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this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2026
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The problem seems to be that it takes competent employees to get anything useful out of an LLM in the first place. However, it is these very employees whom the greedy CEOs want to replace. So the result is that an incredible amount of money is being spent on absolutely nothing.
The logical conclusion, then, should be that it would make more sense to replace these useless CEOs with AI. Since they’re just making idiotic decisions for a lot of money anyway, there could be lots of savings.
Unfortunately, however, that will never happen, because contrary to all that talk of KPIs and such, what really matters in the upper echelons of management is never efficiency, but rather ruthlessness and brown-nosing.
I recently learned of a term "reverse centaur" and found the ideas in that article were very entertaining as a way to explain why CEOs are obsessed with LLMs. The author of the book being interviewed has a few hot takes that I think are pretty relevant here too. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/06/how-to-burst-the-ai-bubble-strike-at-its-roots/
Indeed!
I think that pretty much sums it up.
Doctorow is the Cassandra of our time.
My employer has this figured out the right way: AI tools in the hands of competent employees can get a lot done. The engineers themselves agree and are long past their initial chilly reaction. They now have their workflows figured out and routinely report that they did something in minutes that would have taken them hours to do manually.
And even under this rosier picture, token budgets are an issue. These guys have agents running agents running agents that use a whole ecosystem of internal MCP servers and skill plugins and on and on. They say they never shut their laptops because they have 6 or 7 things running at all times. The LLM usage is ridiculous.
Once the LLMs cost what they actually cost, there will be a big time reckoning. First companies will crack down, then they will futz with on-premise models, then they will drive for SLMs and other slimmed down stuff. And they will pay the big guys 100x what they are now for 1/100th the usage.
But hey I don’t know why I’m posting in substance about the real world when all we are here to do is say AI is bullshit and CEOs are dumb. Carry on I guess.