The AI Gold Rush Is Eating Its Own - ByteHaven - Where I ramble about bytes

ByteHaven - Where I ramble about bytes

The AI Gold Rush Is Eating Its Own

Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series.

Let's start with Wikipedia, because the irony is almost too perfect to pass up.

In mid-May, the Wikimedia Foundation fired Brooke Vibber — the lead developer of MediaWiki since 2003, the first full-time employee the Foundation ever hired, and their first Chief Technical Officer. Over twenty years of institutional knowledge, walked out the door. A week later, on May 21st, they disbanded the entire Community Tech team — five engineers and a manager. That team's entire job was to build things the volunteer editor community actually asked for through an official channel called the Community Wishlist. The one team at the Wikimedia Foundation whose product owner was, in effect, the volunteers who built the thing.

Most of the people fired were union organizers.

Within hours, editors were signing a solidarity petition and threatening an editorial strike. The Wikipedia Signpost confirmed the disbanding the same day. It's apparently the first time Wikipedia's volunteer editors have ever organized in solidarity with paid Foundation staff.

The Foundation doing all of this is sitting on $296 million in reserves and a freshly profitable AI revenue stream from Wikimedia Enterprise — the program that sells high-speed access to Wikipedia's content directly to Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Perplexity, and Mistral.

This isn't a money problem. It's a priorities problem. And Wikipedia isn't the only one who has it.

The Irony Layer Nobody Is Talking About Enough

Wikipedia's volunteer editors — the obsessive, detail-oriented, citation-fighting nerds who built 65 million articles across 300+ languages — are the reason Wikipedia's corpus was worth selling to AI companies in the first place. Every fact, every citation, every heated talk page argument that converged on something resembling accuracy: that was free labor creating the product now being monetized.

The thank you for that is firing the team that existed to give those volunteers a voice, right after cashing the checks from the companies that wanted what those volunteers built.

There's also a longer-term problem buried here. AI companies trained on Wikipedia because it was one of the most reliably human-verified, cited, and contested repositories of knowledge on the internet. Destroy the volunteer community that maintained that quality, replace them with AI-generated content, and you degrade the very thing you just sold. The data feeding AI gets worse. The AI gets worse. The data gets worse. Round and round.

Somewhere down that spiral, an AI will confidently tell someone the Battle of Gettysburg happened in Antarctica, and it will cite Wikipedia, which will have gotten it from an LLM, which trained on the Wikipedia that used to be accurate. Nobody currently making these decisions seems to be the one who'll have to clean that up.

CEO AI Psychosis Is A Real Thing, And It Has A Name

Here's the part where Wikipedia stops being a quirky one-off and starts being a case study.

There's a term going around right now — CEO AI psychosis — and it describes something very specific. CEOs are uniquely vulnerable to it because they're far enough removed from the actual work that when they see an AI demo, they only see the happy path. The impressive part. The "look what it can do" part. They don't see the next ten or twenty steps where things get complicated, where it doesn't scale, where the edge cases pile up, where the humans who used to handle those things quietly aren't there anymore.

They see a demo. They get stars in their eyes. They order implementation. They move on.

Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan described it at SXSW as "cyber psychosis" — said he'd been sleeping four hours a night from the excitement, and claimed a third of the CEOs he knows have it. His assistant said he was joking. He wasn't joking.

Cory Doctorow put it more pointedly: the CEO delusion that they're worth thousands of times more than their workers makes them uniquely easy prey for AI salespeople pushing them deeper into that delusion. Because AI that can replace workers is AI that justifies the salary gap. The pitch sells itself.

The scale of what this is producing is already staggering. In just the first five months of 2026, the tech industry has nearly matched all of 2025's layoffs — 115,430 people fired from 152 companies, with AI cited as the reason by the bulk of them.

It's Not Just Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a good hook because the irony is sharp and the timing is fresh. But the pattern predates this by a couple of years and is accelerating.

OpenAI is the most naked version. Founded as a nonprofit with a stated mission of ensuring AI benefits humanity — I'll pause while you finish laughing — it has spent the last several years systematically dismantling that structure in pursuit of a valuation...