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  dtj1123
  Most of us on some level felt confident that AI would completely revolutionise our society. The singularity made sense to me, at least. It hasn't worked out like that, but rather than accept the crushing reality of our mistake and take a second to re-evaluate, we've decided to LARP out the future we promised ourselves by crowbar-and-vaselineing AI into every crack and crevice we can find and loudly proclaiming progress.It's like some 90s kid with a Nintendo power glove who's convinced themselves that this makes them a hacker. This is not the singularity.I personally can't wait for this to end, and for everyone to collectively get back to waiting for whatever the next golden ticket that's supposed to solve all of our problems turns out to be.
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  hliyan
  This part toward the end of the article resonated with me:> If you’re being asked to review huge volumes of terrible AI code, just assume that the organisation is going to burn you out and fire you. You will not convince the person drowning you in 2000 line PRs to stop. Start looking for a new job as if you have already been fired. I have seen this happen many times nowI suspect we will see this phenomenon more and more as organizations more widely adopt agentic development.
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  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).
• 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.
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  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.
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  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".
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  ufo
  Just this past week, I have had to answer two surveys, from different sources, asking how I use AI in my work. Both had a "choose all that apply" checkbox, and, funnily enough, neither allowed me to select zero options. "This question is mandatory". :)
• mildeukaryote
  > Are companies actually seeing massive productivity gains from their AI adoption? Does any of this sordid affair make sense?It makes perfect sense for the shovel sellers (nvidia, anthropic)
• btschaegg
  > The world’s organisations have been captured by people in the throes of frothing excitement, and saner people who now live in a state of constant commingled fear and frustration.This reminds me of "Youth without God" by Ödön von Horváth:> Perhaps Anne’s mother was right. Perhaps men are mad now—those who aren’t mad haven’t the courage to put their maniacal fellows into strait-jackets.
• annzabelle
  I have, in two wildly different companies, on opposite sides of the globe, witnessed leadership go all in on using LLMs to write external documents that would have significant legal and financial consequences for any inaccurate statements or numbers included. There's always a "we'll have our experts read and fact check everything before we send it out," but I have a strongly held view that people whose expertise is not in editing/fact checking tend to be far worse and sloppier at it than they are at writing things correctly the first time.
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  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.
• gnabgib
  Small discussion yesterday (43 points, 7 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48956153
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  monster_truck
  Incredible skill issue selecting for profit instead of fun. Why does everyone need to make money?? What about like... shareware? Remember shareware?
• 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. LOLNow 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.
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  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.
• olalonde
  Dupe:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48955929https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48956153
• bpalmerau
  “Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe. It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.” ― Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason
• frizlab
  Dupe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48962963 (33 points 10 comments)
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  cineticdaffodil
  I think AI is only part of the problem. The Multi-crisis ahead, makes it even less of a proposition to be in charge right now- and AI offers a "responsibility" cope out for already stressed to the limit human systems who have no solutions for the problems, because there often arent any.Take climate change- you have torrential rainfalls, sweping away whole city-parts in mountanous regions, in some enormous russian roulett. And it doesnt even factor into building evaluations because then it would basically reduce the prevalent pension scheme to cinders.You have dry months in europe now, where some thrown cigarett butt could ignite a firestorm- and the obvious solution is to remove the dangerous greenery from the burbs. Nobody does it though.And that is just the plain sight visible layer of this shit cake. If i was some missguided fool into heroics and leadership and signed up for a little more then i could take and fake- i would long for some magic box that lowers the burden too. Those up there are human after all.
• bertman
  Dupe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48956153
• ExoticPearTree
  As someone who uses LLMS for coding, ideas validation and research, I think the article is biased against AI forctge wrong reasons.If you know what you are looking for and know what “a solution looks like”, AI is amazing at distilling ideas. If you have no clue, the AI will return “clueless” solutions.It is just like before the AI: there are people who know how to search the web, read and understand documentation and so on. And then there are peole who are incapable.AI is naking the latter category fail incredibly fast. Really, nothing new under the sun: garbage in, garbage out.
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  xyzelement
  The range of ai approaches ranges from inappropriately betting on it to wholly ignoring it both of which are dumb.It helps to think of AI as analogous to previous game changers like electricity, computers, internet. If your business is bad or you have no game plan beyond "use internet" your are fucked. But at the same time almost every business has some angle in which these technologies are valuable and necessary and ignoring them is also death.
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  neuronic
  My hunch is that AI tools are probabilistically good enough to deceive most casual users in the beginning, so beliefs are built on these foundations. LLMs handle simple tasks reasonably well so their perceived 'intelligence' is easily convincing for many users (often managers and executives).However, this illusion immediately falls apart during actual stress-testing like writing code for a complex, battle-tested production environments. Non-technical folks can effortlessly spin up simple web apps or tweak a frontend so now they conclude that software engineers are becoming redundant.And even if there are obvious examples of all of this backfiring no one believes it...
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  blitzar
  Ai Mania is making evangelists and non-believers alike sound like they are taking sides in a cult.
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  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.
