The AI Hype Machine Is Eating Itself
CEOs are flexing AI code stats while workers game the leaderboards, Americans tune out, and healthcare AI invents body parts. The gap between the boardroom and reality has never been wider.
Dear Friend,
After our recent plug for Kevin Kelly and his perspective on uncertainty (and the fact that even uncertainty is now uncertain). This week Kevin is back with a thoughtful (and thought provoking) piece on his experience with AI (“The Emergent Self Loop”) – it’s worth a read. Disagree with it (I do, at least in part), but ponder over it a bit. As someone once said: AI is not artificial but alien intelligence.
And now, this…
Headlines from the Future
First It Was AI RIFs, Now It’s AI LOCs. There can be no envy for CEOs trying to stay on top of the AI speed train these days. First they used AI to justify their layoffs – it just sounds so much better if you fire people due to “AI-related efficiency gains” (even better if you do so “anticipating” said gains). And now we have CEOs bragging about how much of the company’s code is AI-written. As if that means anything?! Both perspectives are navel-gazing at its finest…
Move over app downloads and EBITDA – the hot metric for CEOs is now AI productivity. In interviews and on quarterly earnings calls, CEOs are flaunting stats on how much code AI agents are generating. The trend began with AI companies like Anthropic, Meta, and Google, which have been grilled about their AI investments, and has continued with other companies eager to position themselves as AI-forward. From fintech to streaming, agentic AI adoption is the new status symbol among executives.
When will we see CEOs talking about how they are focusing on solving their customers’ problems again? It would make for a refreshing change…
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Turns out, the People Are Not so Hot on AI after All. A recent YouGov poll found that the average American is pretty pessimistic about the prospects of AI.
Most Americans (71%) feel that the pace of AI development is moving too fast. […] Most Americans are skeptical that everyone will benefit economically from AI. Nearly two-thirds (64%) of Americans say that it is slightly or very unlikely that AI will create economic gains that benefit everyone.
Not a good showing for a technology which is supposed to be the savior of humanity (or at least business). It makes you wonder how much of that perception is due to the hype and fearmongering by the fine folks who built AI. It surely can’t help if, for example, the CEO of Perplexity runs around and tells everyone that AI will replace them, right?
What We Are Reading
Brazil Caught up in Craze for Whistling-only Whatsapp Groups Hundreds of thousands of Brazilians are currently in WhatsApp groups where the only permitted communication is… whistling. @Jane
The State of Answer Engine Optimization Answer engine search is only going to continue to grow; AI-sourced site visitors have higher purchasing intent and a higher conversion rate than those arriving on websites from other channels. This report highlights the state of AEO and what companies are doing to get in the game. @Mafe
Data Makes the World Go ‘Round Fern Halper surfaces the disconnect happening in transformation right now: organizations layer AI on top of foundations that were already fragmented, disconnected, or poorly governed. @Kacee
Admit It, That Protein Shake Is Basically Soylent From Soylent Green to Soylent to your modern-day protein shake… I remember well the craze of “optimize your life by skipping food and going straight to the nutrients.” Heck, we fed this stuff to people at Singularity University’s executive program… @Pascal
Down the Rabbit Hole
🧑🔧 Futher to the point above on CEOs touting their AI-generated code generation and American’s increasingly not agreeing with AI, workers are engaging in all kinds of weird behavior: Meta employees launch protest against mouse-tracking tech at US offices. Amazon employees are inflating AI usage to top leaderboards and impress managers.
🏥 Maybe it is not the best idea to use LLMs for your healthcare needs?! Google’s healthcare AI made up a body part – what happens when doctors don’t notice? And: Medical AI transcriber for Ontario doctors ‘hallucinated,’ generated errors.
📝 I recently found myself in a Zoom meeting with four AI notetakers but no people – of course, I trolled the notetakers by talking gibberish. But there is a bigger issue here: They are making lawyers very nervous.
🦹♂️ AI models becoming eerily good at cybersecurity also means AI models becoming superbly good at hacking your systems. This is not a hypothetical anymore – it’s happening in the wild: ‘It’s here’: Google issues dire warning after catching hackers using AI to break into computers
🎓 Want to learn how AI actually works? Here is a fantastic course explaining the inner workings of LLMs using math an 11-year-old can understand.
🕵️ Wondering what your webbrowser knows about you? More than you might think… Scarily more.
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Should We Work Together?
Hi! I’m Pascal from radical. This newsletter is our labor of love. When we’re not writing, we run radical, a firm that helps organizations navigate the future without the “innovation theater.” Most leaders want to seize new opportunities, but they hate endless strategy decks that go nowhere. At radical, we don’t run “projects”; we build your organization’s internal capacity to handle disruption and change. Our goal is to make you future-proof so you can stop reacting to the world and start shaping it. If you’re interested, let’s jump on a call to see if we’re a good fit. Click here to speak with us.