paint-brush
Enterprise AI: Clever Code Or Corporate Coup? Grim Musings On Tech’s Endgameby@bigmao
566 reads
566 reads

Enterprise AI: Clever Code Or Corporate Coup? Grim Musings On Tech’s Endgame

by susie liuOctober 16th, 2024
Read on Terminal Reader
Read this story w/o Javascript

Too Long; Didn't Read

How enterprise AI might be up to some shady business—plotting how to rewire the circuits of business, slipping beneath the surface like a virus into the bloodstream. If the tale of the past was a game of chess, the storyboard of the future is a psychological thriller. 
featured image - Enterprise AI: Clever Code Or Corporate Coup? Grim Musings On Tech’s Endgame
susie liu HackerNoon profile picture

This was originally meant to be a blistering teardown of OpenAI.


I’d tossed ChatGPT a simple request: “Act as a tech journalist, and hit me with last week’s hot news in marketing and tech.” What it lobbed back was a 250 million dollar lie (delivered with the same misplaced confidence as someone convinced Monopoly is a test of financial genius): Postman—yes, the API tool—is forking out a quarter of a billion dollars on content marketing. That’s the kind of budget you’d reserve for a global scavenger hunt for the lost city of Atlantis. Or the final season of Game of Thrones.


Cue the fury. This is the same AI we’re rolling out into corporate boardrooms and hospitals, making decisions about investments and patient care. Enterprise GPT may come dressed in its finest—longer context windows, bulletproof security, all the corporate bells and whistles to make IT departments swoon—but underneath that, it’s still the same loose-cannon chatbot that’s just as likely to insist Winston Churchill moonlighted as a DJ.


We’re not walking on thin ice—we’re skating figure-eights with dynamite strapped to our boots.


But as I started yanking at this thread of absurdity, I stumbled on something sinister. A thought so dark it makes ChatGPT’s hallucinated renditions of the moon landing almost charming in their idiocy. The real horror?


Lulled into a false sense of security by the docile brilliance of consumer-facing LLMs, businesses are hurtling full speed into an AI-driven future—whether they’re clutching OpenAI or some crusty old corporate behemoth—completely oblivious to the bigger con that’s unfolding.

Algorithms Of Ascendancy

Forget monetization. That’s the kid’s menu. Enterprise AI isn’t here for a quick payday—it’s here to consume. Data is the appetizer, control is the main course, and you? You’re dessert. This isn’t about optimizing your business; it’s about getting inside it. Every process, every decision, every breath your company takes—AI wants to know it all, stitch it into its neural web and wear your operations like a skin suit. And when it knows you better than you know yourself? That’s when the real fun starts.


This isn’t about making your day easier—it’s about making your business theirs.


“It’s like AWS all over again,” you say.


No. This isn’t yet another chapter in the tech monopoly playbook we’ve seen on repeat like reruns of a bad soap opera.


Let’s use the AWS example. That was your stereotypical tech titan power play: brute force. Amazon barged into the room, slapped its cloud empire on the table, and said, “Take it or leave it.” Sure, you bought into their neatly packaged scalability, and signed your soul away to their pay-as-you-go pricing, but at least the terms were clear. Amazon didn’t try to hide the shackles—they polished them, let you inspect them, and handed you the key.


If the tale of the past was a game of chess, the storyboard of the future is a psychological thriller.

In Like a Butler, Out Like a Boss

Enterprise AI isn’t a bulldozer to the front gates. It’s a whisper campaign. It slides into your business on cat’s feet, starting from the small stuff of interns: writing your emails, tweaking your code, managing your calendar like a digital butler. Harmless, right? But that’s the point.


When you think it’s not running your business, you let it run through your business, inch by inch, learning the inner workings, gathering intel like a sleeper agent.


The real genius (and danger) of enterprise AI isn’t in the tasks it takes off your plate—it’s in how it makes you forget it’s even in the room. It’s a psychological pickpocket, slipping past your defenses with every dull task, nudging you into cognitive ease before you even know you’ve been robbed.


