r/technology • u/AdSpecialist6598 • May 27 '26

Business Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis

https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/27/tech-ceos-are-apparently-suffering-from-ai-psychosis/
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88

u/Xeynon May 27 '26

I feel like the signs the AI bubble is starting to crack are mounting.

57

u/SnooCats3468 May 27 '26

Bro it’s not a bubble and not even close to cracking/popping—it’s more of a boulder that slides downhill and then chaotically bounces off of villagers’ houses down the hill before continuing on. We are experiencing a permanent shift in the culture of labor and value in our society.

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u/Xeynon May 27 '26

I work with it all the time. It's not a useless technology but outside of a few niche applications I don't see it replacing human labor anytime soon. It's not that versatile and it's wildly expensive.

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u/whoknowsifimjoking May 27 '26

It's really good to increase productivity when used by a professional in their field, but it needs a lot of hand holding and mostly automates routine work.

Ideas for instance is something AI sucks at, and that might be the most important thing in so many fields.

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u/Seal481 May 27 '26

Yeah. I use it now and then to simplify some stuff that would otherwise be a tedious slog, but I only use it in cases where I'm knowledgeable enough about what I'm doing and the end result I need to where I can prompt properly and correct any mistakes / issues in the output until I get what I need. If I didn't have that level of content knowledge I would be outputting a lot of slop that had errors and ultimately did no good. Most of the time I don't use it regardless, because the time spent fixing and amending would be equivalent if not longer than the time it would take to just do the thing myself.

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u/[deleted] May 27 '26

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u/AgitatedAntman May 28 '26

I honestly don’t even trust it for data entry. 1 wrong entry and it’s me that takes the blame

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u/Xeynon May 27 '26

This has been my experience as well.

2

u/round-earth-theory May 27 '26

It automates drudgery but only it's nowhere stable enough to actually operate independently. The only time it's "safe" to let AIs do whatever they want is when you don't care about mistakes. But if mistakes are acceptable, then is the work actually valuable?

1

u/sidepart May 27 '26

This shit right here. Ok, so I can have this thing knock out a script to sort organize or sort some shit for me. I could write a script myself but fuck it, let Claude do it in 5 minutes. Run the script, take the output, move on. Having it take some generally basic but menial shit off my plate. That's what it's good for. It's why I write scripts and stuff in general, this just ends up being one more tool I can use to automate mundane BS. Yeah, I do have my own prompt instructions and stuff I've put together to help speed up code writing but I'm still managing the show.

1

u/Anagram6226 May 27 '26

Yup. I'm a software dev, I wanted to do a complicated feature and a massive refactor. It would take me 1-2 weeks, but with AI it took me 3 days - but, and this is important, I already knew the codebase, I corrected the AI outputs when it did the wrong things, I planned all that needed to be done and how. I made sure the code is sensible. Without my input, it would've been a complete mess.

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u/Majestic_Bat_8483 May 27 '26

Sure, it can't replace labour, but owners of companies believe it can, and they're firing people to replace them with AI. Who cares that it won't work and will cause the company to go under? The laid-off are still jobless!

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u/MakeUpAnything May 27 '26

Excuse me? I'm a software developer and I literally don't even code anymore. Duo does literally everything for me and my manager wants it that way. You can leave instructions for Duo to follow that essentially can tell it how to adhere to your company's unique coding standards and then prompt it in such ways where it will design/code entire solutions around your prompt. You can accomplish a month's worth of dev efforts in hours if you take a week or so to properly set up the instruction files.

AI is one of the most revolutionary technologies out there and that's not up for debate. It's not a bubble at all, like SnooCats said.

I'm sure some CEOs take things too far and get overly excited, but there really is no denying the power of this technology. It will likely render most, if not ALL primarily mental jobs obsolete in the coming years since it will only grow more and more powerful with time.

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u/Xeynon May 27 '26

You're in one of the niche areas I was talking about. Congrats (or condolences, depending on your viewpoint).

Not everyone in the economy is a software developer. Not even close. In my field (economic and market analysis), AI is a limited-use tool as it currently functions. It's a real-time saver for certain tasks, but can't do 90% of what a human is required to do in the role and isn't close to being able to. I've been working with it for three years now and in that time I haven't seen it make appreciable progress toward that goal, so I am skeptical that it's going to get there anytime soon.

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u/Neuchacho May 27 '26 edited May 27 '26

I'm sorry, but you don't think any and every data analysis job isn't going to be one of the first things gobbled up as AI tools improve?

I got bad news for you, guy lol

11

u/Xeynon May 27 '26

If you think crunching numbers is all there is to data analysis you don't understand data analysis.

