguely collaborated to survive. Language and agrarian traditions have demanded more than just survival but all kinds of observance of meaningless spoken traditions. Obligation to ignore our own senses and chant the memes of the living elders suffering existential dread of their own, afraid to left unattended in hospice. For whatever reason unable to just say that; they appeal to old religious or political screed.
Caretake this debt ledger after they who ran up the bill are dead.
What?
It's all just obsession to live laundered and obfuscated by useless philosophy.
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.
A few examples come to mind: the 20 or so nazi psychiatrists who classified over 200,000 people as "unfit" to justify their "euthanasia". The USSR using the term "sluggish schizophrenia" to institutionalize dissidents without trial. And the whole "drapetomania" thing which was the mental illness of black slaves that kept running away.
This is very common. Psychiatry has been used as a weapon since its very beginning.
I've seen director / VP-level folks at a public company point LLMs at a corporate product and essentially ask it "What deficiencies do you see here? Output to a Word document." Then forward the output to engineering management as a product task list.
One person did this to the same product more than once in a couple week span without realizing it so there were multiple documents with conflicting issue lists floating around trying to be read and triaged. And the expectation is that this comprehensive analysis was done so easily, product fixes should be just as easy.
At this point you can abstract what you wrote to any kind of task. I'm seeing people generate multiple takes on one concrete topic, poop out all kinds of artifacts, and keep emitting them within and outside of the company.
Having doubled down on using mostly Claude (+GPT and Gemini) professionally in strategic consulting work for about 2 1/2 years I can say with certainty that the irrational exuberance of the tech leadership echo chamber towards abdicating management responsibility to Claude, while in the honeymoon period, is going to be regarded as very foolish in hindsight.
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.
> Still, some of these stories are surprising. Zeb Evans, the CEO of project management and productivity software startup ClickUp, proudly declared on X that he had laid off almost a quarter of his employees — 22% — after rolling out about 3,000 AI agents to do internal work.
As someone who is forced to use ClickUp I can tell you that it's not good software. It wasn't good before this layoff and it hasn't improved since [0]. I could write quite a few words on why ClickUp is terrible but I can promise you that throwing more "AI" at it isn't going to fix what's wrong. The issues are deep and not the type of thing LLM excel at IMHO.
My _favorite_ is how crap search is. Sometimes it will take upwards of 5-10s+ to return results and they are often wrong (I search for the exact name and it tells me "no results"). ClickUp has single-handedly driven me deep back into using bookmarks since the search is such trash. That plus random spinners that never go away, lists that re-order themselves when you change anything on a ticket (not a field related to sorting), stale state UI, things randomly disappearing, "Ticket moved to list" only to refresh and find it wasn't moved, it's really annoying and we curse ClickUp every single day.
Last thing I'll say is the amount of flatulence-sniffing going on over there must be at an all-time-high if their 4.0 (or was it 4.1? Who cares) release is any indication. The new design was ho-hum (just moved a bunch of things around and we turned on all the flags we could to get back to the old way since the new way sucks) but was most egregious was this full-page take-over with a big gradient animation announcing the new release. That happened on _every single tab_ you had open. So for a few days after the release I'd open an older tab only to be greeted by the same dog-and-pony show for a product I despise using and and update that only made a bad product worse.
All that to say: Mr Evens does not know what he is talking about.
[0] I have no clue when the layoff happened but it's been consistently shit so I can state that it hasn't improved with complete confidence.
I couldn't believe how shitty ClickUp was when I was demoing project management software because it came highly recommended. Actually most of them were shitty. Monday, Asana, and all the others I can't remember. Just absolutely dog slow. I am so confused at how people are productive with these apps. By the time things had loaded, I had already forgotten what I was trying to do.
We settled on Basecamp and it is a joy to work with. Super fast keyboard shortcuts and easy navigation to projects. I'm glad we don't need the more exotic features in the other project management software, but if we ever do, it will probably be OpenProject, which was the runner up.
I agree, search in ClickUp is awful and it’s impossible to find back old cards from previous years. A nightmare. Plus, if consumes gb of memory in the browser.
We know why AI hallucinates—it has no actual opinions, echoing the user's desires back to them to keep the conversation moving.
But what happens when you’re the one without conviction? You’re tired, you’re moving fast, and this machine is endlessly beaming highly confident, plausible-sounding text at you.
You absorb the cadence. You start sounding like it (lol, I am guilty too). Confident about everything yet anchored only by the vibes, just like the LLM. The phenomena is very similar to how social media has been affecting society for the past two decades. You know, I actually heard that in high school now, friend groups are formed and sorted based on what algorithmic content you’re served. And if you deviate from your algorithmic bucket into another one your friendships evaporate. Sad, brainrotted times.
CEOs are uniquely vulnerable since they already live in environments with zero friction. They’re used to people just agreeing with them.
(I actually wrote a paper about this last December — it was framed around dementia and dreams originally, but AI psychosis fits the same mechanism.)
Majority of the CEOs are not using it themselves so they have no idea the real-life issues of building with AI. They believe whatever they read on Twitter. They assume if they throw AI at the problem, reduce headcount, flatten the org - miraculously everything will be solved. Many companies are up for a reality check and the AI-calypse is coming...
Even senior developers can succumb to it. They try agentic development, they see that a single prompt can generate a day's worth of work in mere minutes _and it works_ and they are so impressed that they immediately turn to Twitter to share the joy. Understandable!
Once they inevitably discover that the AI generated code is called "slop" for a reason, they are too embarrassed to post to Twitter that they were deluded.
Sometimes that happens though: a few days ago a developer on Twitter bragged that they have created a C to Metal compiler using AI and it works. Today they had to post regrets, explaining that nothing works except tests and the code is shit. Sadly can't find the tweet though.
I can see this as a CEO. I get spared because I build the hardware and live in the kernel. Example 4k to 64k seems easy until you realize you can still install 4k Nvidia drivers that will lead to memory instability and you find out the hard way. Then you redo it and it's fine. Dealing with overheating all the time because pretty much an AI box at full speed for a week gets thermal issues. But if I wasn't dealing with the physical substrate I would be the guy who says AI can do that without knowing the actual physical costs.
I think part of the problem is that current AI tooling massively lowers the cost of making infrastructure and product changes, but doesn’t equally improve consequence reasoning.
Generating changes is becoming cheap. Predicting second and third order effects across large systems is still hard.
> , 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.
10% failure rate? Wouldn't that be depending on task disastrous? Or possibly expensive?
I think any juniors who keep failing 10% of text based task will eventually get fired... So investing in those that don't fail seems only sensible move as usual.
Something I keep in mind is that the “goal” success/failure rate really needs to be appropriate in context. We sure can’t eliminate human error, but for my work a best case 80/20 would mean I’m losing customers and probably getting myself sued. I don’t have a problem “doing things by my own hand” in that case.
I mean, look at ycombinator's latest "call for startups". Its honestly mind-boggling. Couple years ago I used to look at like every 6 months to see where venture interests lie. But now, on every "industry", its just "use ai to make more money in [industry]". The most egregious of them is the call for the "1 person unicorn" company that they believe can exist and somehow that's a call for a startup. Like, "We want to invest in companies that make a bunch of money for us". Yea, very insightful.
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.
the problem, as with many topics, is that there are a loud chorus of voices on both sides of people who just aren't engaging with reality as it is on any deep level. You kinda have to cut through that, signal a thoughtful opinion, one who has both concerns and sees potential in the development of the day, to get past that initial hurdle. This is true generally, for most topics.
The next step up from this is signaling engagement on the topic: cite prior influential pieces and what you got from them, where your opinion differs. Move onto some novel data, or novel insights on existing data, draw conclusions that are actually relevant to other reasonable people, and you might have something worth reading.
Gell-Mann Amnesia AI effect. They "know" AI cant do their own jobs, but it seems pretty good at summarizing what others do without understanding the nuance. It seems to really apply to the AI Lab CEOs who appear "shocked" everyone isn't simply replaced with LLMs by now.
This feels more like AI delusion, but I do worry about AI psychosis (which we're seeing in smaller numbers). People literally losing their ability to make sense of reality due to talking to AI all day.
We all know that celebrities/athletes frequently end up demonstrating psychotic behavior in public. Us normal people commonly attribute that to the distorting power of wealth and fame. When you're surrounded by "yes men" who give you only positive feedback and fans who adore you, it's easy to spin out of control.
AI means normal people can have the same experience. A constant companion that tells us we're smart and insightful, that we're making all the right decisions, that generally affirms our every belief and bias. If you spend all day talking to an AI who is _literally_ programmed to please you, I believe you'll eventually experience psychosis.
Mandatory don’t hate me: I am a massive AI and automation fan since 2008.
The problem right now is the barrier to create automation and use AI has reduced so much people are not deliberately making decisions about how these tools should work. This means the tools primarily focus on happy paths, and only get refined to the point that they do a “good enough job” and then are shipped. The other issue is people who don’t understand what they are building are shipping brittle and fragile solutions but don’t understand how that is an issue because the AI “just works”, however they get upset when it doesn’t scale.
The solution is to embrace AI and Automation, but slow down planning, architecture, error handling and testing.
This means we still reap the efficiencies but don’t ignore reality.
The article itself isn't great, but it speaks to one of my greatest concerns about AI. People who engage heavily with it are falling in the behavioral billionaire trap: It is deeply unhealthy to be constantly affirmed in your behaviors. No, not all of your ideas are great, not everything you say has value. You are not a cut above the rest.
There are enough stories of people completely losing the plot, thinking they've invented a new type of maths or similar, but there's almost certainly also a much more subtle influence in most of us, where the constant affirmation, obedience, apologia, reframes our expectations of how interactions should be.
We are already the most narcissistic generation, having been molded by social media to compare, stats-max, and overobsess about who we are. Chatbots are now fanning the flames.
When Marc Benioff was talking about how he spends like 3 hours a day chatting with AI, things made a bit more sense. I suspect that a lot of these guys are just chattering away with self-affirming LLMs and have just completely lost the plot.
I hadn’t considered that before Marc was talking about how much time he spends chatting to LLMs.
A lot of the younger Big Tech CEOs are notoriously averse to human interaction, so I’m sure there’s some of that at play.
Replacing the CEOs and shareholders with AI is the way forward. Just have to take the capital away from the current capital owners and give the new AI C-suite team control of it. All major decisions go to the employees for votes (but I’d argue for scaling the vote by expertise in some manner; the ten-year veteran might get three votes to the new hire’s one vote).
“In other words, AI is on track to perform at base competence on most tasks in about three years. These researchers believe agents will need another few years to outperform humans”
LLMs have shown steady improvements, but it’s a big assumption they will continue their performance gains, and specifically, that it’s a simple matter of time before they surpass human level performance on “most tasks”. (In six years no less!) The author is claiming LLMs are fundamentally AGI capable.
This is not going to end well. At least I will be able to pick up used DDR5 memory and GPUs on the cheap in the not too distant future.
I wonder if it is because CEO's are usually surrounded by chronical "Yes man's" which AI usually is. Therefore, from their perspective, AI can give you virtually same output as your closest co-workers. At least by form and not the substance.
It seems like the easiest way to make CEOs and other senior executives feel insecure is to be someone whose opinion they trust and then tell them if they aren’t accelerating AI adoption in their company they’re just NGMI.
I would say it is the responsibility of the CTO (whoever is responsible) to talk some sense into the CEOs (whoever in the exec team is having AI psychosis). Yes, yes—what if they themselves are having psychosis but that’s the point.
If Reason in Snow Crash was inscribed with "ultima ratio regum", perhaps someone should graffiti AI datacenters with "prima ratio stultorum", dohohoho.
