The AI Great Leap Forward (leehanchung.github.io) AI

The article argues that many corporate “AI transformation” efforts mirror China’s Great Leap Forward: top-down mandates push teams to ship impressive but poorly validated “AI” outputs, while metrics and incentives encourage inflated claims. It warns that eliminating people and processes (middle managers, QA, documentation, operations knowledge) creates second-order failures once real-world edge cases appear, and that attempts to “distill” expertise into agent skills can backfire by making workers strategically indispensable. Overall, it calls for evaluation, data, monitoring, and maintainability rather than demos and paperwork.