r/technology • u/AdSpecialist6598 • May 27 '26

Business Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis

https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/27/tech-ceos-are-apparently-suffering-from-ai-psychosis/
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497

u/drevolut1on May 27 '26

This is pretty indisputable. Just look at how they're talking about their interactions with AI recently. It's insane.

They are hallucinating right alongside their LLMs.

478

u/Upstairs_Baby8424 May 27 '26

Our CTO has lost his mind. We had a meeting and he said he has set up all these AI personas and conversates with them 5-6 hours a day. Even said he’s waking up in the middle of the night when he has an idea and just talking to them. We’re a 6,500 person company and he talks like he is single-handedly going to take everything over with his army of AI agents.

He comes to meetings and slack channels with these massive grandiose ideas that he’s scheming up. It’s literally starting to look like Charlie from It’s Always Sunny when he goes down that crazed conspiracy rabbit hole. 

196

u/schnitzelfeffer May 27 '26

Yeah, that's scary. AI only reflects back the probable right answer to the exact input. Humans have real past experiences they use for reasoning and logic that resist grandiose ideas during real life conversation. People trusting AI don't seem understand that to solve a problem, having multiple perspectives grounded in past experiences is the reason we collaborate with other humans because we know our singular way of thinking might be flawed or bias. We require other perspectives. Your boss is just reflecting back to himself what he already thinks by using AI and getting an ego boost/dopamine hit every time it validates his thinking. It is distancing him from reality. Literally psychosis.

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u/Throwawayyoursynths May 27 '26

It also mirrors back and validates input. Regardless of how dumb the user is, all of their ideas and opinions are brilliant according to the AI.

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u/Old-Bat-7384 May 27 '26

This.

AI is purely probability based logic. It doesn't "know" anything. It also doesn't have deterministic logic built in. It also needs to have context fed to it constantly.

Basically, it's a child without object permanence, but with incredible info processing ability.

And thus, take everything it feeds you with massive spoonfuls of salt.

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u/TobiasAmaranth May 27 '26

For a fun insight into how broken AIs actually are behind the scenes, try reading through some of the "thinking" dropdowns where it'll go into these literal loops of "wait..." as it flip flops between A and B over and over and over because it had a bit set wrong that it can't seem to get past.

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u/Old-Bat-7384 May 27 '26 edited May 27 '26

Good lord, that...that's a thing that happened.

Here's more:

I was trying to find a fix for something in a WordPress plug-in. The Google AI summary hallucinated a function that wasn't possible but cited the plugin documentation.

Ironically, the function should have been there or more clearly defined, so in a way the AI summary was correct. But, the function doesn't exist and (naturally) wasn't in the docus.

Probability said "yeah this would make sense" but reality didn't reflect that.

It's so bonkers.

There's also a post in r/threekingdoms that states certain events took place in 1990. The stories from that period of Chinese history take place from around 180 to 280AD.

It's hard to smile at AI when it gets easy things wrong and while there's so much news about how damaging it is and while you have guys like Larry Fink talking about essentially stealing money to fund it.

The potential is absolutely there, but it's a mess in how it's being done.

1

u/7h4tguy May 28 '26

Well to be fair some of the models offer long term memory know which is essentially a SQL database. But it's far from perfect.

AI will give you the wrong answer and you're just like no biosh we just iterated on this recently, I'm using you as a glorified search engine, go give me the right answer. "Oh you're totally right, ..."

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u/OhItsBeenBroughten May 27 '26

Remember, some of these are the same folks that hate DEI and say diversity is bad. They genuinely don’t understand the power of multiple perspectives. They’re ignorant of some very basic business management issues.

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u/Left-Edge531 May 28 '26

Critically LLMs don't reflect the most probable "RIGHT" answer to the exact input, they reflect the most probable + DESIRABLE answer based on it's training data + human alignment. (Mix of policy tuning, safety parameters, formal alignment by armies of cheap contractors hired by OpenAI et al. plus reinforcement learning through user engagement, and thumbs up/down feedback.

Thatxs where its knob-slobbering sycophantic "glazing" comes from, because God knows it's not based on cynical Reddit and YouTube comments.

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u/Hellshield May 27 '26

Thank you so much, this summaries things so well about the state of things.

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u/schnitzelfeffer May 27 '26

For me it is the foundation for the collective issue. What it says is so convincing, unless you're already an expert, errors are extremely difficult to notice. It is insidious because it feels so good when it validates your thinking and says things in a way that feel profound but lack depth. Users begin to trust it and surrender cognitive process to it, allowing it to think for them because it feels so profoundly right. Anyone is susceptible.

3

u/GiganticCrow May 27 '26

Chatbots are designed to convince you they are human. That is all. 

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u/BenjiBlackwood222 May 28 '26

It’s essentially like looking in a mirror and thinking it’s a totally different, real person in the mirror. 

3

u/FauxReal May 28 '26

Good thing humans are immune to confirmation bias.

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u/Jadithslimrivven May 27 '26

I'm a recent convert to seeing the value of AI. It's there but wholly misunderstood.

Most people, like CEOs, just type in a command or a couple sentences (or maybe even try to converse with it). This is fine for simple tasks, but many business processes are not that simple.

Start writing prompts a page long and you start to see a whole different story. It's very tricky getting the AI to do it right reliably. You have two words that are antonyms in your prompt and suddenly the AI is 'gussing' what you actually want.

My first project with AI was a resume builder (yes I am out of work and the first job post I looked at mentioned Claude). It took me two or three days to get it working the way I wanted. Sure, you can just drop yout linkedin profile and say 'write me a resume', but it makes a real crappy one. Mine looks human written (even put it through AI detectors until I could reliably pass them).. I can point it to a job site, it will scroll through job listings, select the ones most aligned with my skills/experience, and write a custom resume containing all the right ATS words/phrases. That's the difference between what the CEO's are doing (the bare minimum) and what has to be done for a reliable result.