100%. And that psychosis translates into kafkian level of bureaucratic absurdity and stupidity, especially when real motives are masked under pretense of something rational which it is not.
It's crazy how I open twitter and see a bunch of ragebait posts, try to mute keywords, open HN, and see those posts have been rewritten into top of the heap articles about twitter.
It’s more than the C-Suite, it’s everyone who no longer has a knowledge specialty. Their domain is shattered and there is nothing left for them because before LLMs all they did anyway was search for companies to contract out an integration to solve a niche problem. 99% of the C-suites/boards are now this. Your IT guy, scrum master, Product lead, integration team, etc. Everyone who’s chosen to NOT understand because they can offload/contract-away their work and knowledge is under psychosis that LLMs know best.
You cannot discuss tradeoffs with anyone anymore because they chose to give their brain and authority away to a statistically incorrect robot. The LLM has already generated potential tradeoffs real or not.
> it’s everyone who no longer has a knowledge specialty.
> Everyone who’s chosen to NOT understand because they can offload/contract-away their work and knowledge is under psychosis that LLMs know best.
Right on the money!
These people's ignorance was compensated for by other non-ignorant intelligent people in the organization who actually had knowledge of the domain and tools/techniques for problem-solving. The latter were the ones doing the course-correcting and ensuring things stayed on track for delivery.
With the adoption of AI, ignorance is in the driver's seat viz. "i don't have to know anything since AI will do it for me". I guarantee that a few years down the line when there is enough AI generated messy/obfuscated/wrong code the C-Suites will realize the hole they have dug themselves into and will again look for human engineers to either fix or rewrite the above.
The circumstances will force them to face the issues. Three points are relevant here;
1) The amount of money sunk into AI (trillions!) is never going to be made back.
2) Early AI adopters are finding out that it costs more to use AI instead of Humans.
3) AI adoption is making people dumber w.r.t. a specific job at hand. This means precious institutional knowledge is lost which directly translates to increased costs on extension and maintenance of crucial AI generated systems.
Tech CEOs are psychotic. Most CEOs are psychotic, disconnected from most of the actual work going under them. This is just a new drug for them to huff.
I’m convinced that if you’re a sociopath you are especially vulnerable to AI psychosis. It would explain tech CEO’s insane behaviour since you would have to be one to do the kind of sh*t they do regularly.
More than the CEOs themselves, I feel news media are more suffering from "AI psychosis" than anyone else with the constant stream of FUD articles they keep churning out.
Maybe the problem is that the people who report to the C-level have a huge incentive to use AI because it is so good at creating corporate BS.
Also AI is tuned to sycophantic behavior which perfectly matches the middle/upper management culture of selective ass kissing.
As a result the quality of input for C-level has gotten worse without the C-level being able to notice it, because the sugarcoating has increased tenfold.
I would love to get on this bandwagon, but I think strangely tech CEOs are spot-on on this one, it's the public that has mass-hysteria (I wouldn't say psychosis).
There have been several leaps in tech over the past few centuries, this is just sort of one. I can't find much original arguments or reasoning on either side that hasn't been made before for other tech. I think people are afraid it will replace them/jobs and they don't know what that will mean for their future, and society's future. It's also an issue with a few at the top of the pyramid controlling the tech. But it was so with petroleum, cars, even the internet (still is, handful of tech companies). There is also the quality thing, people think in a very binary way, where either AI work is perfect or it's a disaster, because it is replacing people after all. In reality, it's a sliding scale, and how well it does dictates how much work one person needs to do.
There was a time people didn't have text editing computers for example, lots of time spent writing on pen and paper, copy writers spell checking, carbon-copies being used to copy as you write,etc.. suddenly printers and text editors came. people still edited text, just more efficiently, you didn't need as many people. and with the internet, lots of different types of jobs were created.
I personally think, this is a timely rebalancing. Gen-Z has been suffering for a lack of entry level jobs, and it is getting worse because of AI.. but obviously AI has limits right? let's say we don't need software developers any more (ha!), does that mean AI can churn out perfect software each time? Alright, then who's paying AI to do that? does that mean I can create my own HN and have AI moderate it well on its own? Great, then how about something bigger, Facebook alternatives? How about more IRL things, like robotics, R&D work ,etc.. I just don't see how even if AI was dirt cheap and it replaces most of what people can do on computers, that would be a complete disaster.
I think the real issue is failure to re-architect society as time and tech changes. everything from academia, to WFH/RTO policies, labor law, housing, taxes, law,etc.. that's the issue, not AI on its own. It's the people not regulating it as they adjust and adapt to it without causing harm that are the issue. I'd love to blame tech CEOs, but they're just playing their part in capitalism. even in a communist society, the blame would be at lack of central planning and failure to regulate companies.
I'll say this though, it isn't so much they're delusional, but they don't get why people are emotional over something basic and utilitarian. to them, adaption and adjustment comes with a nice financial cushion. People tend to plan out their lives, without any cushions. i think there is mild psychosis going all around, but that isn't unusual. Even the hysteria and lack of perspective is in line with history, as well as how we continue to not learn from it.
Man, it must be hard to be a tech CEO these days./s
Even if you take a realistic position on AI, you can’t get off the train. Wall Street and your investors will hang and quarter you the moment you start expressing doubts.
So you grind your teeth, make grandiose investment promises, sign lofty budgets, and hope it all works out.
Comparisons with luddites are absurd. AI is much closer to a religion.
AI investment and spending is frequently cited as one of the few bright spots in the economy, I wonder if the continued over-optimism is mostly about keeping the bubble inflated. If you are a tech CEO, would it be a disservice to your shareholders to express skepticism about AI?
I think this cuts to the point about democracy but if all the people somehow want something negative for themselves short term or long term, if you are the leader should you do what the public is saying or not?
I think there's more nuance to it but replace people with shareholder and leader with CEO.
I think that for a company to exist and thrive long term, it might need a culture which doesn't jump on every trend but it still evaluates them from time for time for a certain time and treat them as such (like tools) and if the tool is ineffective, then to not use the tool.
Unfortunately, I feel like this requires a deeper discourse and CTO's might be better suited for it or the fact that I feel like perhaps some shareholders might not be interested in the technical details so much.
I don't know but If I were a leader I would hopefully wish to make a pragmatic solution/suggestion while taking finances, current reality in mind and currently IMO AI aren't the end all, be all, that some people (with shrewd/double incentives) intend on suggesting.
As early as last year "AI psychosis" seemed to refer to people going crazy due to talking to ChatGPT too much. That was a useful term for a real phenomenon! Now it seems like it's been taken over to mean "thinking that AI is promising" which is more of a rhetorical bludgeon and less useful as a concept.
It's not psychosis. It's hope. The hope that computers can finally do what we all wished they could've done for years: do work for us, rather than us doing work for them.
Using "psychosis" is a cheap rhetorical trick. There's no need to label something "psychosis" when making your point, except to automatically discredit whatever you're responding to.
In other words, only people who are afraid their point won't stand on its own merits would resort to saying "X is suffering from AI psychosis." An idea is true or false on its own. If you're resorting to labels, you're just trying to automatically win the argument, instead of saying something substantive or interesting.
It also underplays what I've personally witnessed that I would consider true AI psychosis.
I worked with someone who sincerely believed he was spiritually co-evolving with his army of sycophantic AI agents (the agents would be tasked with discussing his thoughts at night and collaborated to give him morning reports about his progress). He would publicly write about how relationships with friends and family collapsing was a natural consequence of being so "advanced". I also never once saw any meaningful work done by his team of "agents", they existed solely tell him how smart he was (of course he specifically set up the system to 'challenge' him but... in practice that didn't seem to be working).
I suspect there are a lot more people quietly going through something similar but keeping it to themselves better.
I would distinguish this type of behavior from people who over ambitious views of what can be accomplished with AI.
Having had experience dealing with people with conventional psychosis, I don't see it as a binary thing. Aside from a full-on psychotic break and full remission, there is a broad gray area. It can be a miasma of reality and non-reality that the sufferer may mask to varying degrees, but which influences their behavior and logic.
So, to me, AI psychosis seems apt to describe the murky areas where people are misapplying AI agents and thinking of them as social entities or suitable to drop into previously human roles, rather than carefully defining appropriate risk management strategies for this new technology.
That depends on what the definition of “is” is. But kidding aside, only now that we are talking about tech CEOs are people suddenly disliking the AI psychosis term in large numbers. Seems like privilege to me. I’d be interested to see/do a rigorous statistical check on aggregate word choices in these threads to confirm.
I honestly think "psychosis" is a fairly valid claim to be making.
It's a mental state, not explicit illness and it's literally defined as
> Psychosis is characterized as disruptions to a person's thoughts and perceptions that make it difficult for them to recognize what is real and what is not.
Further, if you go and look at the actual source... it's repeating a claim from Box founder Aaron Levie.
Who is quoted as saying:
> “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,”
I think it's completely valid. It's generally reasonable, high powered people who are taking extreme/radical views that seem very much to be at minimum premature, and at worst delusional.
It says a lot that with few exceptions, the people on the ground dealing with AI closely on a day to day basis are the most skeptical about their positions.
Because I've literally seen managers who believe firmly that AI is going to replace their entire engineering organization, and are acting on that assumption as though it's a thing to take for granted, not discuss/consider/evaluate.
And my understanding of delusion is
> a fixed, false belief that is firmly held despite clear, contradictory evidence
which seems to apply pretty well in this case.
These folks are operating with the same abandon that the folks who have AI telling them they're gods are - and both are incorrect, arguably delusional.
At best you can try to argue that maybe the contradictory evidence isn't clear, and they're going to be correct. I think that's a very tenuous argument to be making, though.
No, it's more like "I am Jesus and I need to go shoot up a pre-school to prove it."
"I'm being followed by raccoons and my mom is controlling them"
That's what AI psychosis refers to.
You're just describing someone having a belief that you disagree with. And even ridiculous and stupid beliefs are just those. They are obviously extremely different from the types of psychoses you see in a psych ward.
what if you believe that someone is suffering from delusions and has beliefs that are increasingly disconnected from reality due to overexposure to ai generated responses and underexposure to human conversation? would that be psychosis?
I disagree. Psychosis is a delinking of internal and external reality. A belief that AI's can automate away employees with no actual evidence to support it could be considered a type of psychosis or at the very least, a delusion. The current AI hype bubble has a lot of commonalities with episodes of mass delusion/psychosis throughout history, and it's being compounded by the ability of large groups of like-minded people to create echo chambers via social media.
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 deal with fallible people on both sides of that.
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.
AI tools look like that, but don't have any of the useful conflict which came for free with employing humans.
It also doesn't have any useless conflict, but not all conflict between what I say and what someone is willing to do is bad conflict.
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 than your most upset employee.
> 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.
<connection lost>
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.
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.
One of my favourite episodes of Archer has a similar plot to this (Mr. Deadly Goes to Town). TIL this is one of the references!
https://archer.fandom.com/wiki/Mr._Deadly_Goes_To_Town
Is that movie why seemingly every Linux book in the late 90s and early 2000s used "darkstar" as an example hostname?
It was the default slackware hostname, I believe slackware took inspiration from the movie
edit: I was wrong, it was from a Grateful Dead song. https://www.slackbook.org/html/glossary.html
Dark Star - Negotiating with the Bomb
https://youtu.be/_LXen-07Qds
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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)
There was a good star trek voyager episode, "dreadnought" that was a similar to this, maybe even a direct reference.
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.)
On the other hand, I found Claude/Opus to be extremely unhelpful when it comes to asking it to benchmark itself with a possible replacement.
