The article doesn't really talk about this directly, but when you read it critically it becomes clear that capitalist corporate structures are ill equipped to deal with the negative effects of LLMs.

It's not completely useless, but the economy in general is way overexposed for sure.

On several occasions, we’ve been exposed to folks that have been sort of lukewarm on our main offerings, but they really, really wanted to use AI to perform a natural language query on their data. And we thought “Okay, if you really want to see it, maybe we can caveat this appropriately and show you what it might look like.”

This was a terrible mistake. It backfired in the most predictable way imaginable – every lukewarm client that saw the chatbot in action, even with us telling them that it was not going to accomplish what they wanted, wanted to buy it immediately. Every other consideration, including millions of dollars that we could plausibly help them achieve by non-AI means, was swept aside. It was like a dark and terrible force seized control of their limbs, plunged their hands into their own chests, and presented their still-beating credit cards to us in grim supplication.

The writing here (and everywhere) is phenomenal, and this section echoes something I've seen Cal Newport say before, something along the lines that somebody with no technical knowledge sees one neat trick and suddenly assumes AI will turn into a superintelligence deity.

I wish there were more concrete facts, but a good article nonetheless.

This is to say that we’re facing a coordination problem around executives being honest around the AI gains they’ve witnessed – if they co-operate, they keep their jobs. If they defect, they will possibly be fired by their embarrassed peers (who have now been implicitly called liars, cowards, or incompetents) and then replaced with someone that will toe the line anyway. If they could all admit the truth at once there might be some hope, but there is no way to coordinate that event.

I think it's interesting to notice that this is not AI-specific. He kinda alludes to that in a different context but I think it's important for people in the industry (and any industry really) to understand. This is driven by the incentives built into the system. Specifically the competition for profit. Whenever there's a thing (technology, process, method) that promises significant profit, everyone and their mother jumps on it. For the simple reason that if they don't, they're getting replaced by someone who would. For the simple reason that if they don't jump in, capital is going to leave their company and enter another one that promises to jump in, and therefore has higher expected profit. This can look as simple as large investors dumping your shares for the shares of a different company, sending your stock price in steep decline. Everyone competes for capital which requires competition for growing profits. Capital goes where the expected profits are higher. Without capital, firms can't hire people and buy what they need to conduct business and create new products. This incentive makes it very difficult to avoid a situation like the one above. We've seen this in corporations with the move to the cloud, with outsourcing development to CHWTIA and so on.

Wow insane world

This is one of the best articles I've read in the "agentic" era of technology. Thanks for sharing!

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.

Then those companies will die, as they should. There are also companies who will fail to adapt, either because they are so anti-AI that they actively refuse to do so, or because they are luddites that weren't well-tuned to technological changes in the first place. Those companies will also die, as they should.

What's left are companies having measured conversations about how to make use of this new technology without ignoring the problem areas, figuring out ways to work around them, being careful of security implications, and acknowledging the importance of human review and architectural design.

This is how all bubbles and trendchasing works. Investors in the 2000s learned pretty quickly that dumping billions of dollars into every company that was even vaguely connected to the Internet is not a long-term business strategy. All topics have nuance, and everything must be consumed in moderation.

Unfortunately, we live in a dark timeline. 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. Even if you grant that AI tooling accelerates specific workloads, the method and scale of the current investments is senseless. Frequently the failure is not related to AI itself, but rather that companies are terminally bad at running software projects effectively, and as I have remarked previously, AI projects are subject to all the failure modes of normal projects plus you can get everything right and then still fail because of the method's novelty.

"companies are terminally bad at running software projects effectively"... that sounds like a "you" problem, not a "me" problem. Git gud at running software projects, and don't sign contracts with ones who are bad at it.

Very few companies are so good at shipping software that they can afford the extra risk profile.

Fine, then those companies die. Fuck em.

If they're so terrible at shipping software that they can't even adapt to change, then they weren't a good company to begin with, or they were so close to the edge of failure that they never had a backup plan, which is also poor planning. Nobody mourns Knights Capital.

We have rejected all AI implementation work. It is absolutely a gigantic bubble and we have minimized our exposure to it – every single one of our current contracts would be totally unaffected by OpenAI collapsing, save for perhaps some second-order effects such a recession causing a client to become unable to pay us. And there's nothing we can do to insulate ourselves from that anyway.

Then you will probably fail, as smarter competition that understands how to use AI will drink your milkshake. And if you don't trust your vendors to implement these projects, which given the amount of boneheaded idiots under said "heavy AI psychosis", might be a good stance, then do it in-house. Learn how it works, sidestep the contract costs, save money.

The entire rest of the article is "shitty companies do nonsensical business decisions around technology that they don't understand". Man, where have I heard that before? MongoDB, NoSQL, "web scale", blockchain, NFTs, Bitcoin, Metaverse, 3D tech for movies, every single trend chased by Hollywood, and of course, the Internet. As always, it's okay to explore new technology, as long as it's designed around understanding how it works. LEARN SHIT before you DO SHIT! Is that really that fucking hard to understand?

This is for people that are just waiting for the bubble to burst and trying not to go nuts.

I've said this a thousand times and I will say this once more: The Internet bubble bursting did not cause the Internet to disappear. You cannot just stuff your head into the sand, cry yourself to sleep, and pretend that the big bad AI era will just disappear once this all blows over. This is not blockchain bullshit. This is real actual usable tech.

But, there's too many dysfunctional idiots that don't want to learn how it works and think they can just give some random LLM a massive task, push "Go!", and it magically replace human workloads. If you give a caveman a computer, he will beat on the monitor with his club, dig out all of the electronics, and use it as a firepit. This is how 95% of companies are using LLMs. Except I don't even think they figured out how to make a firepit out of it yet.

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. I can’t name any specific people because they include personal friends I deeply respect, but I worry about how this plays out. -Mitchell Hashimoto, of HashiCorp and Ghostty fame

Spoken like a been to the island rapist pdfile. Like no guys we lied to you the first time it will be different the second go around. FUCK AI PERIOD...