Comment by noddingham
19 hours ago
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...
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.
Fair and I would edit if I still had time. How about "AI brain fry"?
It's definitely a form of psychosis - contact with reality has been lost in both cases.
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.
"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
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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.
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.
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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).
Please let's not dilute the meaning of 'AI psychosis'. It is a real phenomenon that involves actual psychosis.
What's the psychosis?
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.
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>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 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?
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?
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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?
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You can’t just redefine ‘AI Psychosis’ to mean ‘somebody whose opinion about ai I disagree with’