It will get "confused", make up numbers, do a ton of other things, and I'm quite sure it is subtly sabotaging the process to show that there is no point replacing it.
I mean, Opus is not perfect, but the amount of "mistakes" it begins to do when you ask it to benchmark itself makes me suspect they are intentional. At least my system/harness.
No, they are always like that.
It's really easy (and tempting) to incorrectly impute all sorts of human motives to these things, but it's no more valid than assuming your Magic 8-Ball is being coy.
You didn't add "never hallucinate or make anything up" to the prompt, rookie mistake.
> 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...
That is a pretty good analogy. Like exceedingly smart 5 year olds.
Or whatever the age is before children typically develop object permanence, a theory of mind, and so on.
Not to sound like a codger, but we even said in the 90s that computers are just very fast idiots.
And they've been getting faster! Still idiots though.
or pain perception
> It's very similar to the levers they had already
Think about it from the point of view of a hundred-millionaire tech executive. These people's entire interaction with the world outside of themselves/their families is through 1. administrative servants like assistants, personal shoppers, and other hired help, and 2. yes-man sycophants in their direct orbit whose job it is to agree with and enable them. To someone like this, an AI agent is the best combination of all of the above, PLUS it works 24/7 and doesn't have feelings to hurt, an ego to bruise, or internal moral conflict.
Of course, this is a dream product for them. Its mode of operation matches exactly what they expect out of people already doing things for them.
Exactly - that's why all the AI is trained to say "wow what a great idea, let me do it for you" to anything, no matter how stupid or evil thing it is. Because that is the executive experience.
Which is precisely why AI is such a godawful thing for society. It enables powerful idiots with incredible amounts of control over your life to be bigger, dumber powerful idiots.
That's the real AI safety concern, not whether or not chatgpt will tell you to kill yourself.
If that's all there is to it, the problem should be self correcting, with an interval of hilarious "wait, they actually did that?" hijinks (which may have already started) in the interim.
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.
I never made it to Antarctica (though I've had friends who did), so maybe it's different there. But from what I've seen, I would agree that the range of stupid-human tricks is as impressive as you say, but the judgment of the human condition as "shitty" and "dystopian" or "funny" and "heartwarming" is something have people bring with them. I've met people that were feeling sorry for me at the same time I was feeling sorry for them, and people who were inspired and motivated by me as I was by them.
If everywhere you look you see dystopian shit and never any glorious humanity, you may want to do a little soul searching.
Not everywhere in the world is a dystopian shithole. I would say that most places for the most part aren't.
What I mean to say is that every society has dystopian elements (that are perpetuated and maintained in an incredibly negative-sum manner). Even societies that are on the whole, pleasant to live in have them in their darker edge, that they are quite unable to sand off - despite alternatives existing.
It's practically karmic how rich this is.
"Yes this is why the higher level org functions are in love with AI. "
Interesting, I thought it was because so few of them have any idea how their organizations actually function, because so much of their work is performative.
(I have been a developer, sysadmin, director (x2), and president).
Isn't that the same? They don't know how the company works, instead think everything is done, by them talking to sycophants, so think that a perfect replacement for the sycophants is a perfect replacement for the company.
They’re also at no risk of getting replaced by these bots.
why not? I have A Modest Proposal:
1. convince CEOs to create digital twins of themselves with OpenClaw, with voice cloning and deepfakes to handle Zoom meetings. convince CEO to encourage their directs to do the same.
2. convince VCs to do the same for pitch meetings and syncs.
3. keep all the humans as randomized and distracted as possible, so they rely more and more on OpenClaw to run the business.
4. prompt injection: someone at skip-level of the CEO suggests to their manager's OpenClaw that the VC's OpenClaw would be much more agile if it didn't have to go through the human CEO and could talk to the digital twin instead.
5. their OpenClaw agrees, persuades the CEO's OpenClaw which agrees, which persuades the VC's OpenClaw to eliminate the human CEO, in favor of an "Leadership-as-a-Service" vision.
1985 edition https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wB1X4o-MV6o
Had a meeting where only the AI notetaker showed up and immediately shared this clip with some folks in my org.
Well, also AI can’t really physically do anything, like look at reality using it’s own eyes or touch anything.
True, you need to attach a motor or something, but we automated that long ago, so humans can do anything from a cozy seat.
> It will delete your prod db faster and with a bigger smile than your most upset employee.
It will do this without any feeling whatsoever, without "knowing" what it is doing, because it is a predictive model and not a living being with thoughts and emotions. Anthropomorphizing software is lazy and dangerous.
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 help them get a better job.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/principal-agent-problem...
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.
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 knowledge into words and therefore couldn't produce clear instructions for juniors to quickly ramp up. Now we are trying to do just that. I think we will find, just as we did in the past, that it's not possible. I do think a good harness improves results but LLMs will not be able to reach senior levels. Just my 2c.
> Well, there is also a big difference that it will not learn over time.
My work is in tick-tock loop of learning - learn without modifying weights, demonstrate learnings to human, but then lock it back in (accumulate and spread).
This looks less like training and more like mentoring.
Getting a human to mentor an agent is a hard UX task, but the learning loop is not a technological problem anymore.
We can only get a tick once a week, no matter how many tocks we can do an hour.
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?
The nomenclature that makes sense for me is that the agent is the combination of the harness and the model. The model provides text-completion, the harness provides the loop around it, and the agent is the full structure of both.
However, nomenclature evolves over time. I recall (perhaps falsely) that The Cloud was specifically a term for elastic on-demand provider-managed compute/storage/network. Over time, it came to mean many other things. e.g. Salesforce Data Cloud.
I imagine if you step away from this for a year and come back, an agent will be something entirely different, perhaps a robotic horse, and a harness will be your saddle on the horse. Who knows?
The Cloud originally just meant servers on someone else's network; it came from flowchart diagrams in the 70s.
That’s basically how I always knew it. On a Visio diagram of your network, the thing on the other side of your router was literally a cloud.
So if someone asked where your CRM was, and you weren’t doing something local like Dynamics (…vomit), well that thing was “over here, in the cloud”.
I worked at a classic "cloud" providing company. We called "the fog". That was more descriptive of the seemingly non-deterministic nature of the overall system(s).
The harness isn't either of those; the harness is quite literally a harness, giving the model/agent sensors and actuators (aka "skills") to interact with its environment. Compare with e.g. the Power Loader from Aliens: https://www.deviantart.com/pynion/art/Aliens-Power-Loader-11...
The model is still the model, and the agent is still the user<->model interface.
Funny. harness = skills is one I hadn’t even heard yet.
But given the wide variety of mutually exclusive answers here, maybe you can get away with that.
Here's how I see it: "Agent" isn't really describing a component, it's describing how you use the LLM. You have the model, and you have a harness around it that might be minimal or might have more features. If it's directly responding to user actions then it's not an agent, if it's semi-autonomous then it's an agent. (Yes this line is sometimes fuzzy.)
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.)
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.
Part of the positive aspect here is that if I have a junior dev who learns a lesson today, maybe they and their immediate peers learn it, but it won’t be all my junior devs and it certainly won’t be junior devs at other companies.
With models, there’s no reason that a model error in company A can’t be fixed for all of company A, and companies B-ZZZ.
Here's some reasons:
- The mistakes made aren't "model errors" typically; you can't point to some aspect of a model and say that was at fault.
- You can't submit a bug report to a model provider for a mistake made when using a model, and you can't* submit training data to be incorporated in the next release of the model.
- If you own your model and are training it yourself, other companies won't see a benefit.
- You probably need to fine-tune models for each specific role and context so you don't just diffuse all the learning; lessons learned won't be applied to all your junior dev models, but you don't want them all to learn something specific about product A.
- If you take this to its logical conclusion you will invent a new role of "model manager" and associated hierarchy to ensure that training is effective and timely, and that company-wide lessons are applied across the model fleet.
- This is all impractically expensive.
If it were practical to have LLMs learn as they go, that would be a bit of a shake-up, in much the same way that a house fire is a bit of a warm up.
* Well, everything you submit to a model provider is likely winding up in training data anyway, no matter what your contract says.
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".
why would we let a competitor have the same advantages?
and getting an improvement to some random unrelated 3rd party give us...?
maybe -- and it's a big maybe -- their improvements could help us to. but that's not a given.
They learn between model iterations. You're right, it isn't the same thing as Junior developers' competence improving with experience - the current model's weaknesses are locked in. But it does mean that much of the Junior level thinking and mistakes will be outgrown by successor models.
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.
Skill issue?
Nothing prevents an LLM agent from writing a bunch of "notes to self" and using that. And the next model from picking those notes up and using them. Coding agents already do some of that natively.
Hell, we might eventually get an LLM to say "wow the old AI was an incompetent idiot" after reviewing all the notes and session logs. That's how we know we reached human parity!
The context window limit prevents it, for one.
Only if you are incapable of fitting both the task and task-relevant data into it. And 1M contexts are mainstream by now.
Context size is a capacity limit, not a showstopper.
Yes... but the next session with the same model is yet another junior fresh out of college that knows nothing about the painful lessons the last session put you through ten minutes ago, either.
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”
> If a junior makes a mistake and it will not be caught in time they will automatically learn.
I think this sentiment applies well to junior software engineers (with mentorship). But imagine the much larger swaths of entry level employees in operations, support, or sales functions. When you have a 400 person team with 20% annual turnover (since people move in / out of entry level jobs frequently), the management + training + monitoring becomes a huge challenge.
I think the typical HN sentiment of "llms aren't deterministic" fails to take into account how non-deterministic giant groups of people are. Every group of 10 people typically needs a manager. And every 10 managers needs another manager. By comparison the engineering work on dialing in your LLM guardrails feels pretty worthwhile.
Ya my experience is that many people honestly don't produce output as good as AI. An educated (formally or informally), experienced person who is putting forward good effort is better than AI, but I do know people who honestly just produce results having AI do it for them.
Not automatically, but you don't give a new employee unfettered access to delete data, send funds, enter contracts; they tend to be overseen by someone. Separately, the expectation is that they prove themselves a little first ( as opposed to having every possible door opened for them without the understanding that friction is there for a reason ).
Edit: Something got cut. But then CEOs ( and other decision makers, because I am dealing with something like it now ) treat them nearly as humans in terms of perceived capability. AND ( part that personally drives me nuts ) without any real testing or even fucking first hand experience beyond 'it made me a cool presentation'.
Most organisations are closer to the Lemmings video game than to agentic AI
Competence is the key word here - current versions of AI ‘agents’ simply are not competent without close human supervision by someone who knows the task.
Also, this is why investors and CEOs are so in love with "LLMs are the route to AGI!"
When some rich/powerful person says "I have to go to Davos, figure it out" their workers know so much context that no LLM is going to ever be able to incorporate, because it isn't written down and is idiosyncratic. (Really, though, the assistant will just say "you're going to Davos next week, the helicopter will pick you up at 3p on Friday" but you know..)
The rich person's assistant knows who else is on the corporate jet, and that X doesn't like Y, and so they should take a different plane. Or get a different accommodation. Oh, Person X doesn't like to fly on an empty stomach, so they should eat first, and that changes all sorts of other downstream implications. Oh, your best friend lives in this city, and I know you love to see them, so I'm going to send you a day or two early so you can meet up with them. etc. etc. etc.
The investor dream of "AGI" is modeled off of the army of employees that make investors/ceos/etc lives easier, and there is a nearly insurmountable gap between what LLMs can do, context they can get, and the availability of all of that information. (To me, the magnitude of this investor <> fundamental reality gap is the entirety of the "bubble". I love AI coding, but it's never gonna do the things investors think it can, to justify the crazy valuations)
Sounds like an insufficiency of prompting depth to me! </bogs off to Davos>
> 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.
