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.

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!)

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.

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.

Clickbait title. Should be more like "Box founder Aaron Levie says CEOs should use AI more and learn its limitations."

He's essentially saying that C-suite people overestimate how effective LLMs are at one-shotting hard problems, and underestimate the human maintenance work that follows.

I'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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.)

I don't know why it says "tech CEOs", the article is almost entirely focused on non-tech / generic CEOs.

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.

I like to call this TDS (token derangement syndrome)

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 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.

> , 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.

Hah. Prescription for CEO AI psychosis: buy more AI, invest more time in AI, this naysayer says you can make 100x organizations!

This whole article is just (barely) rephrasing a few popular twitter threads from the past week.

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.

I heard the term AI vampire as well for people sleeping 4h hours just for another hit of that prompt drug.

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.

And there was a comment here on HN just a few days ago saying "AI psychosis is not a real thing".

He who controls the data controls the learner. - @pmddomingos

In this case the data is the AI output and the learner is the executive.

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

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.

Gotta love the authority of headlines using "apparently".

Actually, they're suffering "wealth accumulation psychosis".

Pyschosis? Do they mean just crap at critical thinking?

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.

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.

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.

writing whole articles on a few X tweets...

also clickbait title

I can't believe we got the dumbest version of Snow Crash

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 a nice addition to their ordinary psychosis. Otherwise I can't explain stupid shit like metaverse.

Related:

I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48153379

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.

VCs, too:

https://futurism.com/openai-investor-chatgpt-mental-health

(From last year…)

Just asserts "Tech CEOs" in general, I don't see any names being named. Meaningless FUD article

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.

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.

After all they are always wrong and journalists always right proven by stats. Hm. Wait.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.