[noddingham]

I feel like there's a bit of AI psychosis in this particular post.

>"These are tools which burn vastly more tokens, but are also quickly becoming daily drivers for the work carried out by extremely well-compensated professionals."

>"Somehow this fragment turned into headlines like Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify the money spent on AI tokenmaxxing, because the market for stories about AI failures remains enormous."

Yes, it's just the yearning for AI failures. It couldn't possibly be runaway costs, record revenues, and massive layoffs. It couldn't possibly be that these tools are lighting dollars on fire by people already paid significantly well and not producing any increase in "value" for it (I recognize that output is 100x but outcomes are flat by all measures).

[1] https://cmr.berkeley.edu/2025/10/seven-myths-about-ai-and-pr... [2] https://futuretech.mit.edu/publication/crashing-waves-vs-ris...

[MichaelDickens]

Being pedantic, but I don't want to lose the meaning of the term: "AI psychosis" doesn't refer to someone who thinks AI is really good. It refers to someone who develops symptoms of psychosis from talking to an LLM, e.g. believing they have developed a new Grand Unified Theory of physics.

[noddingham]

Fair and I would edit if I still had time. How about "AI brain fry"?

[pydry]

It's definitely a form of psychosis - contact with reality has been lost in both cases.

[mold_aid]

I don't know, "workaday professionals will find $200/month a particularly good deal, such that there will be widespread adoption" sounds either credulous enough to support the diagnosis or dishonest enough to dismiss. I am a "knowledge worker" who is doin' fine, has a lot of templated written work/report writing, and there is no way in hell I am justifying that kind of spending to my boss or my family.

[kazga]

"I firmly believe this technology will create business value" is so obviously and categorically different from "Humanity has birthed a silicon god that I have also developed romantic feelings for" that I'm not sure if your comment is even trying to be in good faith

[mold_aid]

What sort of bad faith would even apply here? idgaf if poster x or y has psychosis or not. "$200 a month is classic addict behavior" seems pretty spot-on to me though, I just don't want to have to pay it, too.

[arcticfox]

You can't justify $200/month in spending to your boss? Many people charge more than that per single billable hour. I would put your salary side by side with that number, which is your boss's perspective, and reconsider.

[mold_aid]

>You can't justify $200/month in spending to your boss?

No. What? Of course not.

>Many people charge more than that per single billable hour.

hrmmmm not so sure about the work that "many" is doing there

[rogerrogerr]

Fully loaded costs for an average employee at a bigco are scary. Not $200 but significantly higher than the number on your W2 by the time the company pays vacation, benefits, unemployment insurance, etc.

[mold_aid]

I've seen people try to argue for resources using reasonable but abstract arguments, and it just never works. The fact of the matter is that I want $200/month, on top of my other asks, and that comes out of somebody's budget. I just don't see folks snapping their fingers and $200 a month (discounted for now!) appears. Good for the other guy I was replying to if that's the case! I just don't see it though.

[infecto]

I think is the classic dilemma where people don’t know how to value their time.

Typical tech worker costs a company around $100/hour minimum. That $200 subscription cost can look mighty attractive if it saves some time or mental load.

I don’t think there is anything about addiction or spooky with that math. I suspect a lot of this is coming from tokenmaxxing firms but on the flip side on our small team, we end up spending about $200 per person per month for tokens using tools like Cursor. We feel the spend is justified with measurable value.

[worldsavior]

You're blowing hot air. Take it elsewhere.

[infecto]

Not sure why you’re so upset but if don’t have anything constructive please move along. Ty

[spacechild1]

Please let's not dilute the meaning of 'AI psychosis'. It is a real phenomenon that involves actual psychosis.

[BloondAndDoom]

I just cannot imagine zero net productivity gain from AI usage by a somehow experienced developer. Even if it’s happening right now it’s matter of time for people to figure out how to utilize it right. Only exception would be if people are getting the same output but working less, which is still a net positive (just not in terms of output).

[simonw]

What's the psychosis?

[yokoprime]

Sometimes it feels like theres this opposite AI psychosis, where anything AI is bad and boils the ocean, takes our jobs and makes RAM expensive. Its a component in the current economy, but things like tariffs, closing the strait of hormuz etc is equally bad for the economy. Anyway, just find it strange to be so militantly anti a certain tech.

