AI echo chambers and sanity in tech leadership: Three case studies

Altman, Torvalds, Yen. One has got his head screwed on. The others could do with some grounding 

"AI delusion" remains loosely defined, but most of us know it when we see it: exaggerated faith in the technology's power, applicability, or nature, coupled with a refusal to acknowledge its limitations.

It's bad in the individual, as when an elderly relative emails you a hallucination-laden ChatGPT summary. It's worse in management, when your boss insists that AI slop is genius marketing content at a bargain rate. It is terrifying in tech CEOs. It is not, thankfully, compulsory.

Consider three recent examples of technology leadership in the age of AI. One would be Pythonesque were the disconnect with engineers and the public not so profound. Another risks becoming a business-school case study in how to demolish customer trust. The third offers something less fashionable: robust pragmatism. Saving the best till last, y'all.

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Case 1: we present for your consideration Sam Altman of OpenAI, one of the few actually at the controls of the singularity machine. It seems churlish to pluck just one luscious fruit out of that cornucopia of choices, yet we must. Sam Altman thinks it is a sin against the natural order that so much RAM is idling in machines owned by individuals, organizations, and anywhere that isn't Big AI. It's oh so inefficient. How convenient that the efficient allocation of scarce resources should favor the business he runs. Free market schmarket.

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Altman has since said his remarks were taken out of context and that he wants consumers to have as much memory as they like. The efficiency argument still reveals whose priorities come first.

This is the best kind of delusion, one with an undeniable truth at its core – memory does indeed get used far more intensively in AI model makers and inference servers than in your laptop. For a business selling the future, treating privately owned hardware as an inefficient allocation of resources has a distinctly Soviet flavor, and the American right has vowed to stamp out socialist extremism. Get on with it, chaps, you've only got two years left. That Altman can't see this is the best bit of the misconception.

There are two potential root causes of this Marxist-Leninist-Altmanism. One is that he's mathed the math and worked out that the only way OpenAI can hit the numbers is if it gets every last byte in the world, hot off the fab. The other is that you can't run on-prem on an 8 GB state-mandated Chromebook, and on-prem is otherwise going to twist his melon until it falls off.

Case 2: Andy Yen, CEO of Proton, the company behind Proton Mail and Proton VPN. You, me, and the household cat know ProtonMail as the secondary email that's worth paying for. You want the best recovery backup email for Gmail, you want it as an accessible end-to-end encrypted email service. You want it because it is all about stable spotless security, all about the end users, all about being there when you absolutely need it. It is safe to recommend, and you do.

Or rather that's what you thought about ProtonMail et al until the same day you learned about Andy Yen's alleged behavior. Leaked comms reported by 404 Media allege Yen saw Proton as a company that must make its numbers come what may, and one path to do that was to AI-code at maximum velocity.

Engineers who wanted to test the results for security were losers – fax machine operators in the internet age – and he didn't want them, or so the report claimed. No more engineers, just product managers in a Claude terminal. He allegedly imparted this vision through aggression, belittling employees in front of their peers, and swinging his big ol' reinterview job chopper.

More generally, running a toxic workplace should lead to instant dismissal and loss of license to be in charge of anything more sentient than a sausage machine. That AI is involved is not AI's fault. Misunderstanding the brand and the customer base so, so badly – that's the delusion.

ProtonMail has a unique niche, an important part of the whole. People depend on it because privacy and security are the proposition.

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Putting velocity of coding above that is arrant stupidity. Nobody cares. Unless new features and products increase security, they'll only matter outside the niche, where one might argue that Proton products cannot compete. Not knowing that, has the potential to destroy a brand overnight. Yen wouldn't be the first CEO to cause a company some trouble by revealing what they really think, but this one matters. Things are being rowed back – no more reinterviewing to prove allegiance to AI at all costs, and an employee has said it's not quite as bad as all that.

Case 3: Linus Torvalds. He reports that AI-based kernel code has not saturated the production pipeline, is useful when treated properly, and the kernel cadence is expanding following a stabilization period. The high-pressure AI patch spigot turned on; the appropriate plumbing was created to regulate and filter; and he is much happier now.

It's a nuanced story, and nuance is so often a dirty word in the industry. Torvalds' happiness is not a guarantee that everything in the garden is in fact lovely, but the Linus vibe is as good as any – and it's better than most predictive metrics. He is hitting his numbers, which are the quality of the code and the speed at which changes match what users need in a changing world. The numbers do not involve margins, profits, shareholder value, or driving massive investment before the gig's up.

Put another way, Torvalds has managed the arrival of AI to probably the most important codebase ever, and he has done it with, not in spite of, the most diverse and independently minded dev team that ever came through the merge window, and it's barely news. If only they gave Oscars for this sort of thing.

There is no better advert for sanity, nor for FOSS's unique and infinitely valuable ability to remain responsive to market forces without market dependency. Freedom cures delusion. Even AI delusion. It's a helluva drug. ®