Practically, it's far easier to simply ask this at your next all-hands when they are source for questions about AI. To make this a meta: use ChatGPT to ask this as a pointlessly-long-worded question to evade HR/marketing from filtering the question until it's too late ;)
To even ask this question shows no understanding of what a CEO of a large corporation does.
1) Investor relations: Yes an AI could answer questions about the financials on the quarterly earnings call. With a lot of careful handling you might maybe even get it to do this in a way that it wouldn’t hallucinate and lead to shareholder lawsuits and SEC enforcement action. But would it go out for lunch with a bunch of fund managers and convince them to keep their investment when you’ve had a bad quarter? No. Would it take a 3-hour meeting with investment bankers to talk through how to recapitalize or refinance debt? No. If you’re talking a startup CEO is it going to convince a16z, SVF, etc to invest? Nope. If you think it will you’ve never done any of those things. It’s trying to capture lightning in a bottle- not a process you can automate. For example, how did Adam Neumann convince Steve Cohen to invest in WeWork? (I have this on the authority of a friend who was one of about 10 people there) He showed up late, and drunk for a small dinner at Steve Cohen’s apartment and got everyone there doing tequila shots. This is not something an AI is capable of.
2) Corporate strategy. Yes you can get it to generate meaningless gibberish on powerpoint, so you might think corporate strategy would be covered, but consider just a few of the big calls Satya Nadella has made (off the top of my head) in the last couple of years. 1) betting big on OpenAI 2) Intervening to save Sam Altman’s ass after he was fired 3) basically giving up on the “console wars”, ceding the hardware victory to Sony, shutting down a bunch of game studios telling the world how tough the climate is even though you’ve just had the most profitable years in your history, betting big on gamePass etc? Gonna do that? No it won’t.
3) Managing the top executive team. Is it going to do this? Of course not.
Not saying an AI couldn’t possibly do a much better job than current CEOs in some hypothetical world where CEOs do different things from what they do now, but in our world, there is literally none of the black magic bs that CEOs pull to get corporations to be worth obscene bucks that an AI could do.
This might be a less popular opinion on a site like HN, but I'm of the opinion that CEO's don't do a whole lot.
Maybe at small startups they are more involved, but the larger the company, the less I think that CEOs or other C-Suite types actually do.
While I also think ChatGPT is over-hyped and largeley incorrect in what it says, I would answer your question with a "yes". ChatGPT is perfectly capable of writing/delivering speeches at MS Build or whatever.
Having been a CEO and around many CEOs... they of course do work. But they don't do x250 times more work of another worker. It's just a different type of work. Yet all work from every employee is critical for the enterprise to function. And in my experience, they often do less work than many employees in terms of hours. If you're an on-call engineer for example, your CEO doesn't get paged and have to wake up in the middle of the night. If you look at any enterprise the CEO is likely not the one doing the most work. That's kind of the whole point and the reason they want to become a CEO/founder (to capture a larger share of the wealth for the work they put in).
Capitalist enterprises (with owners vs non-owner workers) are fundamentally non-meritocratic and exploitative. Everyone works to generate value, and only a small class of workers captures the bulk of the value.
"I can replace desk meat like you with an Eliza helix and a white noise generator." (Quoted from memory from Howard Taylor's wonderful Schlock Mercenary web comic.)
The role of CEOs is to receive praise for every achievement, but also blame when things go wrong. It's a high risk, high reward position that most people can't handle.
Since it's not possible to blame AI, no ChatGPT can't be used to replace the CEO of Microsoft.
This. The problem lies with blame attribution. We humans have been accustomed to think everything from that perspective. As Yoshua Bengio points out in Machine Learning Street Talk podcast: "social system hasn't evolved to keep up with the technology".
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[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 53.7 ms ] threadI have no idea why so many companies are focusing on replacing entry level work with AI; the real alpha is at the top of the org chart.
1) Investor relations: Yes an AI could answer questions about the financials on the quarterly earnings call. With a lot of careful handling you might maybe even get it to do this in a way that it wouldn’t hallucinate and lead to shareholder lawsuits and SEC enforcement action. But would it go out for lunch with a bunch of fund managers and convince them to keep their investment when you’ve had a bad quarter? No. Would it take a 3-hour meeting with investment bankers to talk through how to recapitalize or refinance debt? No. If you’re talking a startup CEO is it going to convince a16z, SVF, etc to invest? Nope. If you think it will you’ve never done any of those things. It’s trying to capture lightning in a bottle- not a process you can automate. For example, how did Adam Neumann convince Steve Cohen to invest in WeWork? (I have this on the authority of a friend who was one of about 10 people there) He showed up late, and drunk for a small dinner at Steve Cohen’s apartment and got everyone there doing tequila shots. This is not something an AI is capable of.
2) Corporate strategy. Yes you can get it to generate meaningless gibberish on powerpoint, so you might think corporate strategy would be covered, but consider just a few of the big calls Satya Nadella has made (off the top of my head) in the last couple of years. 1) betting big on OpenAI 2) Intervening to save Sam Altman’s ass after he was fired 3) basically giving up on the “console wars”, ceding the hardware victory to Sony, shutting down a bunch of game studios telling the world how tough the climate is even though you’ve just had the most profitable years in your history, betting big on gamePass etc? Gonna do that? No it won’t.
3) Managing the top executive team. Is it going to do this? Of course not.
Not saying an AI couldn’t possibly do a much better job than current CEOs in some hypothetical world where CEOs do different things from what they do now, but in our world, there is literally none of the black magic bs that CEOs pull to get corporations to be worth obscene bucks that an AI could do.
So yes, in theory.
My first thought was"but an AI is not responsible", but how responsible is a CEO? They seem to get away with a lot. I could be wrong though
Maybe at small startups they are more involved, but the larger the company, the less I think that CEOs or other C-Suite types actually do.
While I also think ChatGPT is over-hyped and largeley incorrect in what it says, I would answer your question with a "yes". ChatGPT is perfectly capable of writing/delivering speeches at MS Build or whatever.
What, specifically do you think they do?
Capitalist enterprises (with owners vs non-owner workers) are fundamentally non-meritocratic and exploitative. Everyone works to generate value, and only a small class of workers captures the bulk of the value.
Since it's not possible to blame AI, no ChatGPT can't be used to replace the CEO of Microsoft.
imo its possible, but not in the current decade.
the low end of employees are the ones easily replaceable, and the higher you go in hierarchy the more it is about relationships.