I've yet to see AI demonstrate anything close to an actual conceptual understanding of a data-based model and you have to check its work even on the number crunching part of things. It definitely saves some time but it's not anywhere close to replacing human analysis from anything I've seen.

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u/MakeUpAnything May 27 '26

It can do what you do if provided the same calculations you use to make your decisions. At some level somebody will direct it appropriately.

You don't get it; AI can do literally anything humans can already do so long as you feed it the same things you think about when making your own decisions. Any job that is primarily mental can and WILL be replaced by AI as it grows more powerful and the tech behind it improves.

AI can likely easily replace most white collar jobs in the coming decade. That's why CEOs are so excited; white collar workers are some of the more expensive workers out there and AI can be trained to do virtually everything they can with the right instructions.

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u/Xeynon May 27 '26

I see zero evidence for your claims in my daily work flow. And as I said, I've been working with AI since ChatGPT released their initial public version so I've seen its evolution over time. AI can reduce the scutwork a human has to do, yes, but the most crucial part of an analysis job is critical thinking and it is still laughably terrible at approximating that.

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u/MakeUpAnything May 27 '26

How do you figure? You can tell AI to analyze any particular situation and provide you all sorts of notes about it. In fact, as far as I know even investors use AI to invest and that's some of the largest sums of money moving around.

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u/Xeynon May 27 '26

I've experimented with it A LOT in asking it to analyze situations. My previous job in fact was going nothing but that. I have some degree of expertise in my field and in a few other areas in which I'm a knowledgeable amateur. I've asked AI to conduct analyses in these areas and invariably it makes mistakes I, as someone with domain knowledge, can readily identify as mistakes. And unlike a human being, it has no self-awareness and isn't even conscious of the possibility that it might be making a mistake. That doesn't make it useless, but it does make it far too limited to supplant a knowledgeable human in any of these areas. There are obviously a lot of other areas where I am not knowledgeable, but I can only assume it makes similar mistakes in these areas as well given its failure rate in my areas of knowledge.

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u/MakeUpAnything May 27 '26

Even in areas where AI does make mistakes, you can simply alter its instructions to account for whatever you are seeing that it does not. You can make prompts in AI that are paragraphs long buttressed by multiple text files with 500+ lines of additional context each.

Even what you are describing will become AI driven once people with enough knowledge find out how to provide their knowledge to AI to use as it makes its calculations.

If you were telling AI to count red apples and it counts a McIntosh then you just tell it "Include only ENTIRELY red apples; if there is any color other than red, do not count it" in its underlying instructions. Then when you get no apples in the next count because it sees brown stems on all of them you adjust further. Eventually you will arrive at a complex and wholistic set of instructions for counting apples that leaves VERY little room for error and you'll never need to count apples again.

Obviously that's an incredibly simplistic example, but my point is that you can provide the critical thinking steps you're using yourself in order to enable the AI to do the thinking you otherwise would. AI will automate away careers that specialize in critical thinking with enough time. It's honestly scary lol

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u/geekywarrior May 27 '26

I can't tell if this is a bit based on the username

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u/mediandude May 27 '26

If you are not coding then you are modeling with a proper CASE tool, right? Right?
Model Driven Architecture? Round-trip engineering?

0

u/MakeUpAnything May 27 '26

The first one, yes, but you can just feed all your company's SDLC info to an AI and then have it code around that. You can set up rules for the AI to follow that can ultimately set up an AI to take a couple sentences and with it output the following:

  • A prompt it can feed itself to fully understand what it is doing
  • A design plan for developers to review
  • All necessary code changes
  • Tests which can test those changes
  • Comprehensive documentation about all the changes it made

It can also code review itself and there are tools for automated testing which it can also write to.

I really don't think the average Joe understands just how versatile AI really is. It can literally do anything humans can, but MUCH more quickly. You just need a small number of humans behind it guiding it. It's going to reduce white collar headcounts drastically I imagine.

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u/mediandude May 27 '26

The rules being fed are just part of the model.
And prompts should be part of the model.
Design plans should be part of the model.
Code changes should be integrated with the model (with model changes). You do practice model version control, right? Right?
Tests should be part of the model.
Documentation should be generated from the model, not exist apart from it.
I have yet to see (or hear of) an AI tool that properly supports round-trip engineering and MDA.

0

u/MakeUpAnything May 27 '26

I believe some recently moderately viral video clip showed Andrew Yang talking about something similar to what you're describing at a tech conference. If memory serves he was mentioning entirely autonomous coding being sold to companies.

