AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

gnabgib

Small discussion yesterday (43 points, 7 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48956153

azakai

> All of the AI projects we have observed as a team are failing. Every single one – we have seen 0% success in a year and a half, What is an "AI project"? The post doesn't define it. Is it writing some software from scratch? Using an LLM chatbot by non-coders, either internally or externally? Or something else entirely? Some examples would really help.

slopinthebag

The AI mania has been really fascinating to witness because on the surface it’s surprising that so many otherwise intelligent people have fallen into it. But I suppose intelligence as a concept is multifaceted and doesn’t include wisdom. I also wonder if it has to do with personality, where the people whose personality best suits leadership roles are more susceptible to this psychosis. I think there is also an archetype of “nerd” who believes they are smarter than they are and has all sorts of surface beliefs about AI from sci-fi that makes them susceptible.

LOCNE55

This post feels like its correct but also doesn't align with my own personal usage of claude for writing advanced sql and python code. I haven't with my own eyes seen an AI chatbot actually deliver a user experience that lets them query data with natural language BUT I have personally experienced writing extremely advanced queries using natural language and it is absolutely able to get close to (by my estimate) 80-90% of the way there. There surely are companies out there using AI in such a way that is actually advancing them above and beyond their competition. They are probably quietly doing it rather than announcing it loudly. The whole point of the article is about the big corps with hordes of management and people in them. My argument is that they have always been that way. Before AI it was "data science and analytics" or (as the author says) "blockchain".

kbar13

honestly just seems like selection bias right? 0% success rate with ai projects, really? based on some of their other about us material it seems like they probably only attract companies that aren't motivated to adopt ai successfully.

A1kmm

> All of the AI projects we have observed as a team are failing. Every single one – we have seen 0% success in a year and a half, not only amongst projects we have been asked to participate in, but even within projects that we have observed in passing while doing totally unrelated work. That's got to be hyperbole, which blows out their credibility. They chose to say 'AI' rather than, for example, LLM, or Transformer model, or Diffusion model. This means they are including a huge swathe of things dating back to Expert Systems in their claim. And who hasn't seen productivity gains from more established AI technology - at least things like semantic search? Who hasn't seen diffusion models generating content in roles that might have done the work by hand before? Who hasn't seen some kind of regression algorithm (even using linear regression in a supervised context counts as AI - so you can absolutely do AI even in tools like Excel) improve operation productivity? Even if they narrowed it to the Transformer model LLMs which re-ignited recent public interest in AI, less ambitious projects to give them to engineering staff to automate easy but boring tasks in the background generally have been a success. More ambitious ones that are beyond what you'd reasonably expect the models to be able to do - for sure, those tend to fail. For most of these, the failure is predictable in advance, while some are at the boundary of what's possible, and so it is harder to predict (these are rationally genuine R&D projects).

zkmon

You are basically calling out the fact that the Emperor has no clothes. Many said this before. While it is a true statement, it is not going to help. Because, as you rightly said, it is a mania - like the tulip mania of 17th century or the manias of many forms today. The mania continues to evolve and flourish through it's peak and then go down. For that matter, there is hardly anything that is not a mania. Think of agile processes, timesheets, LoC based productivity, ... The corporate mindset keeps going through different mania at different times. It could be initiated by some consulting gurus (processes), or some security nerds (strap yourself down until you can't move), or peer pressure (fear of missing out), or presentation goals (show that you are a AI-powered and modern company). We can't remove or stop manias. Infact that is not the goal. The music should go on and the dance should go on. Everyone is in this dance - customers, businesses, supply chains, governments, thinkers and philosophers. It's a world-wide dance. So it's OK. The music track won't last forever. It will change and dance will change.

Aurornis

Clicking the footnote for the weird "All of the AI projects we have observed as a team are failing" is equal parts enlightening and confusing: > We have rejected all AI implementation work. It is absolutely a gigantic bubble and we have minimized our exposure to it – every single one of our current contracts would be totally unaffected by OpenAI collapsing, save for perhaps some second-order effects such a recession causing a client to become unable to pay us. And there’s nothing we can do to insulate ourselves from that anyway. Following the link to their company page goes to Hermit Tech, where the primary advertisements for their services are about helping failing projects and troubled teams. So this is just one huge selection bias example? Start a consulting company for recovering struggling projects, then make claims like "100% of the projects we've seen are struggling"? There's so much more in this blog post that feels like they're working hard to ignore anything that disagrees with their bubble. Building an AI data pipeline with evals such that you can swap between AI APIs is standard. It's actually part of doing a decent job because you need to select which model hits the right cost/performance tradeoffs and be in a position to pivot when that math changes. Harboring ideas that OpenAI is going to collapse and bring your projects down with it is the kind of talk you hear out of people who don't understand how AI projects work or that there's an ecosystem to it beyond a single company. The latest projects I'm working on even include open weight models that can be run on reasonable local hardware as cost and performance benchmarks. Even if all of the AI providers collapsed at the same time and nobody offered any services (not going to happen) these projects can still continue on. It's a very weird time in technology. You can have one foot in a world where people are adopting technologies and using them intelligently, then you can run into articles like this from people who have built their own little self-selecting bubble that confirms all of their ideas who can't even imagine that successful projects exist right now.

dash2

> Checking out a parallel copy of our Go repository and telling the AI to rewrite the whole thing in Zig while I work on something else just so I can keep my job. > Was it just sales fluff? The answer was a lot more interesting.... Executives at their customers were saying absurd things about achieving 100x productivity, and this meant that if any executive at the vendor said that these gains were not plausible, it would undermine the credibility of the customer’s executive, be perceived as an attack (or heresy), and possibly result in an enterprise contract cancellation. A lot of excellent anecdotes here.

