Assuming this prediction of a tepid future for AI pans out, where is the accountability for all those CEOs and managers who pushed for deep investment based on FOMO, bolstered by wishful thinking and a willing ignorance of the technical details?
IOW, who will be fired for getting this wrong? Answer: nobody.
Some small AI-based companies will tank, but all the leaders in F500 companies know how to survive. If the emperor has no clothes, they'll all have collective amnesia and say they knew it the whole time. A few quotes to the press here, a few emails there, and they will move on with their BSing and talk about "what we learned."
Macha · 6h ago
Note that while none of the CEOs will be fired for getting it wrong, plenty of people will be fired because the CEOs got it wrong, as the CEOs cut headcount to reduce costs to have _something_ to present to investors in earnings reports.
No comments yet
philjohn · 7h ago
At this point you can't convince me that we couldn't just replace most CEO's and VP's with LLM's and get the same, or better, outcomes.
utyop22 · 5h ago
Sundar, Cook etc are living off the foundations laid by prior founders / CEOs.
I'll give Cook a lot of respect since he knows supply chains and manufacturing in particular deeply and that's really been his job post Steve Jobs.
But what value does Sundar or Satya add, really? I've not heard a single super insightful comment come out of their mouths. You could replace them and not notice a difference in financial performance.
42lux · 5h ago
They are whips for the boards.
utyop22 · 4h ago
Theres been many men throughout history who were whipping boys - none of whom possessed any important quality.
danaris · 47m ago
> where is the accountability for all those CEOs and managers who pushed for deep investment based on FOMO, bolstered by wishful thinking and a willing ignorance of the technical details?
There's never any accountability for the bad—sometimes destructively, catastrophically bad—decisions of managers and executives. And frankly, this is part of what is causing serious problems for our society.
It breeds a class of people who genuinely believe that either a) they are truly always right, always the smartest ones around, and any mistakes or failures are because of all the people around them, or b) it doesn't matter how often they're wrong; they're entitled to always be taken seriously and get their full bonuses, no matter how badly things are falling apart because of their decisions.
Now, part of this is because our corporate world is really really bad at assessing the outcomes of decisions like these (and this is not wholly unrelated to the fact that proper assessment would reveal the levels of incompetence in many C-suites). But part of it is simply because we have built a culture that says these people are never to be questioned.
And that's toxic to any attempts to actually build something better.
aleph_minus_one · 7h ago
> Ahead of launch, OpenAI's Sam Altman said he'd felt "useless" compared to the model's intelligence, even drawing parallels with the Manhattan Project. When it arrived, users apparently felt less intimidated.
So Sam Altman admitted that he isn't so smart after all? :-)
jameslk · 6h ago
The title is clickbaity compared to the content of the article, which seems to have more nuance. Its claim is that recent AI advances were both overhyped and still have a lot of utility that hasn't propagated fully yet (a la the Internet). Not terribly revelatory at this point
aldebran · 6h ago
What does GPT-5 do that just wasn’t possible before or wasn’t possible as well as it is now?
In my daily use cases I only see regressions.
lostmsu · 4h ago
GPT-5 did nothing, but Claude 4 and Gemini 2.5 were just a few months ago.
chrsw · 4h ago
AI has huge potential. LLMs though? Not so much. And the timeline for AI to transform the the way we live and work should be measured in decades, not months.
mettamage · 3h ago
Why not? They helped me get more stuff done in new ways than blockchain has ever done. Both technologies were touted to be innovative. I'm doing all kinds of things with AI all the time. It's pretty handy.
IOW, who will be fired for getting this wrong? Answer: nobody.
Some small AI-based companies will tank, but all the leaders in F500 companies know how to survive. If the emperor has no clothes, they'll all have collective amnesia and say they knew it the whole time. A few quotes to the press here, a few emails there, and they will move on with their BSing and talk about "what we learned."
No comments yet
I'll give Cook a lot of respect since he knows supply chains and manufacturing in particular deeply and that's really been his job post Steve Jobs.
But what value does Sundar or Satya add, really? I've not heard a single super insightful comment come out of their mouths. You could replace them and not notice a difference in financial performance.
There's never any accountability for the bad—sometimes destructively, catastrophically bad—decisions of managers and executives. And frankly, this is part of what is causing serious problems for our society.
It breeds a class of people who genuinely believe that either a) they are truly always right, always the smartest ones around, and any mistakes or failures are because of all the people around them, or b) it doesn't matter how often they're wrong; they're entitled to always be taken seriously and get their full bonuses, no matter how badly things are falling apart because of their decisions.
Now, part of this is because our corporate world is really really bad at assessing the outcomes of decisions like these (and this is not wholly unrelated to the fact that proper assessment would reveal the levels of incompetence in many C-suites). But part of it is simply because we have built a culture that says these people are never to be questioned.
And that's toxic to any attempts to actually build something better.
So Sam Altman admitted that he isn't so smart after all? :-)
In my daily use cases I only see regressions.