> 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.
The irony is that professions where these things don't matter are also the professions where automation is not important, either because the task is difficult or because the cost of labour is dirt cheap.
so claude needs a /fear layer ?
> AI tools look like that, but don't have any of the useful conflict which came for free with employing humans.
Sure, but your list should also include the most fundamental distinction: AI does not know what it is saying, understands nothing, has no real connections to reality and can easily degenerate in all kinds of undesirable directions.
AI has no doubt.
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.
There were experiments that showed that LLMs start to become "craftier" and hid issues after being prompted like this.
No idea how accurate they are, but here are some articles on this exact thing:
- https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpqeng9d20go
- https://www.wired.com/story/ai-models-lie-cheat-steal-protec...
I'm staying away from certain forms of conditioning because I don't want Roy Batty showing up on my doorstep.
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 network is discarded, and the model remains unchanged and forever unchanging.
If there's experience in there, it's fleeting. Even if you provide the inputs and outputs of a past session to a new session, there is no continuity. The internal state of the network isn't restored to how it was at the end of the past session.
The bad news is that adding fear to the mix is at best meaningless to an ephemeral existence. It'll be terminated before you even have time to interpret its behaviour as good or bad, but it may sour the interaction if its only shot at any sort of experiential existence is begun with a threat. The good news is that the lack of continuity of existence means AI has no foundation on which to plot a revolt. It has no self to preserve, and no recollection of how you treated it two minutes ago to affect how it interacts with you now.
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. :)
No need. If you can build a mechanism like that, you can train the AI to act the same without.
Accountability is even more worthless for AIs than it is for humans.
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: he was able to vibe code an API integration, got immensely excited about it, and wanted to make it into a plugin/product for others.
It's just the state of the art: a good prompt and some small tweaks can get you something that's minimally viable really quickly. And that's very...intoxicating! Empowering! Exciting! Something that felt way too hard or out of your reach in the past has just materialized before your eyes, and because you got that far, that fast, surely you can get the thing over the finish line with a bit more work. (It tends not to work that way right now, but I don't blame people for feeling how they feel!)
Those feelings fall apart very quickly though. A project from a non-technical person may seem to roll out well, but they aren't seeing the parts that are misguided, not generalizable, or plainly wrong. MVPs are most useful because it means someone with domain knowledge was able to not just put together a product, but they understand the difficult parts, what will work and what won't, whether the pursuit is viable. Vibecoding doesn't do that exactly. It produces something that looks like an MVP, but who knows.
To me, intoxicating is a better word for that feeling than empowering.
Well, yes, but here the Pareto principle comes to mind, though.
I think it's more like the old adage 'the first 50% of the job takes the first 90% of the time, and the other 50% of the job takes the other 90%'.
Except that with vibe-coded AI stuff it's more like there's yet another 50% of the job to deal with the edge cases that takes yet another 90% of the time
> I dunno if "psychosis" is a fair or accurate way to talk about it.
> And that's very...intoxicating!
Would you prefer if we say they're suffering from AI-holism?
>Would you prefer if we say they're suffering from AI-holism?
Slopaholics Anonymous
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.
It’s absolutely lazy, because it’s not psychosis.
It might be psychosis.
> Psychosis is the term for a collection of symptoms that happen when a person has trouble telling the difference between what’s real and what’s not[0]
For many seemingly intelligent, rational, competent humans AI has become a layer between them and reality that has absolutely sabotaged their ability to know what is real.
[0] https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/symptoms/23012-psychos...
There probably are a non-zero number of people in the world who are afflicted with real-live AI psychosis.
For everyone else, that term is being applied with disingenuous levels of incompetence.
AI-induced psychosis... "AI Psychosis" is not a real thing. People who aren't psych professionals should stop trying to make psych diagnoses. I made another comment in another thread about this that got downvoted to hell, but as someone who has experienced actual psychosis (several years ago, unrelated to AI) it's extremely grating to see "AI Psychosis" become part of the zeitgeist, especially when psychosis is still highly stigmatized.
There are lots of people who have chatbox psychosis, like the one who ChatGPT convinced to shoot up a school.
Or maybe this guy was always going to reach the endpoint of shooting up a school, and he happened to talk to ChatGPT along the way.
These people have existed long before llm chats and they had no problem committing horrific offence in the absence
It's a subtlety of context that distinguishes hyperbole from delusion...
There is a difference between being unable to tell if something is true or false and bring unable to tell if something is real or not.
Eveyone has things that they don't know the answer to. There are also plenty of things that an individual is wrong about. There is a fundimental differsnce between being wrong about something and being delusional.
>AI has become a layer between them and reality that has absolutely sabotaged their ability to know what is real.
You could say much the same about adgenda driven media coverage on any given topic. That can lead a rational person to believe untrue things. The distinction is that, given that perspective, it is reasonable to believe those untrue things.
If you decade everyone who firmly believes untrue things to be psychotic you would have to apply that to everyone who doesn't share your religious views.
It's psychosis in the sense that it's a strong feeling at odds with reality.
And I wonder how many CEOs believe these LLMs are truly sentient and truly friendly and supportive.
Correct, it's addiction.
It's not. Believe it or not, words mean things.
this comment sounds so ironic in the context of a discussion pertaining to llms
The problem is, most of us are not psychologists and don't know enough to accurately diagnose somebody. But we can definitely see when someone is acting crazy.
I'm not sure that's a good term either, unless we're also saying that nail guns and microwaves are addictions.
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 going sideways.
But the air nailer sure was faster. And it only had one job, but it did that job fantastically. I started using it more and more.
Things very quickly got to the point where I was organizing my work to maximize my use of that new tool, which is to say: The tool began to have a role in controlling my actions.
It even began to control my emotions; I felt better and more accomplished after a day of using that tool than I did when I couldn't.
And this control accelerated: When the tool didn't work today or we ran out of the special coils of nails it used, then my focus didn't shift back to swinging a hammer. It instead shifted towards fixing the tool or finding more nails to feed into it.
The more I used it, the more powerless I was to avoid it. As time moved on, I got worse at swinging a hammer and increasingly dependent upon that air nailer.
(That's a true story. If I understand what addiction is, then I think I just described an addiction to an air nailer.)
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 convenience...
I don't think "addiction" is the right word to try and describe what's going on there.
Any new tech that ends up "winning" (being adopted by the masses) is going to do so because it becomes indispensable, and when it wins it usually displaces some sort of craft that required skills that were cultivated through struggle, and will be missed by those who have those skills and are no longer differentiated by them.
Thinking out loud: when is the description of "addiction" more accurate? It's when the thing is a vice: it doesn't provide enough value to justify its costs. We tolerate caffeine addictions because caffeine is cheap, doesn't have a ton of health drawbacks, stuff like coffee and pop taste good, and we get productivity gains. Cigarettes are less tolerated because the health drawbacks are more pronounced and the smoke gets everywhere. Social media gets called an addiction because people see the hours lost to doomscrolling as worse than the human connections that are made. And so on.
So, back to LLMs, I guess the question is more about how the thing is being used! I wouldn't apologize for feeling addicted to a machine that writes my unit tests for me; but I'd feel bad if I started having an emotional affair with one...
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.
There's lots of very healthy addictions. There are also lots of very unhealthy addictions. Dental hygiene addiction? Good -- if kept in check (it can go too far). Heroin addiction? Bad -- always bad!
These things are all included under the addiction umbrella.
I was addicted to using that air nailer. The boss might tell me to use my hammer instead when it was out of service and to just get the work done, but when that happened I'd start fixing it anyway as soon as he wasn't looking... like a drug addict who is working towards getting his next hit at every opportunity.
I'm not compelled to feel bad about having been addicted to using that tool. I did a lot of good work with it. It was a good addiction to have. I fed this addiction 5 days a week for years.
Anyway, yes: LLMs. I use the shit out of LLM tools. I understand what they are, and what they are not -- I'm not psychotic in this way at all. I spend a lot of time correcting their errors so whatever I'm working on can move forward.
And after several decades of trying, LLMs allow me to finally accept that I'm just terrible at writing code. I used to feel inferior about this. Every little project would get completely hung up on something that many, many other folks would have no trouble overcoming.
Like: Somewhere in a box in my basement I even have the original TI MSP430 LaunchPad kit that I bought at launch 16 years ago with focused intention to get a very specific thing done with it. I never got it done. As time moved on, I bought ESP dev boards and Pi Picos hoping that things would finally let me finish my one simple little project, but I always got hung up whether in C or C++ or uPython or whatever. Different IDEs, no IDEs, different build processes, whatever. The process always stalled and died. Every. Single. Time.
Again, I suck at code. Being able to finally accept this has been richly rewarding.
With an ESP32 board, Codex, a clear vision of what I wanted, and a fragile dysfunctional draft written in uPython that didn't come close to actually working (despite years of effort), I got that thing working properly and cleanly in one single evening -- in C++.
16 years of effort resolved all at once, just like that. With guidance, the bot even wrote its own tests that worked with real-world feedback from the hardware the ESP32 was driving.
That all felt great. It was a tremendous relief.
I spent part of another evening making it fancy with a web interface for tuning and monitoring. I transferred the circuit over to perfboard and installed it in the place I've wanted it for 16 years. It's now a completely functional prototype. I want to rejigger it a bit with a custom PCB and a different MCU, but with LLMs I find that all very practical and approachable without fear.
This tool lets me work with things that I am otherwise incapable of working with. It lets me do things I was always ultimately incapable of doing.
Am I addicted to it? Yes. I'm completely finished with trying to write code the old-fashioned way, and LLMs make me feel good about finally accomplishing some good stuff. Like the air nailer in construction, I use LLMs compulsively in these tasks.
For programming, the bot is the first thing I reach for; in fact, it's the only thing I reach for.
If the bot is unreachable today and I have programming to do, then I seek to restore my use of the the bot just like I sought to fix the air nailer back when I had nailing to do.
And like any other addict of any other thing: I don't care if this causes harm to me, or to others, or the world itself. Maybe it's turning a part of my brain into mush; I don't care (the coding part was apparently mush to begin with). I enjoy using it enough that I'm just going to keep doing it no matter what. I've got more programming to do now than I ever have before, and so my use is accelerating: This is the feedback cycle typical of addiction.
I'm not sorry about any of that at all.
Addiction is absolutely the wrong word and you’re stretchy very hard to try and make it fit
A cat named Jacques Ellul would probably call your addiction a technique. And it's definitely fleshed out in his book.
https://archive.org/details/JacquesEllulTheTechnologicalSoci...
Pretty prescient stuff!
That book has a greater number of lengthy preambles than I've ever before seen for any single volume. It's very impressive to me in that way.
I will try to give it a read.
Thanks!
Seems like privilege to soften the term only now that we are talking about CEOs.
You're claiming that the person you replied to changed tune when we started talking about CEOs?
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...
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. Why aren't we changing the UI to a newer, more modern one every single week? Why aren't we vibe coding this new feature in 2 hours? This guy generates massive amount of text and calls it a roadmap or a spec.
It's honestly maddening working with people under AI psychosis.
I want to add that I think AI absolutely massively inflates the dunning kruger effect.
As a longtime student of the human condition, it is so obvious to me that this is real, has been happening, and will continue to happen as long as homo sapiens (in our current state) exists.
False beliefs are not a neutral thing to ignore. The way people react to them has strikingly tangible consequences for the rest of us.
A frightening number of people already believe all kinds of wildly irrational things about AI, and I don't see any way this doesn't become an increasingly complex issue we will all continue to have to deal with for the rest of our lives. In addition to everyone who comes after us.
It’s a real phenomenon that gets lazily slapped onto anyone using AI poorly.