[dmix]

That’s the modern internet. What sells is the most overdramatic doom and gloom take possible.

[Gigachad]

It's more the tech leaders than the internet. Sam Altman, Jeff Bezos, Eric Schmidt and such get up on stage or interview regularly with a shit eating grin telling us all about how they are coming for our jobs, will make us obsolete, and there is nothing you can do about it.

It's a natural response for society to despise these people who have such contempt for us. It's almost embarrassing these days being at a social function and telling people I work in software, it's got a negative stigma almost like working in gambling or the military.

[biztos]

I don’t know about gambling, but if “working in the military” has a stigma, I humbly suggest seeking out different social functions.

[Gigachad]

I don't have to because I don't write software for child seeking missiles for Palantir

[dgellow]

I would say the exact opposite

[throwthrowuknow]

That sounds more like a you problem.

[keeda]

I think it's a matter of perception because I didn't interpret any of them as being gleeful about it. If you think about it, "AI will take your jobs and maybe destroy the world" is horrible, horrible marketing -- like, your comment is a perfect illustration of how it is received everywhere -- and yet these CEBros can't stop saying it, which indicates to me that they actually believe it.

Oh, now that their IPOs are nigh they're changing their tunes (https://archive.md/s9EO3) but to me that looks more like they've decided to let $$$ prospects override what they really think.

[Gigachad]

The general public is not their customer base, they don't have nearly enough money to spend on AI. Going to the media and saying "this product can automate so many jobs" is marketing to other businesses who want to use it to cut their workers out.

There was crazy clip of Eric from Google telling a crowd of university students that in the future AI will do everything, and after the whole audience boos him he keeps pushing the point that they better accept it and get on board. The mentality these guys have is sickening. They have no humility and no humanity.

[3form]

>Anyway, just find it strange to be so militantly anti a certain tech.

You know, that's fair. I'm much more against super-rich investing hundreds of billions in the things they don't understand, creating massive disruptions in their wake.

AI didn't create stupidity and greed. In the end, it's just another tech. I'm just tired, time and again, of people who I would hope to know better (and repeatedly they prove me wrong).

[girvo]

> takes our jobs and makes RAM expensive

I mean it is doing both of those, so thats fair to be honest.

[lelanthran]

Hi Simon; while it's true that the token providers have found that their product is 90% useful to devs and 10% useful to everyone else, this is something they found out in the first quarter of 2025 anyway.

It's not exactly news, is what I'm saying. And even with the PMF they found, the product is still only a commodity i.e `tokens`, which is what every other provider on the planet is also providing.

All their other products boil down to "harnesses", which does not look viable as a product in the sense of PMF - you cannot sell it, you cannot lock it to your own subscription, API, etc. so you can't use it to generate revenue any more than the free harnesses do.

PMF has a specific meaning, and "code harness" or "coding model" does not satisfy the commonly accepted meaning. Maybe Mythos (or similar) will.

[brazukadev]

> because the market for stories about AI failures remains enormous

How enormous? 1 trillion dollars, 2, 10 trillion enormous?

[Npovview]

Hi simonw, can you write your thoughts (hivemind is yet to catch up with this idea), the idea of distilling a large Opus 4.7 model into a purely reasoning core with plugin like architecture (a programming sub-model, a literature submodel, a history submodel, a geography submodel). Why is Russian and Chinese data part of my model training process, its costs more to train and do inference. I want a core model and specialized models to which Core Reasoning model can talk to. This kind of innovation is what Mistral team should be doing. Is it fundamentally impossible to do?

[shimman]

That leaders are completely fine with impoverishing vast swaths of American workers because of "progress?"

[simonw]

If they are then yes, that's psychotic. Not sure how it's relevant to my article about Anthropic and OpenAI's enterprise pricing though.

[aspenmartin]

I’m so curious: let’s say you’re the president or the CEO of a major tech corporation building frontier AI systems.

What are your directives?

[shimman]

I would never be in this position because I'm not an anti-human extremist that wants to hoard wealth and misallocate capital.

[aspenmartin]

Who’s an anti-human extremest? Doesn’t that sort of warrant some sort of facts to justify such an extreme position? What makes you feel this is a misallocation of capital OR something…anti human?

[mock-possum]

You can’t just redefine ‘AI Psychosis’ to mean ‘somebody whose opinion about ai I disagree with’