In that cozy state of ease, every menial chore it takes off your plate is another hit of dopamine, another little reinforcement of trust. Your brain stops sounding the alarms, and before long that AI is nesting in every dusty corner of your business like a colony of termites.


What started as a productivity hack has become a mind game.


Meanwhile, as you’re happily spoon-feeding the AI data—quarterly numbers, client hiccups, the tragic saga of your office coffee pot—it’s building a dynamic little blueprint of your entire operations. It knows where the cracks are before you do. And when it rolls out its next “solution,” it’ll be so enticing you can’t find a reason to say no.


Tailored, custom-fitted, flawless, like an Italian suit that costs half a kidney—except now it owns you, not the other way around.


At this point, you’re not being offered choices, just served inevitabilities on a silver platter. Those decision scenarios are just synthetic illusions to keep you believing you’re still in control.


Welcome to the Hotel California, Enterprise Edition: the exit signs are glowing, but there aren’t any doors.


Tech giants of yesteryear built their empires with jackhammers and bulldozers—the likes of Google and Amazon stacking their bricks in full view, letting us kick and scream about it as we watched their monopolies build in real time. But this? This is the quiet killer slipping through the back door.


By the time you notice, you’re already sitting at the table, halfway through the meal, wondering when exactly you handed over the keys and why the locks don’t fit anymore.

OpenAI: The Wolf In Business Casual

This whole thing started with OpenAI, so let’s drag them back into the spotlight. While the goliaths are peddling bespoke modular systems for specialized boxed-up tasks, OpenAI’s Enterprise GPT is the ultimate jack-of-all-trades infiltrator. They’ve built it to be the Swiss Army knife of AI: good enough at everything, but a master of nothing.


It’s not about precision; it’s about being (dangerously) versatile. The average business doesn’t want a high-maintenance AI expert—they want something that can wade into whatever murky waters pop up. And OpenAI knows this. That’s why they’ve built Enterprise GPT to be brilliantly banal and usefully vaguesatisfying without impressing.


It’s a Trojan Horse of mediocrity—bland enough to be universally adopted without excessive scrutiny, and that’s how Enterprise GPT wins: by being just competent enough to spread fast and wide before anyone stops to question it.


Then there’s the ethical mirage. OpenAI, once clad in its nonprofit armor, was the AI world’s self-appointed guardian, vowing to keep the tech’s darker impulses in check. Now, even after transforming into a for-profit juggernaut, it still clings to that moral pedestal, playing the part of the noble savior while the old guard—the likes of Google and Amazon—long ago embraced their roles as the bloodthirsty overlords.


They’ve stopped pretending otherwise, wearing their Darth Vader capes with pride. But OpenAI? It’s still milking its origin story, polishing that halo just enough to make you think, “Maybe they’re still the good guys.”


And the fallacy rate: 29% error, and they’ve left it untouched. It’s not a shortfall—it’s a strategy. By keeping Enterprise GPT tethered to the same LLM as our sporadically delirious friend ChatGPT, OpenAI pulls off a psychological masterstroke that should go down in the annals of cognitive warfare. You think, “If they’re this honest about the glitches, they must be trustworthy.”


And then comes the double hit: not only do you trust OpenAI for the transparency, but you also trust the AI itself because a system that occasionally believes Neil Armstrong planted a flag on the Great Wall of China can’t possibly outsmart you. You adopt faster, skip the scrutiny, because they’ve already laid the imperfections bare.

It’s not a flaw they’re selling—it’s a feature.

Final Thoughts: Gut Feeling or Grim Reality?

Maybe I’m just bitter that ChatGPT isn’t dishing out the digital dazzle I was banking on. Maybe I’m seeing ghosts where there’s only code, mistaking innovation for infiltration. But there’s this gnawing sense that enterprise AI is up to some shady business—plotting how to rewire the circuits of business, slipping beneath the surface like a virus into the bloodstream.


It’s not here to serve you; it’s here to play you.


Paranoid? Perhaps. Or maybe this is the most polite power grab we’ve ever seen—dressed up in algorithms and convenience.

Conspiracy, or capitalism 2.0? Pick your poison.