GoKawiilBox founder Aaron Levie got us talking this week with a social media post suggesting that tech CEOs are “uniquely prone to AI psychosis.”
On the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I did our best to unpack Levie’s comment. For one thing, we noted that he isn’t disavowing AI tools, merely insisting that CEOs need to actually use those tools to understand them.
That’s a relatively gentle note of skepticism compared to other signs of a broader backlash, whether you look at graduating college students booing any mention of AI, the bad vibes around tech industry layoffs, or the apparent surge of installs at search engine DuckDuckGo after Google’s announcement that it’s bringing more AI to the search experience.
Kirsten suggested that Google faces a dilemma where it’s “chasing that thing it feels like it has to do to keep up, but it’s messing with the thing that people attach to the brand the most, and it’s not improving it.” More broadly, she wondered “if this anti-AI moment is an opportunity for startups or other areas of business.”
Keep reading for a preview of our conversations, edited for length and clarity.
Anthony Ha: AI is incredibly polarizing. And that’s part of what’s challenging to talk about, you can feel a little crazy because [simultaneously,] everybody’s using it and everybody loves it, but also no one’s using it and everybody hates it at the same time. There are large contingents for whom both of those things are true.
On the user side, one thing that was very striking, we [already] talked about Google’s announcements about search and how AI is becoming a bigger part of search — although it’s been interesting to see how Google has tried to walk that back a little bit, or at least add some nuance in terms of, if you want that 10 blue links experience, there are still ways you can get it. It’s not going away entirely.
But I think a lot of people are not excited about the direction Google is going in. And so you see, for example, that DuckDuckGo said installs are up 30%, which is a huge leap. Now, of course, DuckDuckGo is a much, much smaller product than Google. I don’t think Google is in any immediate trouble, but I think that’s a sign that there is a very significant audience that does not like the current AI direction.
Sean O’Kane: I will say one thing that I keep looking for when I look at all of these leading AI labs or tech companies that are really pushing AI features and products — to me, there seems to just be this collapsing towards Anthropic’s approach, this idea of really trying to understand what it is you want to offer people and sticking to that.
And Google is one of the ones that I would say is actually still pushing the other direction. They’re trying to do a lot of different things, but they don’t do themselves any favors by being so vague about it.
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