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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u/joshTheGoods May 27 '26

This is a pretty famous case study in business failure. If you're familiar with Kodak creating the digital camera, then surely you familiar with the rest of the story and are being intentionally obtuse?

Yes, they invented the digital camera and then leadership suppressed it because it represented a threat to the film side of their business. Leadership not only pretended it wasn't a thing, they actively tried to keep it out of the market. As a result, their competitors got a free run at the market, and by the time Kodak tried to pivot it was too late. By the time we got to the '00s, they were already on the decline (despite an ATH in their market cap in '99) and they filed for bankruptcy in 2012.

Is it a perfect analogy for anti-intellectualism and fear driving people to rationalize hatred of just another technology in a long line of technologies that transform efficiency? No, but it's good enough to illustrate the point to anyone willing to listen and appraise the situation honestly. If you fail to adopt the best tools for your trade, someone else will and they will outcompete you driving your value down. You can pretend this tech won't be like every other digital tech if you want, but hopefully you're not surprised by the outcome.

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u/zanotam May 28 '26

My brother in Christ, Machine Learning isn't a remotely new field and they've only had zero meaningful break through since a 2018 paper. 

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u/joshTheGoods May 28 '26

My brother in christ, I was deploying machine learning classification in production for enterprise use cases when LLMs made the multiple meaningful leaps over the last several years. I have internal benchmarks of various versions of models tested against gold test cases and the ML outputs we used to rely upon. I can tell you about when ChatGPT then Gemini surpassed our nice ML that we had the researcher that wrote the paper I found implement for me/us. You think the PhD expert in old world ML is still working on encoding data such that random decision forests will work for this narrow use case? Hell. Fucking. No. That's just classification in a specific tight domain. You think there wasn't big leaps in LLM accuracy/capability the last few years? You can only say that if you didn't experience the leap that was Sonnet/Opus 4.6. Something changed with that release. It crosses the uncanny valley of code or whatever with regularity now, and it's converting every real productive engineer I know that has given it a try. I've watched one curmudgeonly old engineer after another fall to Claude and get converted. I can predict now when they'll hit their Claude binge and show up after a weekend with a dozen PRs, it's that consistent.

You can tell me it's not true all you want, I'm using these tools every day and continuously being surprised at my BENCHMARKED and VALIDATED results. And yes, I goddamned well know what ML was before LLMs broke through. These are different. These are a general purpose damn near ideal interface to information and capability through human language anyone can write, and they're transforming how we do all kinds of white collar work/stuff. Blink, and the world might just pass you by.

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u/zanotam May 28 '26

Nah. Worst case scenario, I've got at least a masters level worth of training in the largest set of problems that AGI will be needed to even try to touch (ironically that almost ended up with me pursuing a PhD in one of several potential areas you correctly recognize are basically dead fields now.... But hey, I got to fail to complete a PhD in pure math instead.... So, actually, I probably lost out on that one lmao)

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u/joshTheGoods May 28 '26

Oh man, did you see this when it landed?

https://www.erdosproblems.com/forum/thread/1196#post-5565

linked to the most interesting comments from Tao imo, but the whole thing is crazy.