Comment by pessimizer

People keep asking "where is the psychosis?" as a reply to people on the rapidly multiplying "CEOs have AI psychosis" threads that have been popping up here and cross-pollinating in the mainstream media for the last week or two.

Here's the psychosis - these things are consistently randomly wrong depending on how the wind is blowing. People are telling you to leave them alone and let them build things, and they randomly forget that cities exist or that people died 100 years ago. Some people just don't see it as worth noting, and move on. That's crazy. These things consistently fabricate - as an inversion of this experiment, I've had different models come up with the same fabrication from similar prompts. People just call it "hallucination" and I think to them that saying that makes it cease to exist or be important - when "hallucinations" are going to be braided into every answer you get even if they're unidentifiable in the output. That's crazy.

There are plenty of other crazy aspects, such as the idea that we suddenly need infinite pieces of bespoke software when all of the bespoke software I hear about people making is mundane. 3/4 of the time somebody mentions a project they're proud that they completed with LLMs to scratch some itch they had, somebody says "you haven't heard of X? It's been around forever" about something that they could have pulled down from their package manager. Who needs a spaghetti-coded, unsupported, untested version of X built on hallucinations that you haven't discovered yet (the LLM didn't realize that deleting files to reduce the archive size was unacceptable.)

What is all of this software that people need but isn't there - where are all these unserved markets, where is all this future revenue supposed to come from? Why aren't LLMs suggesting new classes of software that would create new productivity and revenue sources? Could it be that millions of human ants over decades have mostly exhausted the space, and there isn't any easy hidden revenue?

A common wisdom is that we had been vastly overhiring programmers during ZIRP, who in their idleness degraded user experiences and overcomplicated things, with management resorting to more and more sleazy and gamey means of margin extraction from more and more degraded services. We had an excess of labor, fueled by factors other than productivity, in fact being pissed away at companies that drove nose-first into the ground. What is throwing a trillion dollars of servers at that supposed to do? Is that not AI psychosis?