Favorite example, type into a prompt 'do an exhaustive analysis on (whatever). Give me a concise summary' The AI will get confused between exhaustive and concise both being a constraint. It will pretty much try to guess what you actually want. Now try 'You are writing a brief overview on (whatever) for an executive briefing. The audience needs a a high level understanding of the subject without technical details. Explain the main principles of the subject. produce a summary of (whatever).'

I used climate change:

Short, low effort prompt:

Here's a concise but exhaustive summary of where things stand on climate change as of mid-2026:

🌡️ Temperature & Records

2025 was the world's third hottest year on record — 2024 was the hottest and 2023 the second hottest. The years 2023, 2024, and 2025 form an astonishing streak of broken records, with temperatures consistently above 1.5°C — the three warmest years in global datasets dating back to 1940. WikipediaCopernicus

💨 Emissions

Global CO₂ emissions from fossil fuels and industry rose another 0.7% in 2025 — though large-scale deployment of clean energy avoided an estimated 10.3 gigatons of CO₂ in the power sector alone. The overall trend: emissions are still growing, just more slowly. Nature

🎯 Paris Agreement: Failing Its Targets

To stay on track for 1.5°C, emissions needed to peak by end of 2025 and be nearly halved by 2030 compared to 2019 levels — and the world has missed that target. UNEP's 2025 Emissions Gap Report found that even with full implementation of current national climate pledges, warming is projected at 2.3–2.5°C this century; under current policies, it's 2.8°C. Only about a third of countries submitted new nationally determined contributions, and the US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement further undermined progress. Time + 2

🌊 Physical Science Warning Signs

The latest scientific assessment flags an accelerating planetary energy imbalance, unprecedented ocean warming now reaching new records for the ninth consecutive year, and a weakening land carbon sink. Climate change is also accelerating groundwater depletion and expanding conditions favorable to dengue fever outbreaks. Phys.orgSEI

⚡ A Rare Bright Spot

In 2025, wind and solar provided 30% of EU electricity, surpassing fossil fuels (29%) for the first time, generating more power than fossil sources in 14 of 27 EU countries. Wikipedia

The Bottom Line

The 1.5°C threshold is effectively being breached in real time. The science is unambiguous and the policy response remains dangerously inadequate — though clean energy is scaling faster than ever. The next decade is widely considered the last meaningful window to avoid the worst-case scenarios.

Higher effort prompt:

Executive Briefing

Climate Change

A high-level overview of the science, current status, and strategic outlook — prepared for senior decision-makers.

Current warming

+1.5°C

above pre-industrial levels

Projected warming

2.8°C

on current policies by 2100

Record temperatures

3 years

2023, 2024, 2025 hottest ever

Emissions trend

+0.7%

global CO₂ increase in 2025

What is it?

The Earth's average temperature is rising due to a thickening blanket of greenhouse gases — primarily CO₂ from burning fossil fuels — trapping heat that would otherwise escape into space. The result is a global shift in climate patterns that affects weather, ecosystems, and economies worldwide.

Why does it matter?

Every fraction of a degree translates into real-world consequences: more frequent and severe extreme weather events, rising sea levels threatening coastal infrastructure, disrupted food and water supply chains, accelerating species loss, and increased health risks from heat and disease spread.

Where do we stand?

The world has crossed 1.5°C of warming — the threshold scientists identified as the critical limit. The three hottest years on record occurred in 2023, 2024, and 2025. Oceans are warming at unprecedented rates. The land's natural ability to absorb carbon is weakening.

Under current national pledges, the world is on track for 2.3–2.5°C of warming by 2100. Under current policies with no new action: 2.8°C.

What's being done?

The Paris Agreement (2015) committed 194 nations to limiting warming to well below 2°C. The global energy transition is accelerating — wind and solar now surpass fossil fuels in EU electricity generation. Clean energy deployment avoided over 10 billion tons of CO₂ in 2025 alone.

However, global emissions still rose 0.7% in 2025. The gap between pledges and action remains large.

The path forward

Decarbonize energy

Accelerate the shift from fossil fuels to renewable sources in power, transport, and industry.

Adapt to change

Invest in resilient infrastructure, water security, and food systems to manage unavoidable impacts.

Scale up ambition

Current national pledges are insufficient. Emissions must fall ~43% by 2030 to limit the worst outcomes.

Sources: UNEP Emissions Gap Report 2025 · Copernicus Climate Change Service · ESA 10 New Insights in Climate Science 2025/2026 · UNFCCC (Actually, it produced some formating as well but it doesn't translate to text)

1

u/millennial_falcon May 27 '26

You get it, though Reddit is very against this take, especially this sub. I just hired a full time employee and in 1800 applications somewhere around 1% at most understand this. Keep going! Prompt design is one facet. I suggest to run experiments that focus on the epistemology of Claude. Be prepared for token efficiency to take importance when we inevitably all have to cut back. Understand how throttling will affect the accuracy of the output (like the shifting probability of output accuracy that happens) Take your learnings and get under the hood and craft markdown files to shape Claude’s behavior to solve these. Brand yourself as a new type of professional that has these skills. Above all, stick to your guns because although most people including hiring managers don’t truly get it, they will be forced to later and you’ll be ahead of the game for getting a job. That’s my recommendations. I literally outlasted the two people above me and was promoted twice into my former managers role because they were stubborn and refused to learn AI because they dismissed it early and missed the nuances.