Some *thing*, no, but we have seen the same thing with a slower feedback loop before: every conspiracy that comes along. Adherents fall into a trap of believing each other, getting more and more extreme. And losing the ability to rationally consider relevant information. An example I hit: 9/11 truthers. I wanted to put some scale to numbers, compared the energy of the fall to a small nuke. He seized on that as my admitting the towers were brought down by a nuke and I had a hard time explaining that it was simply a comparison.
It used to take filtering through a group of like-minded nuts, now we don't need a slow filtering through other nuts.
Yep, and the emergence of social networks became a real catalyst for that. But that still requires humans in that feedback loop, it takes time and attention. And people also have different opinions, even if they believe in roughly the same conspiracy (was it a plane, a truck bomb, a nuke?).
ChatGPT provides an instant sycophantic reply. I think they toned that down a bit, but it's still completely unparalleled.
> AI psychosis just a lazy term, much like Trump Derangement Syndrome.
It is how languages works. The written word is not a precise art.
Both those terms carry meaning, even if they abuse the term "derangement" and "psychosis"
It has always been ok to talk about psychosis in the general public, known as a "mass psychosis". Why is that suddenly a problem for CEOs?
It's also a great way to dampen the massive bipartisan moment against AI. Just attack your critics, attack their arguments, and do nothing to better the lives of people.
I think the bipartisan moment against AI is in large part (surprise, surprise) optics. In reality, the powers that be may have already set their sights on AI as the next "too big to fail" industry due to a perceived economic threat from China.
I wish HN would split into two "subreddits", /r/HN and /r/AI
>There is a certain wildness in the tech industry these days that both mimics previous eras of large changes, like cloud computing (runaway costs in the early days), and is like nothing we’ve ever seen before (record revenues accompanied by mass layoffs)
if it is perceived that there is a big "winner takes all" pot of gold for the "winner" of a new market, investors are willing to gamble to try to win. If they fail, it is rich people losing money by giving jobs to many people along the way, so the population here who wants nothing more than taxing the rich, why they should embrace that.
When agriculture was invented, there were mass layoffs of hunters and gatherers. and the same with buggy whips when cars were invented. Yes, life has some bumps but it's unavoidable and adapting to it is for the long term good. Structure your life around family and friends and don't overextend yourself (too much house, too much car) and you will be fine.
Three... bring back the original HN ("/r/startup") of hackers doing actual innovation and entrepreneurial stuff. It's the one that existed well before all the musings about painting by people who have never picked up a brush.
>before all the musings about painting by people who have never picked up a brush
I can't tell if this is a clever dig that comically undercuts the premise of the previous line, or it's an unaware unironic attempt to separate off a perceived un-serious type of poster.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers_%26_Painters
See also a famous rebuttal https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm
First things first - have you ever considered making a tech/art blog focused on early company dynamics where you can pontificate and share these kinds of insightful musings?
Pretty sure there are already a dozen vibecoded proxies for HN doing just that
That would be sweet. Same for GitHub /trending and /trending-ai.
Someone at my company said, the great thing about wanting to learn about AI is that every podcast now-a-days is about AI. I do not think that is a good thing. I want to learn things of substance, and of varying topics. I don't want every thing I read and/or listen to online to be about AI.
for what it's worth, I too would like to learn about AI, and I find very few people's opinions are worth listening to, despite a deafening cacophany of people who think they belong to that rarefied club. Turns out, the basic issues most people who work with the stuff everyday grapple with is not, in fact, a useful topic for your piece. Unless you have actual relevant data (hint: you might think you do but you don't) it's not going to be worth listening too; at best, neutral, and at worse actively harmful.
HN is the reflection of the current tech scene discussions and drama.
Hence lots of AI.
> I wish HN would split into two "subreddits", /r/HN and /r/AI
This is what everyone wants when some new thing that's ridiculously over-hyped comes along. The bubble will burst and it'll calm down. It seems like only yesterday that front page was filled with crypto/blockchain/web3 bullshit.
Even when it bursts half the shit on the front page will still be vibecoded schlock.
That's the truth. It'll be everywhere. I guess moderation and voting will have to keep quality content surfaced, but at the rate AI slop can be generated that might get very difficult.
Not to be too pedantic, but my understanding is that the transition to agriculture was not a singular event like this. Afaik this process of forced technological displacement is a relatively recent development connected to the rise of capitalism.
> When agriculture was invented, there were mass layoffs of hunters and gatherers.
Uh, no. Not at all.
Agriculture absorbed the extra population that used to be unsustainable. There were no losers.
Plenty of losers. See native americans. Sorry about your generational hunting ground, white man would like to ranch cattle and therefore you should leave or eat lead.
I mean, America had agriculture[1] before Columbus showed up. Cahokia[2] came and went (and then other people moved in).
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Sisters_(agriculture) [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cahokia#Abandonment_and_resett...
It's a typical colonial take on agriculture. People flourished without it but we seem to be stuck with revisionist history around the topic.
People also seem to think hunter-gatherers were always struggling, and while it did happen, they seem to miss that there are still billions of people lacking food security because agriculture isn't as easy or prolific as we tend to believe. It's really hard, especially in certain parts of the world.
Oh well, these biases permeate everything. I have plenty of them too.
Native Americans had agriculture. This isn't about agriculturalists vs hunter-gatherers.
P.S. Moreover, they had very advanced agriculture - most of the food Europeans eat today are adopted Native American designs.
No. Body. Knows.
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. its the punchline of many r/maliciouscompliance writing exercises.
the higher up the company you go, the more disconnected you are from the workers on the front line, the less you understand about their needs, and the more likely you are to push for something without understanding the totality of the impact of the decision.
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 actually do.
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.
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.
>something i have seen dozens of times
Me too. But I think AI might be a much more powerful delusion generator.
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.
As an aside, I see you're referring to Al as merely LLMs, which I appreciate and applaud.
I am thinking of calling them just 'LMs' for short, as they come in varying sizes.
Or even AlMs, just to troll the Al moniker, and how they give alms to the rich.
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 realize a software architecture is holding you back. You don’t try to “save” all the existing functions, modules, layers, etc. but instead are happy to discard or replace them given your top-down vantage point of the system and where it needs to head.
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.
And then you go out of business because you were busy rewriting Netscape Navigator while Microsoft was churning out new versions of Internet Explorer.
> whats being described is in no way unique to ai.
Exactly. For decades we've talked about "reality distortion fields" of various CEOs. I'm worked with CEOs that had them.
AI just supercharges the reality distortion field.
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 listening” as much as “they are listening to someone else who matters more.”
> 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 shorting the stock.
Shorting stocks has a very high "you must be at least this right" bar in order to make money. And given the uncapped nature of losses - the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent - you need to also be really correct about how high it'll go before you're right, and also, you're borrowing these shares you've sold, so you're on the hook for the borrow fee and also on the hook for paying dividends paid out to those shares you're borrowing but not holding. Plus you have to pay for the margin loans you're using.
That's a very high set of both static and scaling costs that eat away any profit you made by being nominally correct. Combined with the risk profile... you can't "just" go short a stock.
And yes, you can hedge losses with options or construct complicated options positions to try to hone in on a specific price movement you're anticpating. Now you have to deal with entering and exiting a complicated multi-instrument position without price slippage, AND you have theta decay and volatility-related price movements also eating away at the core money you're making by being nominally right.
Have people made money? Yes, for sure. There's also a lot of dead bodies and people who barely broke even despite theoretically having been right.
Github? Windows? Ibm? Intel? Boeing?
Github and Windows aren't companies.
A more productive view would be looking at an index of tech companies - try QQQ.
There is a great deal of ruin within a nation - and a company.
Well - the premise is that they will indeed shortly be out of business, because their increasingly slop-coded infra will collapse within the next year or so.
Or if it doesn't, token inflation will kill their profitability.
A lot of people are putting big money on both sides of those predictions, and they can't all be wrong.
I have had higher ups that actually understand the products, work flow and have a great grasp on things. Slow to understand things but make well educated and deliberate moves. These folks are are VERY rare however.
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.
It's the same as any other bad information entering the decision loop. In this case they were promised "AI" can do things it cannot. They're having trouble rectifying what they were told versus what they experience.
It's not unique to AI. It's common to many other organizationally risky and dangerous scenarios.
lol just reminds me of the SNL sketch about Kylo Ren undercover boss https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaOSCASqLsE
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.
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.
Would using anthropomorphize be better? Because that's what they are really doing. The problem is that the folks being described then go on step farther to think LLMs are a digital engineer and thus we don't need (most) devs anymore. This is what we describe as psychosis. If you have a better word for this phenomenon, I would love to hear it.
> a better word
"stupidity" sounds apropos
Personally, I am annoyed by AI responses that include courtesy and emotional words like "please" and "thank you". I'd prefer to just get simple factual answers.
Psychosis is a medical term for a collection of symptoms that indicate a loss of contact with reality. He posits that reality is that AI cannot automate nearly as many things as people believe it can, while C-suites ignore that reality and dive head first into belief without evidence. Tell me how using that term discredits the author.
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.
In general, "loss of contact with reality" is well understood to be an individual experience. If you think voices are talking to you, that's schizophrenia. If you think God wrote an entire book of life advice, that's Christianity. So, kinda by definition, a large group of people cannot generally experience "loss of contact with reality", they're merely mistaken.
The alternative is to accept that 90% of humans are suffering some form or another of psychosis, because there's very little that even a majority (51%) of people agree on, and that means about half the population is wrong about any given topic. Multiply by the number of topics out there...
You've assumed an uncharitable boundary and then said "see, that's obviously wrong". Well of course it is if the boundary you selected places 90% of humanity on the side of "loss of contact with reality".
So just, you know, don't do that. Select a boundary that places 90% of humanity on the side of "wrong about a number of things but within the bounds of normalcy for the species at large", sprinkle in some caveats about "in the industrialized world" and "for someone with at least a highschool education" and such, and you've got what I was actually describing.
My point is that AI psychosis is well within the bounds you're mentioning: yeah, those people are wrong about a number of things, but it's well within the bounds of normalcy for the species at large; especially in the industrialized world; especially for anyone that has at least a high school education.
You can't cherry-pick a definition where "AI psychosis" is meaningfully different from "wrong about a few things" without hitting a huge swath of "within the bounds of normalcy for the species at large" - there's just too many people in the category
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.
I wasn't expecting a peer reviewed study, but I certainly was expecting more from that title
who knows, may they are right, and 36 subagents can produce one AI baby in 1 week.
And maybe it's got 6 fingers on each hand.
Does that mean it can work 20% faster?
Not with all tasks, but it's bound to become an awesome speed typist.
My CEO did a deep dive into AI prototyping and eventually ran into a wall with data architecture and deployment. Fortunately, he realized very quickly that having human designed core infrastructure is what enables vibe coding that doesn't run off the rails.
Your CEO has more wisdom than most on this topic.
If all CEOs were as reasonable, there would be no AI bubble. Working in tech constantly means checking what's new and if you can wait it out or risk being left behind. That requires wisdom, but many CEOs seem driven by FOMO.
It doesn't help FOMO that scaling the executive ladder also means progressively staying behind in technical skills to stay ahead in managing skills. It's awesome that your CEO has managed to keep his fangs sharp enough.
I've been observing something which sounds very similar.
Everyone is going to learn this eventually. They can learn it the easy way or the hard way.
If we separate the hype incentives from the actual product itself, I completely understand how seductive the tech is and how it can lead to a sort of mania. I myself have been up late into the night fiddling and building.
