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by simonw 26 days ago
What's the psychosis?
5 comments

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

I don’t know about gambling, but if “working in the military” has a stigma, I humbly suggest seeking out different social functions.
I don't have to because I don't write software for child seeking missiles for Palantir
I would say the exact opposite
That sounds more like a you problem.
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.

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.

The general public may not be their customer base (except maybe for ChatGPT, which is primarily a consumer app), but it is the voter base. The AI backlash has been brewing for a while and is bubbling over in the form of data-center pushbacks, and talk about regulation has been picking up. Plus, if "AI destroys the world" does happen, even the capitalists looking to further cut out labor will not be too happy about that.

Even if this was not covered in Marketing 101, it was all pretty predictable. Sure, most of these CEBrOs probably have a god complex (probably fueled by Ketamine) but their behavior is also consistent with the premise that they see a job apocalypse coming and they must warn the world about it.

Especially never liked Eric Schmidt, and he went about it very ham-handedly, but I do think he is right. Stopping is not an option given Capitalism's hunger for growth and the current geopolitical landscape. The genie is out of the bottle and we must adapt, because Capitalism is not going to.

>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).

> takes our jobs and makes RAM expensive

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

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.

> because the market for stories about AI failures remains enormous

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

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

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