AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making
Drawing from hundreds of professional engagements, I witness a mass psychosis where global institutions blindly pursue AI despite near-total project failure. Executives and boards obfuscate the lack of real productivity gains, creating an environment where questioning the hype is career suicide. Organizations are pivoting to agentic workflows and chatbots that rarely work, driven by fear rather than strategy, leaving rational voices silenced.
I strongly believe there are entire companies right now under heavy AI psychosis and it’s impossible to have rational conversations with them about it.
- dtj1123
Most of us on some level felt confident that AI would completely revolutionise our society. The singularity made sense to me, at least. It hasn't worked out like that, but rather than accept the crushing reality of our mistake and take a second to re-evaluate, we've decided to LARP out the future we promised ourselves by crowbar-and-vaselineing AI into every crack and crevice we can find and loudly proclaiming progress.
It's like some 90s kid with a Nintendo power glove who's convinced themselves that this makes them a hacker. This is not the singularity.
I personally can't wait for this to end, and for everyone to collectively get back to waiting for whatever the next golden ticket that's supposed to solve all of our problems turns out to be.
- hliyan
This part toward the end of the article resonated with me:
> If you’re being asked to review huge volumes of terrible AI code, just assume that the organisation is going to burn you out and fire you. You will not convince the person drowning you in 2000 line PRs to stop. Start looking for a new job as if you have already been fired. I have seen this happen many times now
I suspect we will see this phenomenon more and more as organizations more widely adopt agentic development.
- A1kmm
> All of the AI projects we have observed as a team are failing. Every single one – we have seen 0% success in a year and a half, not only amongst projects we have been asked to participate in, but even within projects that we have observed in passing while doing totally unrelated work.
That's got to be hyperbole, which blows out their credibility. They chose to say 'AI' rather than, for example, LLM, or Transformer model, or Diffusion model. This means they are including a huge swathe of things dating back to Expert Systems in their claim.
And who hasn't seen productivity gains from more established AI technology - at least things like semantic search? Who hasn't seen diffusion models generating content in roles that might have done the work by hand before? Who hasn't seen some kind of regression algorithm (even using linear regression in a supervised context counts as AI - so you can absolutely do AI even in tools like Excel) improve operation productivity?
Even if they narrowed it to the Transformer model LLMs which re-ignited recent public interest in AI, less ambitious projects to give them to engineering staff to automate easy but boring tasks in the background generally have been a success. More ambitious ones that are beyond what you'd reasonably expect the models to be able to do - for sure, those tend to fail. For most of these, the failure is predictable in advance, while some are at the boundary of what's possible, and so it is harder to predict (these are rationa […]
- slopinthebag
The AI mania has been really fascinating to witness because on the surface it’s surprising that so many otherwise intelligent people have fallen into it. But I suppose intelligence as a concept is multifaceted and doesn’t include wisdom. I also wonder if it has to do with personality, where the people whose personality best suits leadership roles are more susceptible to this psychosis. I think there is also an archetype of “nerd” who believes they are smarter than they are and has all sorts of surface beliefs about AI from sci-fi that makes them susceptible.
- dash2
> Checking out a parallel copy of our Go repository and telling the AI to rewrite the whole thing in Zig while I work on something else just so I can keep my job.
> Was it just sales fluff? The answer was a lot more interesting.... Executives at their customers were saying absurd things about achieving 100x productivity, and this meant that if any executive at the vendor said that these gains were not plausible, it would undermine the credibility of the customer’s executive, be perceived as an attack (or heresy), and possibly result in an enterprise contract cancellation.
A lot of excellent anecdotes here.
- LOCNE55
This post feels like its correct but also doesn't align with my own personal usage of claude for writing advanced sql and python code. I haven't with my own eyes seen an AI chatbot actually deliver a user experience that lets them query data with natural language BUT I have personally experienced writing extremely advanced queries using natural language and it is absolutely able to get close to (by my estimate) 80-90% of the way there.
There surely are companies out there using AI in such a way that is actually advancing them above and beyond their competition. They are probably quietly doing it rather than announcing it loudly.
The whole point of the article is about the big corps with hordes of management and people in them. My argument is that they have always been that way. Before AI it was "data science and analytics" or (as the author says) "blockchain".
- azakai
> All of the AI projects we have observed as a team are failing. Every single one – we have seen 0% success in a year and a half,
What is an "AI project"? The post doesn't define it.
Is it writing some software from scratch? Using an LLM chatbot by non-coders, either internally or externally? Or something else entirely?
Some examples would really help.
- ufo
Just this past week, I have had to answer two surveys, from different sources, asking how I use AI in my work. Both had a "choose all that apply" checkbox, and, funnily enough, neither allowed me to select zero options. "This question is mandatory". :)