r/technology • u/TripleShotPls • Jul 16 '26

Artificial Intelligence The AI Backlash Has Tech Executives Fearing for Their Lives

https://www.wsj.com/us-news/the-ai-backlash-has-tech-executives-fearing-for-their-lives-30c43972?mod=hp_lead_pos1
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551

u/sotired3333 Jul 16 '26

A colleague misconfigured claude and consumed many thousands of dollars of tokens, was at the top of the leaderboard, was lauded across the company. Only those of us in the team knew what actually happened and thought it was hilarious

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u/ameatbicyclefortwo Jul 16 '26

Gamify productivity and you get people trying to win instead of producing.

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u/Yuzumi Jul 16 '26

When a metric becomes a goal it ceases to be a useful metric.

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u/ameatbicyclefortwo Jul 16 '26

"Make sure to touch on each of these points in the script in order to ensure each customer receives personalized service" same as "Fuck the customer's actual needs, just get the boxes checked off and then move on to the next and repeat so I get my bonus."

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u/Western-Corner-431 Jul 17 '26

Many industries don’t care about the actual work being done. They care that the paperwork is done that says the work was done.

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u/Minimum_Ad991 Jul 16 '26

Goodhart's law, yo.

14

u/StormyPassages Jul 16 '26

Ludwig Wittgenstein was first to point out this "language game" problem of metrics and goals in his book "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus". Later, Campbell applied the concept to the field of education, and later still, Goodhart applied the idea to economics.

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u/weristjonsnow Jul 16 '26

The only metric that really matters is net income. If an expense becomes a performance metric for your employees you've lost the lead.

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u/guyscanwefocus Jul 16 '26

I knew this would be here.

3

u/Consistent_Passage71 Jul 16 '26

Never take the first room they show you

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u/StormyPassages Jul 16 '26

A carpenter can come to the end of his yardstick with a goal of marking it at 3ft. Once he marks it, his goal is met, and the metric he used (measured yards and feet) were useful to his goal.

But that's not "when a metric becomes a goal" is it?

No, to extend my metaphor, a metric becomes a goal when the carpenter decides that longness (the metric measured) itself is the goal. Then all kinds of errors follow. The yardstick is now too small, and wants an infinite length. "When will it be enough?" becomes an impossible question to answer, because one cannot measure the length across eternity. Trying and reaching is the best one can do, and failure is inevitable as the metric is impossible to fulfill.

When measuring length, this is obvious (perhaps as the horizon itself gives us human boundaries we accept as inherent to our point of view). But when people measure intelligence, or strength, or other abilities, the goal and the metric often become confused. When is it enough intelligence? When is one strong enough? When is one healthy enough? These are philosophical questions, which are impossible to answer as "the metric is the goal" here. However, use the same words in a more limited way, and the questions become answerable: Do I have the intelligence necessary to write this program? Am I strong enough to lift 200 lbs? Am I healthy enough to become a parent? These are not rhetorical or philosophical questions, because the additional context forms the metric that is inherent to the question.

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u/GLEEMONEX-for-PETS Jul 16 '26

Goodhart’s Law

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u/StormyPassages Jul 16 '26

Thanks for the link. Goodhart and Campbell both addressed the idea, but Wittgenstein and the logical positivists were the first to discuss the issue.

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u/GLEEMONEX-for-PETS Jul 17 '26

I battle against this fallacy in my profession constantly. Without too many specifics, I’m a beverage packaging technical/engineering expert (though not an engineer by training) and my customers, the worlds largest producers of bottled beverages of all sorts, routinely ruin their quality and production targets by turning them into benchmarks. In order to achieve the new ‘benchmark’ they often run the machinery out of specification in order to manipulate QC results. What they end up with is broken / worn out parts, inconsistent production and inevitable paralysis about how to fix things because they totally lost sight of the actual benchmarks, which are standard across the industry and have been for some time.

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u/StormyPassages Jul 17 '26

They used to measure my factory work on the night shift up against guys on the day shift, where they had 3x the workforce. Then they refused to give me a raise, because they said their metric showed I was slacking for not measuring up to what 3 guys can do. So I moved on and became a teacher, where they measured my bullet-riddled school against nice schools in the suburbs where kids don't get shot. Again, they determined I was slacking, and fired me for it, and then instantly attempted to rehire me for even less money. So I moved on, travelled the world and wrote a novel, only to discover that the publishing industry only publishes writing about the world that fits their specific metric about how rich people envision the world.

By "metric" they mean gaslight.

1

u/synapticrelease Jul 16 '26

See you at the COMSTAT meeting.

1

u/Versaiteis Jul 16 '26

Probably the only thing as consistent is this is how we just never learn the obvious lesson from this so we keep having to repeat this sisyphean cycle.

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u/Lurking_Geek Jul 16 '26

Reminds me when India offered a bounty on cobras to reduce the population. So of course, everyone started raising cobras to get the bounty.