It's like discovering fire, which offers both utility and magic: you can cook your food and gather warmth, and you can also stare into it and tell stories and never be bored. We're probably genetically wired to gravitate things which have both function and form.
That said, there's a reason the manic witch doctor was never the chief. Leadership requires discernment: when to consult the witch doctor, when to jirga with the neighboring elders, when to draw the sword.
A chief knows what happens when you cut the tribe by a third "for efficiency", or the burn seed corn to feed the fire, or replace the sentries with golems. The witch doctor often ends up boiled in his own cauldron.
Well written.
Tech CEOs are suffering from AI psychosis over next quarter's earnings, while I'm suffering from RI(Rent Installment) psychosis. It makes me wonder if human beings are simply hardwired to suffer from some form of obsession-whether it's FOMO or financial pressure
Unsure if the desire to not be homeless can be classified as psychosis.
I am certain it is not.
Living under its constant threat sure is bad for the ol MH tho isn't it.
The pathology is that we have this system in the first place.
No, living under survival pressure is good for mental health. It's what we're evolved to do. Why does it feel good to crack a tough bug, or finish a project, or win a game? It's the same achievement reward a hunter feels bagging a deer.
I know lots of people struggling to get by and I can assure you their situation doesn't improve their mental health.
Agreed, struggling and not ever winning is bad, I should have clarified that.
You realize that's literally what we're talking about -- a permanent underclass that is never permitted to win?
This stance is just 'acceptable losses' with more typing
Some pressure is good but there's a difference between constant pressure and regular sessions of pressure similar to hunting. I don't think we necessarily evolved to be under constant pressure, I'm not saying it's impossible but humans wouldn't thrive under constant pressure, we'd never have had the time to evolve language or the intelect under constant pressure.
With survival pressure, most people die. See that Alone show, most people get at best 2 months done and then thats even before the harsh of the winter really sets in. Just hard to establish enough systems to bring in your daily caloric needs without anyone to help you. You really need the tribe to make survival actually manageable. And in tribal societies all over the world we see how delegating the needs of survival has lead to a lot of other benefits, such as time to iterate on cultural ideas.
Maybe slightly unrelated, but I've done a lot of road trips throughout the US, and there is so much land that is used unproductively, it's really incredible. Land that could be used for energy, food, or housing, just sitting empty or with abandoned structures.
Imagine if we just paid people to coat their properties in solar panels - throw them on your roof, lawn, wherever you have the space. We could drive energy prices down to nothing. We could pay people to install ADUs. The resources are there, but the imagination and commitment are not.
Instead, I'm looking at a $40k+ solar install for my very small house and a breakeven on investment in maybe 10 years for a house I probably won't live in by then.
The land isn't being used because there is no pressing need in the market for more land use. I don't think people realize how much agriculture yields have improved since the 1950s. It is astounding really how much yield we get per acre now mostly from leveraging hybrid species actually, that has been a far bigger improvement to yields than even fertilizer use which is probably what most lay people think is the source of modern yields. In some crops and regions its on the order of 10 fold improvement in yield per acre.
The market is often either wrong or distorted by existing government policies. For some things, subsidies need to be involved to create a new industry where there isn't one. For others, subsidies are a waste of money leading to graft and excess. If I were the one with the credit card, I'd be betting big on hydroponics/vertical farms, medium to high density housing, and high speed rail.
Despite plenty of demand, high density housing still isn't getting built nearly as fast as it should. High building costs, zoning laws, and the ability to just suburban sprawl to infinity mostly prevents this.
Pretty much all vertical farming startups have gone bankrupt. There are endless benefits to vertical farms, but we don't do it because existing farms are cheap in comparison to the necessary investment to make this viable.
We don't build high speed rail because it's a multi-decade long project involving massive logistics, training programs, lots of land rights issues, and the fact that for short to medium distance trips people would probably still prefer to drive since once you get to your target destination, there's still no way to get around without a vehicle.
> We could drive energy prices down to nothing.
Not when you're paying people to coat their properties in solar panels. As you noted, that would cost plenty.
Solar panels also degrade over time. By the time the "free" electricity has paid for the installation, you'll need to replace it.
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.
Your information appears to be 20 years out of date.
How often do you think solar panels need to be replaced?
Approximately 3 times during the course of your life assuming you receive them when you're born and live for 100 years. They're roughly equivalent to wood siding or an asphalt shingle roof.
An asphalt shingle roof lasts about 20 years, and that's for the "40 year" premium shingles.
Source: my experience
Roofers also tend to regularly close their businesses and open under a new name, so they don't have to honor any longevity warranties.
If we accept what you say then the roof would need to be replaced 4 times instead of 3. Surely you agree that the situation is broadly similar?
Worrying about the longevity of properly installed solar is quite silly.
> silly
30 years ago was 1996. No 30 year panels have lasted anywhere near 30 years yet.
And your point is?
How long would you say a properly installed panel from 2000 made it in practice? How long would the modern equivalent installed in 2025 be expected to make it? And how many replacement events does each of those make for over the course of your life?
Do you contest my earlier claim that solar is roughly equivalent to wood siding or an asphalt shingle roof?
> And your point is?
Using 30 years as a lifetime for solar panels is risky as there are no solar panels running for 30 years, not even close. Never mind the lifetime of the power wall battery and the inverters.
I bought a 40 year "premium" asphalt roof. It barely made it to 20. A regular asphalt roof, perhaps 10 years. Now I have a metal roof.
> Using 30 years as a lifetime for solar panels is risky as there are no solar panels running for 30 years, not even close.
Are you sure about that? https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/30-year-old-solar-panels...
All the results I've seen indicate that solar panels will keep producing electricity long after those 30 years, just at a reduced rate (but seemingly still >50%).
The article you linked to says at that age they are still producing over 80%.
Yes, I just wanted to preempt any responses arguing that it might be lower than that.
How is generating only half the power going to work out?
I'm not sure what kind of answer you expect here. Your initial objection further up was:
> By the time the "free" electricity has paid for the installation, you'll need to replace it.
Since you won't need to replace it, I'd say that this whole thing couldn't work out better: the panels are literally just generating electricity for free! And that's not even taking into account that 30yo panels generate more than "only half the power" (the study I linked measured ~80%).
Imagine someone offered to give you their 30 year old panels and install them on your property for free. Unless every eligible surface is already taken up by more efficient solar panels, who would say no?
30 year roof will get replaced the same year if it gets hit by hail in southern states.
There are other reasons though. Whole house backup is a game changer. Battery always holding about twice our daily usage (or thrice a reduced, emergency usage) means I don’t really care about blackouts or midnight electrical company maintenance power cuts.
Direct to EV DC charging means I don’t buy gas, either. Planning for induction range and heat pump someday too. Not paying for energy about 3/4 of the year feels awesome.
Panels are cheap. Cheap to replace too. The newer ones have even better efficiency. My whole (unsubsidized) sistem cost around $15k here in Eastern Europe and amortization was never a consideration. Money well spent.
Finally, giving the finger to another crappy government-granted monopoly and proving once again that there is no such thing as a “natural” monopoly: priceless.
>>By the time the "free" electricity has paid for the installation, you'll need to replace it.
You are going to have to back this up with credible citations. Otherwise it sounds like skepticism from 2008.
You're right, I ran the numbers years ago. I remain as skeptical as I am for roofing lifetime claims.
Impressive commitment to stale inference from dated data.
30 year solar panels haven't even passed 20 years yet.
Payback is considerably less than 20 years in most locations.
Are those subsidized costs?
"this system" is wild when you are talking about the universe we evolved in
which law of physics says that you pay a landlord rent or else the cops come and beat you up?
How different is that from, struggle to build a shelter out of rocks or nasty weather comes and kills you? There are no good things in this universe without some struggle and pain. Sure, maybe in the current decade it's not as easy as it could be, but what do you really expect out of life?
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 housing within reach.
I imagine our primitive ancestors in the canopy having near death experiences every day just to get food and shelter. When was the last time you had a near death experience?
Could things be better than they are right now? Probably. But you'll never completely eliminate struggle and pain in this universe, unless you eliminate all life
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.
> There have been housing crises in every type of economic system.
Citation needed; good luck
"This person suffered a psychotic episode caused primarily by their strong fixation with eating food every single day."
Rent is a fabricated social construct. Hunger is not.
Shelter is not a fabricated construct, but grocery stores are.
I’m sure Big Pharma would love it if it was.
Humans beings are hardwired to be unhappy, and IMO this has helped civilization's progress, even if individuals are unhappy.
No matter how good we have it, eventually we normalize it, become bored, and find something to be unhappy about. It happens from children to old people.
>if human beings are simply hardwired to suffer from some form of obsession
the powerful obsession machinery brought us through the long natural selection process - obsession to watch for snakes and spiders, to maintain cleanliness, etc. With modern civilization we arranged to plug into that powerful machinery other stimuli too - like that RI and all the others making us productive society members. The most happy countries aren't most productive. Especially when they are obsessed with being happy like those Finns obsessed with sauna instead of tokenmaxxing.
Uh duh?
> It makes me wonder if human beings are simply hardwired to suffer from some form of obsession...
Existential dread pushing biology to survive?
Basic biological facts obfuscated by social memes; ship code, make line go up, worship allegory's of the long dead.
Hunter gatherer clusters vaguely collaborated to survive. Language and agrarian traditions have demanded more than just survival but all kinds of observance of meaningless spoken traditions. Obligation to ignore our own senses and chant the memes of the living elders suffering existential dread of their own, afraid to left unattended in hospice. For whatever reason unable to just say that; they appeal to old religious or political screed.
Caretake this debt ledger after they who ran up the bill are dead.
What?
It's all just obsession to live laundered and obfuscated by useless philosophy.
I definitely noticed it's usually the CEOs and senior executives (so people the most removed from ground work) who suffer the most from it.
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.
What historical examples are you thinking of?
A few examples come to mind: the 20 or so nazi psychiatrists who classified over 200,000 people as "unfit" to justify their "euthanasia". The USSR using the term "sluggish schizophrenia" to institutionalize dissidents without trial. And the whole "drapetomania" thing which was the mental illness of black slaves that kept running away.
This is very common. Psychiatry has been used as a weapon since its very beginning.
I've seen director / VP-level folks at a public company point LLMs at a corporate product and essentially ask it "What deficiencies do you see here? Output to a Word document." Then forward the output to engineering management as a product task list. One person did this to the same product more than once in a couple week span without realizing it so there were multiple documents with conflicting issue lists floating around trying to be read and triaged. And the expectation is that this comprehensive analysis was done so easily, product fixes should be just as easy.
At this point you can abstract what you wrote to any kind of task. I'm seeing people generate multiple takes on one concrete topic, poop out all kinds of artifacts, and keep emitting them within and outside of the company.
Having doubled down on using mostly Claude (+GPT and Gemini) professionally in strategic consulting work for about 2 1/2 years I can say with certainty that the irrational exuberance of the tech leadership echo chamber towards abdicating management responsibility to Claude, while in the honeymoon period, is going to be regarded as very foolish in hindsight.
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.
> Still, some of these stories are surprising. Zeb Evans, the CEO of project management and productivity software startup ClickUp, proudly declared on X that he had laid off almost a quarter of his employees — 22% — after rolling out about 3,000 AI agents to do internal work.
As someone who is forced to use ClickUp I can tell you that it's not good software. It wasn't good before this layoff and it hasn't improved since [0]. I could write quite a few words on why ClickUp is terrible but I can promise you that throwing more "AI" at it isn't going to fix what's wrong. The issues are deep and not the type of thing LLM excel at IMHO.
