AI echo chambers and sanity in tech leadership: Three case studies
Consider three recent examples of technology leadership in the age of AI.
Key points
- For a business selling the future, treating privately owned hardware as an inefficient allocation of resources has a distinctly Soviet flavor, and the American right has vowed to stamp out socialist extremism.
- This is the best kind of delusion, one with an undeniable truth at its core – memory does indeed get used far more intensively in AI model makers and inference servers than in your laptop.
- Another risks becoming a business-school case study in how to demolish customer trust.
Case 1: we present for your consideration Sam Altman of OpenAI, one of the few actually at the controls of the singularity machine.
"AI delusion" remains loosely defined, but most of us know it when we see it: exaggerated faith in the technology's power, applicability, or nature, coupled with a refusal to acknowledge its limitations.
Additional details
- Case 2: Andy Yen, CEO of Proton, the company behind Proton Mail and Proton VPN.
- Leaked comms reported by 404 Media allege Yen saw Proton as a company that must make its numbers come what may, and one path to do that was to AI-code at maximum velocity.
- Sam Altman thinks it is a sin against the natural order that so much RAM is idling in machines owned by individuals, organizations, and anywhere that isn't Big AI.
- Engineers who wanted to test the results for security were losers – fax machine operators in the internet age – and he didn't want them, or so the report claimed.
- More generally, running a toxic workplace should lead to instant dismissal and loss of license to be in charge of anything more sentient than a sausage machine.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
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