Making sense of the debate over AI psychosis

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

In the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I did our best to unpack Levie’s comment. To start, we noted that he doesn’t dismiss AI tools, just emphasizes that CEOs should actually do them usage those tools to understand them.

That’s a relatively muted note of skepticism compared to other signs of a broader backlash, any way you look at it graduating students booing any mention of AIthe bad vibe surrounding layoffs in the tech industry, or the apparent surge in installs at search engine DuckDuckGo following Google’s announcement that it’s bringing more AI to the search experience.

Kirsten suggested that Google faces a dilemma: It’s “chasing what it feels like it needs to do to keep up, but it’s messing with what people hold most about the brand, and it’s not improving it.” More broadly, she wondered “whether this anti-AI moment is an opportunity for startups or other industries.”

Keep reading for a sample of our conversations, edited for length and clarity.

Anthony Ha: AI is incredibly polarizing. And that’s part of the challenge to talk about, you can 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 contingents for whom both of these things are true.

On the user side, there was one thing that was very noticeable: us [already] talked about Google’s announcements about search and how AI is becoming an increasingly important part of search – although it was interesting to see how Google has tried to pare that 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. For example, you’ll see that DuckDuckGo said installs are up 30%, which is a huge leap forward. Now, of course, DuckDuckGo is a much, much smaller product than Google. I don’t think Google is in immediate trouble, but I think this is a sign that there is a very significant audience that doesn’t like the current AI direction.

Sean O’Kane: I will say one thing that I keep looking for when I look at all these leading AI labs or tech companies that are really pushing AI features and products – to me there seems to be a collapse towards Anthropic’s approach, this idea of ​​really trying to understand what you want to offer people and sticking to it.

And Google is one of those that I would say is actually still going the other way. 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 that when Google goes on stage at IO and talks about the way it thinks search is going to change, so much of what they talk about, they talk about shopping or things that end in a commercial transaction. And I think a lot of what we collectively think about Google, especially people who have been using it for two or three decades, is an information retrieval system.

Google may have a lot of trouble with that, where they get reactive fears about how they might damage the information retrieval side of things, and their response is, “Yes, but that’s still going to be there. Let’s focus on how it’s going to help you book a flight or something like that.”

And then they also go out and shoot themselves in the foot a bit by letting go. It must be quite a challenge to stress test these systems, but they go out and they release this stuff and they run into the same problems they’ve been running into for years.

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

It’s this tension between: Google is chasing what it thinks it needs to do to keep up, but it’s messing with what people hold most about the brand, and it’s not improving it.

What I wonder is that we’ve already seen some evidence of people’s fingers voting or running for them by literally going to another service. But I wonder if there are opportunities for other startups or culturally, if this anti-AI moment is an opportunity for startups or other industries that we haven’t really thought about yet.

Anthony: Absolute. Again, it’s probably challenging because there are so many different opinions out there. And when you build something tailor-made for a group, it’s skeptical [of] AI, then you’re probably going to alienate other users who are much more evangelical or enthusiastic about it. But I think this is exactly the moment we’re living in.

And you can see from the way DuckDuckGo promotes itself that they’re heavily emphasizing this idea of ​​anti-AI, which I find very striking because I’ve mentioned it before: [I’ve been] Give up Google yourself and try other search engines. And I would say that a year ago, when I started that exploration, even these alternative search engines were still trying to experiment with AI features, emphasizing AI to some extent because they also thought they had to do it.

And now I think they’re seeing that there’s actually a way to say, “No, we just weren’t interested in that kind of thing at all. Or, to the extent that we do it, we put it in a separate sandbox that doesn’t impact your core search experience.”

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

I’m talking about Box founder Aaron Levie, who has come to Disrupt often and is certainly a friend of TechCrunch. He made these comments about how CEOs are particularly susceptible to AI psychosis because they are sufficiently, and I read this, “distant from the last mile of work that still needs to be done to drive the most value with AI.”

I found that very interesting. And I wonder if there are other CEOs who agree. I also wonder, as part of that shift in thinking about what needs to happen to drive the most value, if they’re also thinking about how their workforce is changing, which is our other topic today: [not] As for the AI ​​gap, it is also how AI is changing work. And we’ve certainly seen some of the bad news side of that, which is a lot of layoffs.

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

Sean: As for the companies I deal with, many of them usually work on physical transportation, or things close to that. And it seemed much slower there than it is, unsurprisingly, on the software side of things.

We’re starting to see some of that change. We talked a bit during the show about Mind Robotics, the spinout of Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe. And you know, there’s definitely more AI being applied to physical infrastructure and manufacturing and robotics and self-driving.

I think it’s the software side where it really changes things, where you have people whose job is directly related to producing code.

Anthony: Part of the question, I think, [involves] both the adoption of AI in companies and then the layoffs caused by AI – to what extent are these top-down or bottom-up?

Because I think a lot of other workforce transformations over the last few decades have been bottom-up at least to some extent: these are tools that people like to use, they bring them in, and at some point executives and IT managers accept that.

There’s a feeling that a lot of the [belief that there are going to be these] The productivity gains in AI seem to be embraced by the executives – or, if you have a startup, probably by the venture capital firms that fund you – who love the dream that you can have just a small team and be as effective 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, if you don’t actually touch any of the final work, how would you know? He’s also not someone who says we should just throw away all AI tools, but he says you should actually use these tools and understand what they do. You can’t just look at a slide and say, “Yes, incredible efficiency, let’s go.”

Kirsten: Well, I think there’s a lot of real evidence that these companies are using these tools, and it’s having a direct impact on employees in terms of layoffs, and also on the way they work. The two truths are correct here.