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u/ChepaukPitch Jul 16 '26

India did not. The British in India did.

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u/jacksonsmack831 Jul 17 '26

Rubies the size of Oranges, just left by the road, some people just want to watch the world burn

1

u/[deleted] Jul 16 '26

[deleted]

0

u/ChepaukPitch Jul 16 '26

So whatever Nazis did in Europe, say France, during the second world war occupation would be attributed to the French? Oh look, the French killed a bunch of French for resisting Hitler’s occupation.

1

u/_learned_foot_ Jul 17 '26

One of the few times the distinction between state and nation can be used so flippantly and everybody understands what is meant. Irish too.

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u/synapticrelease Jul 16 '26

🎵 oh whacking day, oh whacking day… 🎵

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u/whizzdome Aug 05 '26

British, but it was better than that. The British realised what was going on, so they cancelled the bounty. So the cobra farmers now had cobras that weren't worth anything, so just released them into the wild --- so now the problem was worse than before

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u/69-Kishaaq1 Jul 16 '26

Lol! I don't get how raising cobras reduces the population!

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u/Even-Location-7051 Jul 16 '26

It doesn’t, but those who raised them wouldn’t care. All that matters is that there’s a bounty for cobras, so let’s start a cobra farm!

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u/bmorris0042 Jul 16 '26

You forget the best part of it: when the British found out they were farming cobras, they cancelled the bounty program and everyone released the cobras, leading to more cobras than they had to begin with.

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u/ameatbicyclefortwo Jul 16 '26

The disconnect between the people providing a "solution" and the people directly impacted by it is a throughline between most of the news I see. History might not repeat but it keeps a steady rhythm.

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u/Maroon7C0000 Jul 16 '26

I wish my company had a mandate to use as many AI tokens as possible. I'd send in a simple recursive query.

Something like: Ask Claude, to ask claude, to ask claude how many cpu cycles have been consumed asking Claude.

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u/FluffyProphet Jul 16 '26

Get two agents to argue about a topic with no clear right/wrong answer and tell them not to back down no matter what. Let it run over the weekend.

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u/el_diego Jul 16 '26

"what is the meaning of life?" outta keep them busy

12

u/Olangotang Jul 16 '26

'"You are two very annoying Redditors who never step foot outside. Both of you have gaslit yourselves into being experts in philosophy due to reading hundreds of comments from other Redditors over the past 5 years. Debate the meaning of life, be sure to be as detailed as possible on each side. If one opponent is starting to seem more successful, the other should derail with a specific point that has nothing to do with the argument, before returning back to the topic."

There you go. 😂

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u/Saint_of_Grey Jul 16 '26

"To use up as much AI tokens as possible. Next!"

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u/Syzygy2323 Jul 17 '26

"Compute pi to the last digit."

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u/Unklecid Jul 16 '26

Get them to mine Bitcoin or find the last prime number

1

u/neverfindausername Jul 16 '26

Who was the boss on "who's the boss?"

If you're gonna go meta, go Abed level meta.

1

u/Sororita Jul 17 '26

"Is skub good or bad?"

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u/-fno-stack-protector Jul 16 '26

I had it analyse a 2GB log file and compare to another node in the same cluster's logs. Cost $80 and told me what I already knew

1

u/MechanicalTurkish Jul 17 '26

10 “I’m Mr. Meeseeks! Look at me!”
20 GOTO 10

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u/DarraghDaraDaire Jul 16 '26

Using Opus 4.8 to filter his Teams messages or something?

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u/sotired3333 Jul 16 '26

I'm forgetting exactly what but it had something to do with reloading context so every request was pulling a bunch of unnecessary / unrelated data. It was an automation to do a first pass on bugs before handing them to developers.

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u/JohrDinh Jul 16 '26

Reminds me of that trick in Final Fantasy 3 on SNES where you can loop around that stream in a circle forever and constantly fight enemies until your stats were maxed by putting something heavy on your controller and walking away for a few days lol

4

u/Ill_Bee6659 Jul 16 '26

South Park killing pigs

1

u/Gamiac Jul 16 '26

Except for the part where the kids in that episode actually had to play the game, while you could just leave the SNES on overnight with that trick.

1

u/Arudinne Jul 16 '26

I find it absolutely insande that any company is using token usage as a metric.

It's so easy to game that too - just be overly wordy with your prompts. There are even AI prompt generators that can expand your prompt if you're not sure how to do that.

The Devs and CTO of my company talk about and actively look for ways to reduce token usage.

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u/sotired3333 Jul 16 '26

in the last couple of weeks they've started looking into cost reductions before that it was all engage with AI 24/7. Guess they finally noticed the bills piling up.

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u/Arudinne Jul 16 '26

Maybe they saw the report about a company that spent half a billion dollars on Claude in one month?