Tech CEOs Are Apparently Suffering From AI Psychosis

Source: Slashdot

AI Psychosis Among Tech CEOs

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: there is a certain wildness in the tech industry these days that both mimics previous eras of large changes—like cloud computing’s runaway costs in the early days—and is unlike anything we’ve ever seen before, with record revenues accompanied by mass layoffs. One possible explanation: tech executives, especially CEOs, are collectively suffering from delusions of AI grandeur. At least one tech CEO has said as much out loud: Box founder Aaron Levie.

“CEOs are uniquely prone to AI psychosis because they’re sufficiently distant from the last mile of work that still has to happen to generate most value with AI,” Levie wrote on X. “CEOs ‘play with AI,’ develop a prototype, or generate a contract, to use Levie’s examples, and then make the leap to believing agents can do the work. But these top‑level executives aren’t the people who have to review code, discover bugs, and identify calls to hallucinated libraries before software is deployed. They aren’t responsible for training AI models on a company’s idiosyncratic contract terms, nor do they have to spend days combing through contracts to find sneaky terms, as Levie indicates.”

In other words, Levie’s theory posits that CEOs don’t really understand processes well enough to know what can and can’t be automated. That lack of knowledge doesn’t stop them from acting on their beliefs. So what are CEOs to do instead? Levie advises CEOs to use AI “a ton” to really see what it can and can’t do, and come out the other side with an appreciation for both the upside and the real work.