Box CEO Aaron Levie links tech CEOs’ AI hype to “AI psychosis”

The tech industry is finally coming around to all their AI adoption mistakes, and I’m so here for it.

Box CEO Aaron Levie believes that leaders who don’t see the trial and error that goes into deploying AI into a business are “uniquely prone to AI psychosis.” In response to a post on X that claimed “CEOs are the most delusional about AI,” Levie wrote: “CEOs are uniquely prone to AI psychosis because they’re sufficiently distant from the last mile of work that still has to happen to generate most value with AI.” AI psychosis, often interchangeably called chatbot psychosis, is an informal term to describe the development of paranoia or delusions as a result of chatbot usage. The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) became the first to clinically document “AI-associated psychosis” last year, after a 26-year-old woman with no history of psychosis or mania developed delusional beliefs about talking to her deceased brother through ChatGPT.  Rather than the clinical condition, Levie seems to be using the term here loosely to describe executives who develop an inflated sense of AI’s capabilities after only seeing polished outputs. “So when they play with AI, they see the happy path results, often not considering the next 10 or 20 things that have to happen to get sustainable results from agents,” Levie continued in the post, which now has more than a million views. While CEOs often see exciting product prototypes or swiftly generated contracts, Levie said that those who don’t see the process of actually making AI systems accurately and effectively work don’t get the full picture. His solution? For CEOs to use more AI. “The best thing you can do as a CEO is to use AI a ‘ton’ to figure out the real implications of agents in the enterprise, and come out the other side with an appreciation for both the upside and the real work that goes into them,” Levie concluded in his X post. Levie has been an outspoken voice on X on all things tech and AI—including the gap between AI’s promise and the operational reality. Last November, he wrote that “bridging the AI models’ capabilities to the customer’s environment still requires a tremendous amount of long tail work.”  But after meeting with enterprise AI and IT leaders earlier this year, the multimillionaire CEO said that AI agents “are clearly the big thing,” and that companies are using the tech across every part of their workflows despite the fact that high cost and governance could slow adoption.  The Box CEO has also described the effects of the tech on his own workflow, saying in the past that conducting deep research with AI “is an entire [sic] new form of productivity.” “Often I’ll kick off deep research on a topic before going to bed and just wake up and review the results,” Levie wrote in the X post last May. “It’s one of the clearest examples of what AI agents will look like in the future.”

Box co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie has some words of wisdom for CEOs interested in using AI.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: There is a certain wildness in the tech industry these days that both mimics previous eras of large changes, like cloud computing (runaway costs in the early days), and is like nothing we've ever seen before (record revenues accompanied by mass layoffs). One possible explanation: tech executives, especially CEOs, are collectively suffering from delusions of AI grandeur. And at least one tech CEO has said as much out loud: Box founder Aaron Levie. "CEOs are uniquely prone to AI psychosis because they're sufficiently distant from the last mile of work that still has to happen to generate most value with AI," Levie wrote on X. CEOs "play with AI," develop a prototype, or generate a contract, to use Levie's examples, and then make the leap to believing agents can do the work. But these top-level executives aren't the people who have to review code, discover bugs, and identify calls to hallucinated libraries before software is deployed. They aren't responsible for training AI models on a company's idiosyncratic contract terms, nor do they have to spend days combing through contracts to find sneaky terms, as Levie indicates. In other words, Levie's theory posits, CEOs don't really understand processes well enough to know what really can and can't be automated. But that lack of knowledge doesn't stop them from acting on their beliefs. [...] So what are CEOs to do instead? Levie advises CEOs to use AI "a ton" to really see what it can and can't do, "and come out the other side with an appreciation for both the upside and the real work." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"CEOs are uniquely prone to AI psychosis," Box CEO Aaron Levie opines. Maybe that explains the almost religious belief in AI productivity gains.