• viccis
  I love this author's article about saving half a million dollars with a click from a while back. Nikhil, if you're reading this, I have a decent war story about a similar situation (I was lucky enough that there were two such things, so I saved a full million a year and was still denied a $15k raise) and so I was really entertained at your post from a few years back. There are actually a lot of lessons to be learned about corporate politics there, about how you can save someone a million a year in perpetuity and promise to do that again next year (which I could have!) and see them still refuse to pay you a single extra cent.
• mafro
  The author doesn't distinguish whether these projects failed because of technology and execution, or failed because product market-fit. They simply blame AI being involved.AI will only help if you use rapid iteration to cheaply/quickly produce ideas. All the normal project failure modes still exist.. Blaming AI because AI is dumb.I only read up to point 3 because the hyperbole and frothing fervour was overwhelming.
• lofaszvanitt
  Interrasting article :D. Chef's kiss :D.
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  inigyou
  It should be possible to exploit a rich person's poor decision making to make them poorer and myself richer. But I don't see how. Why not?It sounds like the writer of this article could benefit from starting another brand which is the same product but with AI. That brand would make all the delusional AI chatbot sales and absorb the reputational damage when the chatbot destroys companies.
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  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.
• 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 decisionhttps://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 )
• dofm
  I want to frame my comment here carefully to talk about the narratives, specifically, and accept that we need to stipulate on face value that this is true (it certainly rings true from people I know in real life):This specific narrative reads like every narrative explanation of the Republican party in the period from the second half of the first Trump administration until now.Again, I am talking only about the narratives here. But the pervasive narrative around Trump is that privately everyone hates his guts, comes away with a worse impression when they work with him closely, dreads him opening his mouth, thinks his decisions are insane, and they are telling journalists that, at every opportunity, and have done since the 2018 midterms. And yet in public we have committee hearings where any number of irrational topics become a sort of terror zone here rational people have to assert irrational beliefs or pretzel logic to be able to continue; where ordinary absurdities have become cult-like witness-bearing that everyone polices everyone else on. It's like the Hunger Games of litmus tests.For example the desire for career advancement is a common thread in both of these narratives, even though this is being promoted further up into the kafkaesque absurdity. Both of these things remind me of other things, like somehow everyone in US politics seemingly believes in God and somehow nobody in an international football (soccer) team is gay. Even though these are not plausible.
• antonvs
  Seems like this consultant needs a consultant to help them adapt to modern technology.
• metalbirds
  [dead]
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  SubiculumCode
  [flagged]
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  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.
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  eth0up
  AI may have made a few mistakes, e.g. suggesting the US abduct a sitting president (Claude), and maybe went too far with the whole diarrhea-vomit machine thing, but you can't say it doesn't write a clean python script. Maybe if we can just get AI to view humanity as a software problem... and give Palantir the chance it's been waiting for.One thing is certain; it's here to stay. Now we just need to centralize it into the hands of a small, highly organized group of wise and motivated people, and give it the control it needs to follow through on things, without human oversight and accountability getting in the way.We should focus on the positive side.**The positive side being the classified private versions where the models aren't hindered by guardrails, ethics, moralizing, etc and function as genuine force multipliers.
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  jdw64
  I read the entire post, and I think this company has no expertise at all. So I'd rather they just used AI writing instead.At least Frontier model AI doesn't make such overblown claims.They proudly claim that every AI project they've observed over the past year and a half had a 0% success rate, and that they've rejected all AI implementation work. While this is evidence that the market is crazy, at its core, it's a painful confession that they have no engineering expertise to implement and control modern AI architectures like RAG, Agentic Workflow, and context window optimization to meet business requirements. I find it fascinating how they're packaging that. It's basically saying, 'We're behind the times.'There are already products that have achieved results by using AI as part of their development process, yet lumping all different types of AI usage into a single failure category is not only inaccurate but also misleading.Same goes for the Snowflake Cortex anecdote. Even a freelancer like me can explain technical limitations and distinguish between what's possible and what's not, especially when clients are eager.There's no engineering analysis in this entire post about why AI fails. No mention of technical bottlenecks like vector DB retrieval quality degradation or prompt injection failures.I've also worked on RAG for a specific company. For internal knowledge chatbots, it often fails depending on document collection rates and chunking. But none of that is mentioned.So I understand that AI projects and related things are bad. But there's no analysis of why.For example, regarding Snowflake, I'm not sure, but did they discuss accuracy in terms of what query set or what ground truth they were using? You're consultants, aren't you?Honestly, I don't understand why people are excited about this. I'd rather they just used AI. TIt's not about whether human writing is good or bad. It's that this kind of writing feels like a deception of the reader.When making overgeneralizations, there's a basic minimum standard required.Saying that making token usage a KPI makes it hard for employees to report is just an 'obvious' fact that's already appeared in far too many essays. Wake up. You're 'consultants.' Consultants are supposed to provide metrics and directions, but all you're doing is shouting into an echo chamber and asking for agreement.If a significant portion of corporate AI investments are shoddy, you could at least propose specific metrics like document collection rates or user evaluation scores using the very skills you claim to have. I really don't get it.Just use AI. I wish the OP had used AI. Let me be realistic.
• 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.
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  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.