simonw

This is excellent. > Employees don’t use internal chatbots because companies tend to have low-quality documentation and an LLM is not psychic – it can only know things that have been written down and made accessible. Then later: > In one extreme case, I have seen an executive confess that they had never even used ChatGPT or any AI tool in their life, immediately after producing a technical strategy for an organisation with $2B+ in revenue which was entirely centered around AI. And: > In fact, we have been forced to opt out of every sale where the lead has expressed anything beyond the most fleeting curiosity in the use of AI in their business. I don’t mean that we’ve heard that they’re interested in AI and elected to drop the contract on moral grounds. I mean that, over the course of the engagement, these people have exhibited a pattern of behavior that has made it near-impossible to sell to them without incurring reputational and legal risk, and are furthermore crafting management environments that I can only describe as cultish, ineffective, and “please dear God, do not let it be on earth as it is on LinkedIn”. And: > with one client, we uncovered that staff were totally unaware they had been given licenses for AI tooling, which cast into doubt all productivity claims.

theendisney

Everyone knows the ivory towers are full of people who shouldnt be there. Its marvelous to see them crumble even if you arent in the chain gang below. Nothing will improve until things get bad enough. You need enough greedy yes men doing quailty control on airplanes to escalate. It took me decades to understand the use of and need for escalation in big organisations. I didnt understand seemingly unproductive strict job descriptions either. Hilarious situations with 10 people doing nothing at all their entire shift (really nothing) while i had work todo on my own that really required 5 people. A few days later someone showed up to tell me the qualty was below average. LOL Now i know i should do only half a shift worth of work. When they come complaint about it i say: very good, write it down, make the official report. Then i hear nothing and a year later its two people with work for 5 scheduled. I tell them to slow down but we still do 2.5 shifts because they dont understand how escalation works. The nummers now show we are 5 times as productive which isnt good for the company. The beurocracy is slow to adapt and all it has is numbers. For many years i tried to do all of the work but that means nothing is wrong. The numbers say all is fine most of the time. Someone grinning at how much work i did isnt going to get recorded or processed. If it looks like an unattended LLM can do a better job it means you dont know what you are talking about. If you fire everyone who noticed you might buy time but reality will catch up. It reminds me of when they first put computers in trains in NL, they ran on windows 3.11 and no one trusted it to do anything. The solution was to give it all the data so that it could display a nice overview but it didnt control anything. Lots of trains drove around with a blue screen of death or a boot error. If there was a problem it was slightly harder to diagnose but it wouldnt drive if [say] a door was open. If the gui said a door was open you could just ignore it. On its own it means someone has to replace a sensor. If it also didnt move anymore the message is a real issue. I imagine LLMs are wonderful for that kind of thing.

jauntywundrkind

Broadly I don't think this is quite so true, quite such a mortal threat. What I see are that there are a lot of extremely fake humans, who want and need cover. Who have absurd ridiculous (and often dastardly or sinister) plans. Who want to do things, a-priori. But could never get away with their actions, in any just clear reasoned normal rules of society. And AI is this new circuit breaker. It's innovative permission to move ridiculously fast and break everything, right now. Take the perhaps old IBM slide and flip it upside down, > A computer can never be held accountable. > Therefore a computer must never make a management decision https://simonwillison.net/2025/Feb/3/a-computer-can-never-be... The people "using" AI today to "make decisions" are using it because AI cannot be held accountable therefore that is the cover for their decisions. This is is all such a resounding PKD nightmare, a reality bring invaded by Fake Humans. It was that was already, just gobs of nonsense, the worst liars spreading the most ridiculous memetic caltrap everywhere: Bullshit Asymmetry Principle weaponized against reason to ever higher degrees, Fox News terrormongering advanced and advanced, Hastert Rule obstructionist politics by wicked pedophile protectors and system ruiners and monsters. AI is a rapid accelerant for burning down reality, for propagating the disreality that the fake humans require for existence. Un-people truly from some other dimension, who've worked and worked to get away with their twisted anti- reality over us all. AI can and does help with a lot of decision making, in good ways. It's an incredibly tool. It can comb through incredible amounts of data. But it's primary use in "decision making" seems to be in deflecting responsibility, in making hideous choices no human system could reasonably make. In concocting fabulations. Both of management design, and endless fuel nightmare disreality slop video to dislodge any last bits of real reality still clinging on (hello ai faked campaign videos!). The "frothing excitement" here is the frothing excitement to destroy society, to be and bring out the most wicked brutal careless world that can be brought upon us, to raise up the Theil-istic/(Octavia) Butler-ian nightmare neofuedalim. It is to escape accountability, to give cover for sin savagery and sabotage. (Regarding the article, I do think it's worth tempering ones read of this article by reading the authors previous work on AI. Which to me exposes their baises and in my view makes them so vastly unreliable & overdramatic a narrator as to be near worthless. Their other submissions are less greviously clearly full of it, but also tend towards ridiculous over-grandiosity. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48002795 )

danilocesar

Interesting how op describes his own experience and then assume that every other company around the globe experience exactly the same. He generalizes CEO's behavior but provides no evidence. Cool.

ilaksh

Fair point as far as there being low success rate in some ways and over-enthusiasm. But 0% success is a dishonest exaggeration. He's ramped his own AI spite up to a manic level.