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Which clueless executives are we blaming? The ones who purchase products from vendors like OpenAI or AI-powered products that run API calls through OpenAI et al., or the vendors themselves who make bombastic claims about capabilities?

As an analogy, I don’t know if I fully blame my executives for buying Microsoft Teams when Microsoft Teams turns out to suck. Microsoft promised to my company’s executives that Microsoft Teams doesn’t suck just like Sam Altman promised that AI is so powerful and so capable of exceeding the capabilities of humans that it’s dangerous.

Maybe at some point some of the B2B customers of AI products will be suing their vendors for the kind of grossly exaggerated marketing we are seeing right now. I think that SaaS companies would never get away with it.

I don’t know that the executives at my company suddenly lost their mind and decided that hundreds of dollars of AI spend per employee is suddenly justified even though approving a simple $##/month/employee SaaS tool was previously a rigorous slog. The only reason the executives at my company suddenly changed their mind on frugality is becausey they were sold a lie by a huge industry.

We could consider them clueless for falling for that, or an alternate viewpoint is that they are victims of widespread fraud.



You should. It's their fault for picking a bad vendor. It's their fault for not finding someone with taste to solve the problem. Fundamentally its their business, pretending you can blame someone else for your ultimate accountability is stupid.

Nobody is forcing you to take poison, and saying "Well Microsoft promised me it isn't poison!!!" at this point, decades into it selling poison, doesn't make much sense.


They didn't pick the bad vendor, the herd did. They all go to the same conferences, attend the same vendor lunches and buy the same garbage. And today, most of the IT managers are not technical at all. They have art degrees and have never been technology practitioners.

Literally anyone off the street can be a "decision maker" in technology today. Just buy what everyone else is buying and collect a huge paycheck while working remote. People who understand tech and sort of know what they are doing, are not included.

That has been my experience.


No ... THEY very much did. In fact the whole idea of their job is that they are responsible for the outcomes. Seriously. Listen to their speeches. That gets repeated and repeated and repeated, again and again and again.

Of course, if insurance companies were rapidly held to account by courts, a core function of the courts if there ever was one, there would be no problem here.

Which is probably why most governments are defunding the courts.


My previous landlord was the IT manager of [big bank everyone would recognize] at their headquarters.

When he asked me to email him scans of a bunch of personal documents, I asked him for his PGP key.

..."What's that?"


Well, yes. He probably was expecting GPG.


I think that we need to start blaming vendors for blatant lies. Systematically, again amd again. And actually punish them.

Somehow the "accountability" shifted from meaning "being reaponsible for not defrauding, lying" into "it is fault of people who were lied to".


Feel free to blame MSFT all you want, I am just saying at some point if your boss keeps making dumb decisions it IS your bosses fault.

It's like a person voting for Trump the second time being confused at all his lies, at this point basic education would get you out of this.


Thats a fraud and host of other charges with that poison, and I see no difference with overhyped llms.

You are not correct.


Fool me once, shame on you, fool me ten billion times its still Microsoft's fault you bought the wrong thing.


> We could consider them clueless for falling for that, or an alternate viewpoint is that they are victims of widespread fraud.

Pretty much what this blog post says: https://hermit-tech.com/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-global...

It seems pretty bad, no doubt about it


Wow, what a post.


Your executives are completely unable to evaluate the products they decide to buy?

If so, yes, they are to blame, either for not being able to evaluate the stuff they buy or for deciding on questions they are not qualified for. Either one is incompetence.

You can also blame them to continue renting the thing (because it's not brought) after it's shown to be defective. And if they decide to do irreversible transformation to your business before verifying that the thing even works, than yes, that's bare incapacity of running a company.


> We could consider them clueless for falling for that, or an alternate viewpoint is that they are victims of widespread fraud.

This is what they depend on actually. Scape goats for their failures. This quarter takes a hit then number go up.




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