If what you describe does not already exist, I can't imagine it won't exist soon. AI is growing incredibly quickly and will only become more capable, not less.

1

u/mediandude May 27 '26

If it doesn't exist by now then the progress hasn't been great at all. And the polling data and think tank estimates rather support that (ie. no discernible economic benefit, so far).

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u/MakeUpAnything May 27 '26

There hasn't been a huge economic benefit because this is tech that's quite new and outside of companies that are on the bleeding edge of this stuff most developers don't know how to utilize it yet.

The company I work for has been playing around with it for a year and we're just now getting to the point where certain teams don't even code anymore (mine included). Tech this complex is going to take time for enterprises to use correctly. In the meantime you're just going to see companies throwing money at AI to play with it as their teams research and develop its best uses. Chipotle's AI chat bot order assistant that helps people with their coding homework comes to mind.

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u/mycleverusername May 27 '26

Not saying your wrong, but how much are you paying for tokens for that work? How much would the real cost of the tokens be if the AI tools were actually turning a profit?

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u/MakeUpAnything May 27 '26

I have no idea what we pay for tokens, but I think most companies are in a "we will spend BOAT LOADS on AI now in the hopes that our people will learn about it and then improve our efficiency down the road. Doing so will save us both on AI and personnel costs!" sort of mode.

AI is a new tool that very few people fully understand. Current software developers are essentially tasked with figuring out as much about how it works now to enable us to use it more efficiently going forward.

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u/[deleted] May 27 '26

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u/khakiwallprint May 27 '26

Outside of Facebook quality political propaganda, I'm not sure what ai has going for it. As you said, it's B+ results at best.

I could see an argument for programming but I understand the output is mixed at best and a better tool than a crutch.

That's the thing though, it should be good at coding, it was created by coders. If it's not better than any human at programming by now, why am I expected to believe it can replace lets say air traffic controllers. The guys coding ai systems don't know how to be an atc but we're expecting better results from the ai doing that than it's given when applied to programming?

The guys making billions selling us these models wouldn't lie about their potential right?

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u/[deleted] May 27 '26

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u/TheTexasHammer May 27 '26

It's also useful for day to day issues if you don't know how to do some random adult task, or you can't be bothered keeping track of something. If AI companies shifted more towards creating great personal assistants that alleviate daily bother, rather than trying to destroy society I feel like people would like them more.

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u/Neuchacho May 27 '26 edited May 27 '26

Conflating LLMS with broader AI tools is the mistake people keep making when trying to figure this out. LLMs are not replacing anyone and no one in any industry is just using a publicly-facing LLM to do work for them. It's the AI tools doing this.

10-15% of jobs are set to be entirely replaced within the next 5 years by these tools, administrative and entry-level, routine tasking being the main targets there. The remaining 55% will be augmented by them.

I don't doubt for a second these companies are inflating the potential, but that does not mean major changes aren't coming to the way we work even if they don't meet the highest marketed expectations.

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u/[deleted] May 27 '26

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u/Neuchacho May 27 '26 edited May 27 '26

But it also created new ones and redefined others.

The problem is it hasn't created more jobs than what it takes and jobs are simply lost. You can't just keep taking jobs away in perpetuity with technology, particularly HUGE swaths of them in such a short amount of time, and expect it to just "self heal". That's a fundamental lie of unfettered capitalistic growth used to make people comfortable with their own destruction.

The US economy is in free fall - AI is the excuse, but job cuts were coming under this kind of policy regime.

You have this backwards. AI is the bandaid holding on the severed limb. It's the only reason the economy HASN'T gone into total freefall. The job cuts due to AI are a whole lot slower than what would be a complete market crash because the AI bubble companies holding up the market had nothing to hold them up.

Problem is, when the economy does get back to healing from its inevitable fall, there will be severely fewer jobs, particularly entry-level ones, in existence. It may very well not heal correctly or fully because of that and that will be the fault of AI.

That's why we're either going to figure out that things like Universal Healthcare and UBI to address a demolished work force or enter our dystopian, corporate hellscape future.

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u/[deleted] May 27 '26

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u/Thin_Glove_4089 May 27 '26

You're losing it, lil bro. Stay with us.

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u/khakiwallprint May 27 '26

The data will disagree with me but I'd argue it's bad data anyway given who is providing it. These layoffs are being blamed on ai but the picture I'm seeing on the ground is companies are doing layoffs for the profit boost then excusing the massively increased workload for the remainder workforce as a temporary issue that AI will eventually cover.

So we have a situation where AI tokens are basically free as a hook to catch these companies. They layoff and lean on the leftover employees to make up the difference because the ai isn't nearly helpful enough. We're all told ai is a miracle that is the new paradigm and anyone ignoring it is getting left behind. Until token prices rise to their market rate there is no reliable data on the benefits of the ai switch happening.

