And yet, despite fucking up royally, CEO Marc Benioff won't lose his job or probably any remuneration. And there's the problem.
this post was submitted on 25 Dec 2025
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Fuck AI
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Well they probably had record earnings for a few quarters then their backlog caught up to their inability to deliver.
Got their bonuses and left scorched earth. The business strategy of private equity and capital.
I'm still holding out hope that they get half-drowned Clockwork Orange-style, despite how unlikely it is...
Prayers and best wishes for Luigi and all of his followers.
If any of us fucked up like this they'd have security marching us out.
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“We assumed the technology was further along than it actually was,” one executive said privately
I wonder how many executives made these types of decisions knowing the technology could not perform as intended, but wanted to boost their quarterly or yearly bonuses, versus how many were just gullible morons.
It's also showing that they do not regret firing the employees; they would do it again if the technology was that far along.
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It’s amazing how stupid these people are
How much longer will anyone believe the lie that success is earned and not luck
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Oh no!!! The dumb business plan that has no proven way of working didn’t work!?
Yeah, they phrase it a bit differently. It was "premature". 😅 Basically the same thing you said with some added innundo how they're gonna try again...
It did work. They wanted to fire people and put the blame on AI so they can now hire other people cheaper. AI is only the excuse.
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Not that I don't love this for them.
But this source is really odd, it's not a reputable new source, and has no citations, and very much an opinion blog type site.
Is there a better source for the story?
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Unfortunately it’s part of their plan.
Now they will hire people for cheaper.
Yep. I hope there employees are not dumb and will unionize, make them pay hard
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Cool, now fire the entire executive staff. Replace them.
They are objectively the people who would be the easiest to replace with LLMs.
All they do is have a rolodex, schmooze, and read reports and such written by people who do have some talent.
They're also far and away the costliest employees to employ.
I already had a good few years academic and professional experience in both NLP and ML before ChatGPT came out, and since then I’ve been doing some consulting in gen AI.
I don’t feel safe posting or commenting anything about AI on LinkedIn because of the sheer strength of the cult of “if you criticise AI you’re a Luddite who doesn’t understand the modern world, and should be shunned professionally”. Pointing out that the Emperor has no clothes makes you unemployable in the eyes of at least half the hiring managers in my contacts.
Is there anything that's not a cult in the US?
Empathy for human beings.
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C-suite is always clueless, and C-suite gets no consequences for their ineptitude.
If I were a shareholder, I'd be pushing my fellow shareholders to replace the inept.
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I think it's a giant billboard sign that if they can replace you, they will. It was good for the tech bros to see this.
Well in this case even if they can't replace you, they will try and fail
Their failure is quiet comfort when you're out of a job.
Someone quoted this above and I replied there too, but this shows how they really think about the situation:
"We assumed the technology was further along than it actually was,” one executive said privately
They don't regret firing people, they regret not being able to replace them with AI
I whole heartedly believe my company would have replaced everyone in my department with remote workers from India if government regulations didn't require US citizenship or qualified people. What I mean by qualified I don't necessarily mean their quality of work but government regulations that require certificates and licenses to do the work.
So I guess AI will be after my job very soon
I want to see the delusion in HN comments really. "actually, he just didnt prompt hard enough"
Fr. But I'm trying to not go there anymore lol
ML techniques have a lot of productive uses. Perhaps even LLMs and other generative approaches find their useful place one day. It takes effort and grit to find those productive uses and make them pay, which has been the case for any new technology I’ve seen come to the fore over the past good few decades. Chasing quick profits never delivered the results, and it never will.
Exactly.
Are we about to witness a technological revolution on the scale of broadband access for the masses? Yes.
Are we in a financial bubble the size of the dotcom and subprime mortages combined? Also yes.
I really don't think AI is going to be anywhere near as influential as you think it will be.
We found a mathematical function which is good enough to be called universal estimator. Even better, our current computation technology is enough to implement these ideas algorithmically and compute in real-enough time. This will allow us to "do first, figure out later" rather than "hard work first, fruits later" approach.
It's just not magic, so yea we have to find where it makes sense to deploy it and where it doesn't.
Anecdote: I wasn't really going for accuracy (we were looking at hidden layers more than the output layer) but the small model I was working with was able to predict cell state (sick with the thing I'm looking for?) from simple RNA assay data with 80-95% accuracy even with all the weird and bizarre regularization functions we were throwing at it.
For some things, it makes sense. For others, we need more research. For the remaining, this is an apple we need oranges.
I think a lot of the hype with AI comes from the sincere shock that throwing more compute at a really simple algorithm resulted in a program that kicked the Turing test's ass. If we can't recognize the significance of that, then we must truly have lost our sense of wonder and curiosity.
But the hype is focusing a little too much on the LLM side of things. The real gains are going to come from models that specialize on other kinds of data, especially data that humans are bad at working with.
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The answer to your first question is actually "no".
At least with dotcom and mortgages we had an assets bubble that didn't have a shelf life of 5 years. It's not like the capacity we are building now will be useful after the end of the decade
Is it a good solution if you have to work hard do find a problem for it to solve?
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ha ha ha, haha, ha ha, hahahahaha, ha ha, ha
Sucks to suck
Who couldn't have seen that coming? It really brings home how stupid most of these company leaders are. The lack of ethics and reduced morals they have allow them to rise to the top of the organization but that in no way selects for intelligence. AI has them blinded because their dream is to have everyone replaced by machines. Just like that Twilight Zone episode.
I picture a room with 5 execs desperately typing into chatgpt.
Time to short
now get fucked
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