AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making
Simon Willison Simon Willison ● Covered by 3 sources
Executives at large companies are making AI strategy decisions based on hype rather than understanding, with some leaders creating multi-billion-dollar AI strategies without using AI tools themselves. One engineer reported rewriting code in a different language using AI just to appear productive, while vendors avoid contradicting customers' unrealistic claims like 100x productivity gains due to fear of contract cancellation. The result is organizational decision-making increasingly driven by AI marketing momentum rather than practical assessment of technology capabilities.
Why it matters
AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making Here's an entertaining perspective from Nik Suresh on the AI mania that is overwhelming the large companies that he consults with. It's crammed with spicy anecdotes from anonymous sources. 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. Here's a report from an engineer at a company with a token leaderboard: 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. I particularly enjoyed this report of a conversation with a skeptical executive at an over-enthusiastic company: I asked why this was being repeated without opposition. Was it just sales fluff? The answer was a lot more interesting. It was partially ridiculous sales material bei