My _favorite_ is how crap search is. Sometimes it will take upwards of 5-10s+ to return results and they are often wrong (I search for the exact name and it tells me "no results"). ClickUp has single-handedly driven me deep back into using bookmarks since the search is such trash. That plus random spinners that never go away, lists that re-order themselves when you change anything on a ticket (not a field related to sorting), stale state UI, things randomly disappearing, "Ticket moved to list" only to refresh and find it wasn't moved, it's really annoying and we curse ClickUp every single day.
Last thing I'll say is the amount of flatulence-sniffing going on over there must be at an all-time-high if their 4.0 (or was it 4.1? Who cares) release is any indication. The new design was ho-hum (just moved a bunch of things around and we turned on all the flags we could to get back to the old way since the new way sucks) but was most egregious was this full-page take-over with a big gradient animation announcing the new release. That happened on _every single tab_ you had open. So for a few days after the release I'd open an older tab only to be greeted by the same dog-and-pony show for a product I despise using and and update that only made a bad product worse.
All that to say: Mr Evens does not know what he is talking about.
[0] I have no clue when the layoff happened but it's been consistently shit so I can state that it hasn't improved with complete confidence.
I couldn't believe how shitty ClickUp was when I was demoing project management software because it came highly recommended. Actually most of them were shitty. Monday, Asana, and all the others I can't remember. Just absolutely dog slow. I am so confused at how people are productive with these apps. By the time things had loaded, I had already forgotten what I was trying to do.
We settled on Basecamp and it is a joy to work with. Super fast keyboard shortcuts and easy navigation to projects. I'm glad we don't need the more exotic features in the other project management software, but if we ever do, it will probably be OpenProject, which was the runner up.
I agree, search in ClickUp is awful and it’s impossible to find back old cards from previous years. A nightmare. Plus, if consumes gb of memory in the browser.
AI psychosis is LLM hallucination, backwards.
We know why AI hallucinates—it has no actual opinions, echoing the user's desires back to them to keep the conversation moving.
But what happens when you’re the one without conviction? You’re tired, you’re moving fast, and this machine is endlessly beaming highly confident, plausible-sounding text at you.
You absorb the cadence. You start sounding like it (lol, I am guilty too). Confident about everything yet anchored only by the vibes, just like the LLM. The phenomena is very similar to how social media has been affecting society for the past two decades. You know, I actually heard that in high school now, friend groups are formed and sorted based on what algorithmic content you’re served. And if you deviate from your algorithmic bucket into another one your friendships evaporate. Sad, brainrotted times.
CEOs are uniquely vulnerable since they already live in environments with zero friction. They’re used to people just agreeing with them.
(I actually wrote a paper about this last December — it was framed around dementia and dreams originally, but AI psychosis fits the same mechanism.)
Majority of the CEOs are not using it themselves so they have no idea the real-life issues of building with AI. They believe whatever they read on Twitter. They assume if they throw AI at the problem, reduce headcount, flatten the org - miraculously everything will be solved. Many companies are up for a reality check and the AI-calypse is coming...
It's not exclusive to CEOs.
Even senior developers can succumb to it. They try agentic development, they see that a single prompt can generate a day's worth of work in mere minutes _and it works_ and they are so impressed that they immediately turn to Twitter to share the joy. Understandable!
Once they inevitably discover that the AI generated code is called "slop" for a reason, they are too embarrassed to post to Twitter that they were deluded.
Sometimes that happens though: a few days ago a developer on Twitter bragged that they have created a C to Metal compiler using AI and it works. Today they had to post regrets, explaining that nothing works except tests and the code is shit. Sadly can't find the tweet though.
These? https://nitter.net/VictorTaelin/status/2043810543035920672 / https://nitter.net/VictorTaelin/status/2059327831679578511
Yes, exactly!
I like to call this TDS (token derangement syndrome)
Stealing.
I can see this as a CEO. I get spared because I build the hardware and live in the kernel. Example 4k to 64k seems easy until you realize you can still install 4k Nvidia drivers that will lead to memory instability and you find out the hard way. Then you redo it and it's fine. Dealing with overheating all the time because pretty much an AI box at full speed for a week gets thermal issues. But if I wasn't dealing with the physical substrate I would be the guy who says AI can do that without knowing the actual physical costs.
I don't know why it says "tech CEOs", the article is almost entirely focused on non-tech / generic CEOs.
I think part of the problem is that current AI tooling massively lowers the cost of making infrastructure and product changes, but doesn’t equally improve consequence reasoning.
Generating changes is becoming cheap. Predicting second and third order effects across large systems is still hard.
> , 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.
10% failure rate? Wouldn't that be depending on task disastrous? Or possibly expensive?
I think any juniors who keep failing 10% of text based task will eventually get fired... So investing in those that don't fail seems only sensible move as usual.
Yes, it would.
Something I keep in mind is that the “goal” success/failure rate really needs to be appropriate in context. We sure can’t eliminate human error, but for my work a best case 80/20 would mean I’m losing customers and probably getting myself sued. I don’t have a problem “doing things by my own hand” in that case.
Oof. And how much more expensive will the models be to get that 80%?
Hah. Prescription for CEO AI psychosis: buy more AI, invest more time in AI, this naysayer says you can make 100x organizations!
I mean, look at ycombinator's latest "call for startups". Its honestly mind-boggling. Couple years ago I used to look at like every 6 months to see where venture interests lie. But now, on every "industry", its just "use ai to make more money in [industry]". The most egregious of them is the call for the "1 person unicorn" company that they believe can exist and somehow that's a call for a startup. Like, "We want to invest in companies that make a bunch of money for us". Yea, very insightful.
I heard the term AI vampire as well for people sleeping 4h hours just for another hit of that prompt drug.
This whole article is just (barely) rephrasing a few popular twitter threads from the past week.
And there was a comment here on HN just a few days ago saying "AI psychosis is not a real thing".
An outside observer is needed for an accurate diagnosis. The patients themselves are unaware.
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.
the problem, as with many topics, is that there are a loud chorus of voices on both sides of people who just aren't engaging with reality as it is on any deep level. You kinda have to cut through that, signal a thoughtful opinion, one who has both concerns and sees potential in the development of the day, to get past that initial hurdle. This is true generally, for most topics.
The next step up from this is signaling engagement on the topic: cite prior influential pieces and what you got from them, where your opinion differs. Move onto some novel data, or novel insights on existing data, draw conclusions that are actually relevant to other reasonable people, and you might have something worth reading.
Gell-Mann Amnesia AI effect. They "know" AI cant do their own jobs, but it seems pretty good at summarizing what others do without understanding the nuance. It seems to really apply to the AI Lab CEOs who appear "shocked" everyone isn't simply replaced with LLMs by now.
Gotta love the authority of headlines using "apparently".
This feels more like AI delusion, but I do worry about AI psychosis (which we're seeing in smaller numbers). People literally losing their ability to make sense of reality due to talking to AI all day.
We all know that celebrities/athletes frequently end up demonstrating psychotic behavior in public. Us normal people commonly attribute that to the distorting power of wealth and fame. When you're surrounded by "yes men" who give you only positive feedback and fans who adore you, it's easy to spin out of control.
AI means normal people can have the same experience. A constant companion that tells us we're smart and insightful, that we're making all the right decisions, that generally affirms our every belief and bias. If you spend all day talking to an AI who is _literally_ programmed to please you, I believe you'll eventually experience psychosis.
Pyschosis? Do they mean just crap at critical thinking?
Framing everything as 'gaslighting' has finally worn out. 'Psychosis' is fashionable again!
Treadmill keeps on moving...
Mandatory don’t hate me: I am a massive AI and automation fan since 2008.
The problem right now is the barrier to create automation and use AI has reduced so much people are not deliberately making decisions about how these tools should work. This means the tools primarily focus on happy paths, and only get refined to the point that they do a “good enough job” and then are shipped. The other issue is people who don’t understand what they are building are shipping brittle and fragile solutions but don’t understand how that is an issue because the AI “just works”, however they get upset when it doesn’t scale.
The solution is to embrace AI and Automation, but slow down planning, architecture, error handling and testing.
This means we still reap the efficiencies but don’t ignore reality.
Code happy, Dale
> The solution is to embrace AI and Automation, but slow down planning, architecture, error handling and testing.
How does that work in practice? How do you implement that from the bottom up if the psychosis is top-down?
The article itself isn't great, but it speaks to one of my greatest concerns about AI. People who engage heavily with it are falling in the behavioral billionaire trap: It is deeply unhealthy to be constantly affirmed in your behaviors. No, not all of your ideas are great, not everything you say has value. You are not a cut above the rest.
There are enough stories of people completely losing the plot, thinking they've invented a new type of maths or similar, but there's almost certainly also a much more subtle influence in most of us, where the constant affirmation, obedience, apologia, reframes our expectations of how interactions should be.
We are already the most narcissistic generation, having been molded by social media to compare, stats-max, and overobsess about who we are. Chatbots are now fanning the flames.
I agree.
When Marc Benioff was talking about how he spends like 3 hours a day chatting with AI, things made a bit more sense. I suspect that a lot of these guys are just chattering away with self-affirming LLMs and have just completely lost the plot.
I hadn’t considered that before Marc was talking about how much time he spends chatting to LLMs.
A lot of the younger Big Tech CEOs are notoriously averse to human interaction, so I’m sure there’s some of that at play.
Actually, they're suffering "wealth accumulation psychosis".
Replacing the CEOs and shareholders with AI is the way forward. Just have to take the capital away from the current capital owners and give the new AI C-suite team control of it. All major decisions go to the employees for votes (but I’d argue for scaling the vote by expertise in some manner; the ten-year veteran might get three votes to the new hire’s one vote).
This line jumped out at me:
“In other words, AI is on track to perform at base competence on most tasks in about three years. These researchers believe agents will need another few years to outperform humans”
LLMs have shown steady improvements, but it’s a big assumption they will continue their performance gains, and specifically, that it’s a simple matter of time before they surpass human level performance on “most tasks”. (In six years no less!) The author is claiming LLMs are fundamentally AGI capable.
This is not going to end well. At least I will be able to pick up used DDR5 memory and GPUs on the cheap in the not too distant future.
I wonder if it is because CEO's are usually surrounded by chronical "Yes man's" which AI usually is. Therefore, from their perspective, AI can give you virtually same output as your closest co-workers. At least by form and not the substance.
It's a nice addition to their ordinary psychosis. Otherwise I can't explain stupid shit like metaverse.
It seems like the easiest way to make CEOs and other senior executives feel insecure is to be someone whose opinion they trust and then tell them if they aren’t accelerating AI adoption in their company they’re just NGMI.
Apparently?!
I would say it is the responsibility of the CTO (whoever is responsible) to talk some sense into the CEOs (whoever in the exec team is having AI psychosis). Yes, yes—what if they themselves are having psychosis but that’s the point.
writing whole articles on a few X tweets...
also clickbait title
If there is one job in a tech company that's by far the easiest to replace with LLMs it's Tech CEO. They're literally all the same nowadays.
He who controls the data controls the learner. - @pmddomingos
In this case the data is the AI output and the learner is the executive.
I can't believe we got the dumbest version of Snow Crash
If Reason in Snow Crash was inscribed with "ultima ratio regum", perhaps someone should graffiti AI datacenters with "prima ratio stultorum", dohohoho.
VCs, too:
https://futurism.com/openai-investor-chatgpt-mental-health
(From last year…)
100%. And that psychosis translates into kafkian level of bureaucratic absurdity and stupidity, especially when real motives are masked under pretense of something rational which it is not.
Related:
I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48153379
It's crazy how I open twitter and see a bunch of ragebait posts, try to mute keywords, open HN, and see those posts have been rewritten into top of the heap articles about twitter.
What is AI pyschosis?