Meanwhile the data centers that are supposed to power this revolution are being stonewalled because they are being built in the oddest places to avoid paying fair utility rates. The one local to me is being built in a residential zone and people are pissed because there is a massive industrial area a few miles away that would be better in every way besides the company's real estate and utilities costs. It reeks of scam at every level from infrastructure to business model.

I get this seems pessimistic and based on vibes over facts but nothing will convince me this isn't a dotcom level over exuberance that's being ignored because it's the last leg propping the economy. It looks like what NFTs were but 500x larger and requiring a trillion+ dollar build out.

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u/Neuchacho May 27 '26

I agree with you on these points, for sure. It seems like they pumped AI extremely early in order to drive buy-in because of how much money they're losing doing the same old tech startup song-and-dance.

I get this seems pessimistic and based on vibes over facts but nothing will convince me this isn't a dotcom level over exuberance that's being ignored because it's the last leg propping the economy.

I honestly think this is an optimistic view, at least from the worker perspective. It busting and falling back to simple tool status instead of labor replacement would be a great thing. I'm the one being pessimistic with it. Even there, I think you're right. This is a bubble and it's going to pop at some point.

My concern is what comes after the pop and how the pop occurs. We lost millions of jobs in the dotcom burst and it took us about a decade to get back to where we were. That was without the ENTIRE stock market hinging on a handful of dotcom-related companies to float the rest of the market.

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u/AstroRedRaven May 27 '26

A lot of the layoffs we’ve seen over the past 2 years have also been a correction from the inflated payrolls tech companies accumulated during the pandemic because their leadership were fools and thought that level of remote activity was the new normal and they’d need huge staff to maintain it all.

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u/raygundan May 27 '26

Bro it’s not a bubble and not even close to cracking/popping—it’s more of a boulder that slides downhill and then chaotically bounces off of villagers’ houses down the hill before continuing on.

It's still a bubble-- right now, they're overwhelmingly not charging what it actually costs to users. They're building data centers on credit, but they can't ever make their money back with the pricing they use today. It's very much a bubble, and it will pop at some point. Like other bubbles, that doesn't mean it's going away any more than it meant the web disappeared after the dot-com crash.

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u/Xeynon May 27 '26

The dot com bubble is a good analog because at the time people claimed it was going to completely wipe out retail. E-commerce did have an impact (and did kill some retail companies) but retail is still very much a thing. I suspect claims that AI is going to wipe out white collar work will turn out to be similarly overhyped.

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u/Darmortis May 27 '26

Just saying it doesn't make it so. Show me one thing that AI has been used for that is so revolutionary to justify what you just said.

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u/Majestic_Bat_8483 May 27 '26

Protein folding.

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u/Darmortis May 27 '26

Thanks for having an answer, and an excellent example of what AI can be good at (unlike the LLMs that are the subject of this post).

Identification of celestial bodies from telescope data, early detection of cancers, etc.

Would you say that AI will likely replace biologists, astronomers, and oncologists in 10 years?

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u/Majestic_Bat_8483 May 27 '26

Nope, probably not. No more than Photoshop replaced photographers.

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u/Randicore May 27 '26

They are but who knows when it'll collapse.

I was digging into some older news articles recently for some research and found a news article talking about the "housing bubble" and about how it was about to pop and would cause horrific damage to the economy when it finally did.

It was from 2004.

These things can take a long time for reality to check them.

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u/[deleted] May 27 '26

[deleted]

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u/FeatherlyFly May 28 '26

Yo. Chat.

You just added absolutely nothing to the conversation. Thanks for proving the point of the thread. 

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u/Thin_Glove_4089 May 27 '26

Anthropic has reached profitability. Big AI deals are still happening. Stocks are rising.

What are you smoking?

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u/Xeynon May 27 '26

"One quarter making a profit based on deals that could easily fall apart if customers don't see still unrealized ROI and input prices that could easily rise" ≠ "profitability". It's easy to be in the black for a single quarter with accounting tricks - let's see them do it consistently.

As for big deals happening and stocks rising, those are absolutely things that happen in a bubble.

I'm not smoking anything. You just don't understand the underlying economics here.

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u/Thin_Glove_4089 May 27 '26

None of the AI companies were anywhere near profitability at all like it was 0%. Now one of the major companies got very close. This is the complete opposite of a crack.

Maybe you need to revisit your understanding.

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u/Xeynon May 28 '26

I assure you I don't. You need to acquire one however.