AI Summary
5 min read"They've gone insane": Why AI mania has broken decision-making inside companies
Consultant and writer Nik Suresh has spent a year and a half inside companies across Australia and the US watching organizations pour money into AI projects. His conclusion, after seeing the results firsthand: "I've seen 0% success." Not because AI can never do anything useful, but because the entire decision-making apparatus around it has become unmoored from reality.
The core problem, as Suresh lays out in his widely circulated piece "AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making," is that companies are doing something they already know they are bad at—running large technology projects—and choosing to do it on hard mode. Normal IT projects at big companies already fail at high rates. AI projects are novel, more complex, and failing even more. Yet instead of the usual corporate instinct to minimize spending on unproven technology, executives are demanding to pour as much budget as possible into exactly this.
The internal mechanics of delusion
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What you'll learn
- 1 (02:24) **Episode Introduction** - Ed Zitron introduces guest Nik Suresh, a writer and consultant, to discuss his viral piece "AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making"
- 2 (03:55) **AI Investments Are Total Failures** - Nik explains that AI projects fail at even higher rates than normal IT projects, yet companies are pouring unprecedented money into them
- 3 (06:39) **Zero Percent Success in 18 Months** - Nik reports seeing no successful AI projects in his consulting work across Australia and the US over a year and a half
- 4 (09:33) **Why Nik Stopped Offering AI Services** - His consultancy found that mentioning AI attracted bad customers while repelling good ones
- 5 (11:56) **The One Legitimate Use Case for LLMs** - Ed identifies the Bloomberg terminal as the only real application he's found for LLMs
- 6 (12:28) **Why AI Fails on Business Data** - The Snowflake Cortex chatbot example illustrates why LLMs can't handle complex enterprise queries
- 7 (15:46) **The "N-2 Idiot Solution" and LinkedIn Psychosis** - Nik describes how executives get brainwashed by niche tech content on LinkedIn into buying irrelevant products
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Show Notes
In this week’s Better Offline, Ed is joined by writer and software engineer Nik Suresh to talk about how AI mania is eviscerating global decision-making, weakening businesses and creating a culture of fear that demands workers lie about the benefits of AI to kiss up to Business Idiots.
Nik’s blog: https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-global-decision-making/
https://hermit-tech.com/
Brainwash An Executive Today! https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/brainwash-an-executive-today/
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