It’s more than the C-Suite, it’s everyone who no longer has a knowledge specialty. Their domain is shattered and there is nothing left for them because before LLMs all they did anyway was search for companies to contract out an integration to solve a niche problem. 99% of the C-suites/boards are now this. Your IT guy, scrum master, Product lead, integration team, etc. Everyone who’s chosen to NOT understand because they can offload/contract-away their work and knowledge is under psychosis that LLMs know best.
You cannot discuss tradeoffs with anyone anymore because they chose to give their brain and authority away to a statistically incorrect robot. The LLM has already generated potential tradeoffs real or not.
> it’s everyone who no longer has a knowledge specialty.
> Everyone who’s chosen to NOT understand because they can offload/contract-away their work and knowledge is under psychosis that LLMs know best.
Right on the money!
These people's ignorance was compensated for by other non-ignorant intelligent people in the organization who actually had knowledge of the domain and tools/techniques for problem-solving. The latter were the ones doing the course-correcting and ensuring things stayed on track for delivery.
With the adoption of AI, ignorance is in the driver's seat viz. "i don't have to know anything since AI will do it for me". I guarantee that a few years down the line when there is enough AI generated messy/obfuscated/wrong code the C-Suites will realize the hole they have dug themselves into and will again look for human engineers to either fix or rewrite the above.
It will be a different wave of C-Suite then and I’m not so sure that next wave will be remotely intelligent to see the issues.
The circumstances will force them to face the issues. Three points are relevant here;
1) The amount of money sunk into AI (trillions!) is never going to be made back.
2) Early AI adopters are finding out that it costs more to use AI instead of Humans.
3) AI adoption is making people dumber w.r.t. a specific job at hand. This means precious institutional knowledge is lost which directly translates to increased costs on extension and maintenance of crucial AI generated systems.
After all they are always wrong and journalists always right proven by stats. Hm. Wait.
Yeah, I was going to remark that tech beat journalists are also suffering from a kind of AI psychosis.
Tech CEOs are psychotic. Most CEOs are psychotic, disconnected from most of the actual work going under them. This is just a new drug for them to huff.
I’m convinced that if you’re a sociopath you are especially vulnerable to AI psychosis. It would explain tech CEO’s insane behaviour since you would have to be one to do the kind of sh*t they do regularly.
More than the CEOs themselves, I feel news media are more suffering from "AI psychosis" than anyone else with the constant stream of FUD articles they keep churning out.
Just asserts "Tech CEOs" in general, I don't see any names being named. Meaningless FUD article
If the AI causes people to get banned in huge numbers like apparently happened to Facebook then what is the fucking point?
Apparently Metaverse > account security
Maybe the problem is that the people who report to the C-level have a huge incentive to use AI because it is so good at creating corporate BS.
Also AI is tuned to sycophantic behavior which perfectly matches the middle/upper management culture of selective ass kissing.
As a result the quality of input for C-level has gotten worse without the C-level being able to notice it, because the sugarcoating has increased tenfold.
I would love to get on this bandwagon, but I think strangely tech CEOs are spot-on on this one, it's the public that has mass-hysteria (I wouldn't say psychosis).
There have been several leaps in tech over the past few centuries, this is just sort of one. I can't find much original arguments or reasoning on either side that hasn't been made before for other tech. I think people are afraid it will replace them/jobs and they don't know what that will mean for their future, and society's future. It's also an issue with a few at the top of the pyramid controlling the tech. But it was so with petroleum, cars, even the internet (still is, handful of tech companies). There is also the quality thing, people think in a very binary way, where either AI work is perfect or it's a disaster, because it is replacing people after all. In reality, it's a sliding scale, and how well it does dictates how much work one person needs to do.
There was a time people didn't have text editing computers for example, lots of time spent writing on pen and paper, copy writers spell checking, carbon-copies being used to copy as you write,etc.. suddenly printers and text editors came. people still edited text, just more efficiently, you didn't need as many people. and with the internet, lots of different types of jobs were created.
I personally think, this is a timely rebalancing. Gen-Z has been suffering for a lack of entry level jobs, and it is getting worse because of AI.. but obviously AI has limits right? let's say we don't need software developers any more (ha!), does that mean AI can churn out perfect software each time? Alright, then who's paying AI to do that? does that mean I can create my own HN and have AI moderate it well on its own? Great, then how about something bigger, Facebook alternatives? How about more IRL things, like robotics, R&D work ,etc.. I just don't see how even if AI was dirt cheap and it replaces most of what people can do on computers, that would be a complete disaster.
I think the real issue is failure to re-architect society as time and tech changes. everything from academia, to WFH/RTO policies, labor law, housing, taxes, law,etc.. that's the issue, not AI on its own. It's the people not regulating it as they adjust and adapt to it without causing harm that are the issue. I'd love to blame tech CEOs, but they're just playing their part in capitalism. even in a communist society, the blame would be at lack of central planning and failure to regulate companies.
I'll say this though, it isn't so much they're delusional, but they don't get why people are emotional over something basic and utilitarian. to them, adaption and adjustment comes with a nice financial cushion. People tend to plan out their lives, without any cushions. i think there is mild psychosis going all around, but that isn't unusual. Even the hysteria and lack of perspective is in line with history, as well as how we continue to not learn from it.
Man, it must be hard to be a tech CEO these days./s Even if you take a realistic position on AI, you can’t get off the train. Wall Street and your investors will hang and quarter you the moment you start expressing doubts. So you grind your teeth, make grandiose investment promises, sign lofty budgets, and hope it all works out.
Comparisons with luddites are absurd. AI is much closer to a religion.
AI investment and spending is frequently cited as one of the few bright spots in the economy, I wonder if the continued over-optimism is mostly about keeping the bubble inflated. If you are a tech CEO, would it be a disservice to your shareholders to express skepticism about AI?
A big reason there are so few bright spots is AI sucking all the air out of anything else. Both funding and attention-wise.
I think this cuts to the point about democracy but if all the people somehow want something negative for themselves short term or long term, if you are the leader should you do what the public is saying or not?
I think there's more nuance to it but replace people with shareholder and leader with CEO.
I think that for a company to exist and thrive long term, it might need a culture which doesn't jump on every trend but it still evaluates them from time for time for a certain time and treat them as such (like tools) and if the tool is ineffective, then to not use the tool.
Unfortunately, I feel like this requires a deeper discourse and CTO's might be better suited for it or the fact that I feel like perhaps some shareholders might not be interested in the technical details so much.
I don't know but If I were a leader I would hopefully wish to make a pragmatic solution/suggestion while taking finances, current reality in mind and currently IMO AI aren't the end all, be all, that some people (with shrewd/double incentives) intend on suggesting.
As early as last year "AI psychosis" seemed to refer to people going crazy due to talking to ChatGPT too much. That was a useful term for a real phenomenon! Now it seems like it's been taken over to mean "thinking that AI is promising" which is more of a rhetorical bludgeon and less useful as a concept.
It's not psychosis. It's hope. The hope that computers can finally do what we all wished they could've done for years: do work for us, rather than us doing work for them.
Doing work for computers means something is broken in your process, product, culture, or whatever else.
Using "psychosis" is a cheap rhetorical trick. There's no need to label something "psychosis" when making your point, except to automatically discredit whatever you're responding to.
In other words, only people who are afraid their point won't stand on its own merits would resort to saying "X is suffering from AI psychosis." An idea is true or false on its own. If you're resorting to labels, you're just trying to automatically win the argument, instead of saying something substantive or interesting.
It also underplays what I've personally witnessed that I would consider true AI psychosis.
I worked with someone who sincerely believed he was spiritually co-evolving with his army of sycophantic AI agents (the agents would be tasked with discussing his thoughts at night and collaborated to give him morning reports about his progress). He would publicly write about how relationships with friends and family collapsing was a natural consequence of being so "advanced". I also never once saw any meaningful work done by his team of "agents", they existed solely tell him how smart he was (of course he specifically set up the system to 'challenge' him but... in practice that didn't seem to be working).
I suspect there are a lot more people quietly going through something similar but keeping it to themselves better.
I would distinguish this type of behavior from people who over ambitious views of what can be accomplished with AI.
Having had experience dealing with people with conventional psychosis, I don't see it as a binary thing. Aside from a full-on psychotic break and full remission, there is a broad gray area. It can be a miasma of reality and non-reality that the sufferer may mask to varying degrees, but which influences their behavior and logic.
So, to me, AI psychosis seems apt to describe the murky areas where people are misapplying AI agents and thinking of them as social entities or suitable to drop into previously human roles, rather than carefully defining appropriate risk management strategies for this new technology.
In the phrase "artificial intelligence psychosis" I'm not sure "psychosis" is even the worst misnomer.
That depends on what the definition of “is” is. But kidding aside, only now that we are talking about tech CEOs are people suddenly disliking the AI psychosis term in large numbers. Seems like privilege to me. I’d be interested to see/do a rigorous statistical check on aggregate word choices in these threads to confirm.
All words are labels. You cannot make an argument without using them. "cheap rhetorical trick" or "resorting to labels" are just labels as well.
I honestly think "psychosis" is a fairly valid claim to be making.
It's a mental state, not explicit illness and it's literally defined as
> Psychosis is characterized as disruptions to a person's thoughts and perceptions that make it difficult for them to recognize what is real and what is not.
Further, if you go and look at the actual source... it's repeating a claim from Box founder Aaron Levie.
Who is quoted as saying:
> “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,”
Which is why the title is "apparently".
I think it's completely valid. It's generally reasonable, high powered people who are taking extreme/radical views that seem very much to be at minimum premature, and at worst delusional.
It says a lot that with few exceptions, the people on the ground dealing with AI closely on a day to day basis are the most skeptical about their positions.
It's become a cultural term to refer to someone suffering from delusions exacerbated by AI.
It's a little rhetorical device to draw in the reader, and personally I think it works quite well.
Except that the thing being described as AI psychosis in this article (and increasingly elsewhere) isn't psychosis.
Not understanding or not believing in the power of AI, or misapplying it or whatever, is not psychosis.
AI psychosis is when people suffer actual delusions.
What do you consider a delusion?
Because I've literally seen managers who believe firmly that AI is going to replace their entire engineering organization, and are acting on that assumption as though it's a thing to take for granted, not discuss/consider/evaluate.
And my understanding of delusion is
> a fixed, false belief that is firmly held despite clear, contradictory evidence
which seems to apply pretty well in this case.
These folks are operating with the same abandon that the folks who have AI telling them they're gods are - and both are incorrect, arguably delusional.
At best you can try to argue that maybe the contradictory evidence isn't clear, and they're going to be correct. I think that's a very tenuous argument to be making, though.
No, it's more like "I am Jesus and I need to go shoot up a pre-school to prove it."
"I'm being followed by raccoons and my mom is controlling them"
That's what AI psychosis refers to.
You're just describing someone having a belief that you disagree with. And even ridiculous and stupid beliefs are just those. They are obviously extremely different from the types of psychoses you see in a psych ward.
It is the correct term to explain many behaviors we’re seeing
AI psychosis is an actual term from psychiatry research.
what if you believe that someone is suffering from delusions and has beliefs that are increasingly disconnected from reality due to overexposure to ai generated responses and underexposure to human conversation? would that be psychosis?
I disagree. Psychosis is a delinking of internal and external reality. A belief that AI's can automate away employees with no actual evidence to support it could be considered a type of psychosis or at the very least, a delusion. The current AI hype bubble has a lot of commonalities with episodes of mass delusion/psychosis throughout history, and it's being compounded by the ability of large groups of like-minded people to create echo chambers via social media.
Yup. Just like the label "conspiracy" theorist. Or "he's mentally sick".