Understanding the AI ​​psychosis debate

Box founder Aaron Levie got us talking this week with a social media post suggesting that tech CEOs are “uniquely susceptible to AI psychosis.”

On the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I did our best to unpack Levie’s comment. For one thing, we noted that he doesn’t disavow AI tools, he just insists that CEOs really need to use these tools to understand them.

That’s a relatively mild note of skepticism compared to other signs of a broader reaction, either way graduate students scoff at any mention of artificial intelligencethe bad vibes around layoffs in the tech industry or the apparent increase in installs on the DuckDuckGo search engine after Google announced it was bringing more artificial intelligence to the search experience.

Kirsten suggested that Google faces a dilemma where it’s “chasing this thing that it feels like it has to do to keep up, but it’s messing with what people most associate with the brand and not improving it.” More broadly, he wondered “whether this anti-AI moment is an opportunity for startups or other business sectors.”

Read on for a preview of our conversations, edited for length and clarity.

Anthony Ha: Artificial intelligence is incredibly polarizing. And that’s part of what’s hard to talk about, you might feel a little crazy because [simultaneously,] Everyone uses it and everyone loves it, but also no one uses it and everyone hates it at the same time. There are large groups for which both of these things are true.

From the user side, one thing that was very impressive, we [already] talked about Google’s announcements about search and how artificial intelligence is becoming a bigger part of search — although it was interesting to see how Google tried to dial it back a bit, or at least add some nuance in terms of, if you want that 10 blue links experience, there are still ways you can get it. It doesn’t go away completely.

But I think a lot of people aren’t excited about the direction Google is going. And so you see, for example, DuckDuckGo said installs are up 30%, which is a huge jump. Now, of course, DuckDuckGo is a much, much smaller product than Google. I don’t think Google has an immediate problem, but I think this is a sign that there is a very important audience that doesn’t like the current direction of AI.

Sean O’Kane: I will say one thing that I keep looking for when I look at all these top AI labs or tech companies that are really pushing AI features and products — to me, there seems to be this collapse towards the Anthropic approach, this idea of ​​really trying to figure out what it is that you want to bring to people and stick to that.

And Google is one that I would say is actually still pushing in the other direction. They’re trying to do a lot of different things, but they’re not doing themselves any favors by being so vague about it.

What I mean by that is when Google comes out on stage at IO and talks about how they think they’re going to change search, a lot of what they talk about, they talk about purchases or things that result in a commercial transaction. And I think a lot of what we think of Google as a collective, especially people who have been using it for two or three decades, is an information retrieval system.

Google can struggle a lot with that, where they’re reactively afraid of how they might hurt the information retrieval side, and their response is, “Yeah, but that’s still going to be there. Let’s focus on how it’s going to help you book a flight or something.”

And then they also go out and kind of shoot themselves in the foot by releasing – it must be very difficult to stress test these systems, but they go out and release this stuff and they run into the same problems they’ve had for years.

Kirsten Korosec: We had a great article just published about how Google doesn’t know how to spell its name. If you ask it, “How many P’s are in Google?” says two.

It’s this tension between: Google is chasing this thing that it feels like it has to do to keep up, but it’s messing with what people most associate with the brand and not improving it.

What I’m wondering is that we’ve already seen some early signs of people’s fingers doing the voting or walking for them, literally going to another service. But I wonder if there are opportunities for other startups out there, or culturally speaking, if this anti-AI moment is an opportunity for startups or other areas of business that we really haven’t thought about.

Anthony: Absolutely. Again, it’s probably a challenge because there’s such a range of opinions. And if you create something that’s tailored for a group, it’s skeptical [of] AI, then you will likely alienate other users who are much more evangelical or aggressive about it. But I think that’s just the moment we’re living in.

And you can see in the way that DuckDuckGo promotes itself, that they really emphasize this idea that they’re anti-AI, which I find very impressive because I’ve mentioned before, [I’ve been] moving away from Google myself, trying other search engines. And I would say that a year ago when I started this exploration, even these alternative search engines were still trying to experiment with AI features, emphasizing AI to some extent because they thought they had to.

And now I think they’re seeing that there’s actually a lane to say, “No, we just weren’t interested in this thing at all. Or, as we do, we’re putting it in a separate sandbox that’s not going to affect the core search experience.”

Kirsten: I think we unfairly sometimes categorize all tech CEOs as artificial intelligence force-feeding people. And there’s at least one tech CEO who’s come out and said, “I think there’s a little bit of psychosis among other tech CEOs around AI.”

I’m talking about Box founder Aaron Levie, who has come to Disrupt many times and is definitely a friend of TechCrunch. He made these comments about how CEOs are uniquely susceptible to AI psychosis because they are quite, and I’m reading this, “away from the last mile of work that still needs to happen to create more value with AI.”

I thought it was really interesting. And I wonder if there are other CEOs out there who agree with that. I also wonder, as part of that shift in thinking about what needs to happen to create the most value, if they’re also thinking about how their workforce is changing, which is our other topic today — [not] Just about the AI ​​divide, it’s also how AI is changing work. And we’ve seen, certainly, some of the bad news of that, and that’s a lot of layoffs.

But I think also, we’re seeing big changes in the way people work. I’m wondering in the sectors you two cover if you see evidence of this, because I don’t think it’s just in the quote unquote “AI startup sector” or the big tech companies.

Sean: In terms of the companies I cover, a lot of them tend to work in, if not physical transportation, then things adjacent to it. And it seemed a lot slower there than it is, surprisingly, on the software side.

We are starting to see some of that change. We talked on the show a little bit about Mind Robotics, which is the spin out from Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe. And, you know, there’s definitely more artificial intelligence being applied to physical infrastructure and manufacturing and robotics and self-driving.

I think the software side is where it really changes things, where there are people whose jobs are just directly tied to producing code.

Anthony: Part of the question, I think, [involves] Both corporate AI adoption and AI-driven layoffs — to what extent is it top-down or bottom-up?

Because I think a lot of other workforce transformations over the past two decades have been, at least to some extent, bottom-up: These are tools that people really want to use, they bring them in, and at a certain point, executives and IT managers buy into it.

There is some sense that many of the [belief that there are going to be these] The productivity gains of AI seem to be embraced by executives—or, if you’re in a startup, possibly by the VCs who fund you—who love this dream that you can have a small team and be as efficient as a company with a much larger team.

And I don’t think that’s necessarily impossible, but I think Aaron’s point is essentially that if you’re not actually touching any of the finished projects, how are you going to know? He’s also not someone who says we should just throw away all AI tools, but says you actually have to use those tools and understand what they’re doing. You can’t just look at a slide and say, “Yeah, incredible efficiency, let’s go.”

Kirsten: Well, I think there’s a lot of real evidence out there that these companies are using these tools and it’s directly affecting workers in the form of layoffs as well as the way they work. Both truths are accurate here.