A team of software developers were recently let go so a company could replace them with AI. So they got together and created an Open Source AI CEO to replace the CEO and other executives. Hopefully, turnabout is fair play and this might even get some folks to think twice about using AI to replace people.
This is hilarious, I feel like we are going to see AI companies add something to the system prompt or terms of service that explicitly forbids having an LLM act as CEO. Honestly though I do hope this gives pause to the C suite when it comes to replacing people with AI
Corporate officers, including CEOs, have to be "natural persons" (legal jargon for flesh-and-blood humans) either directly by law or indirectly as a practical matter so the attempted turnabout falls flat on its face.
Sun Tzu said to "know your enemy" and those who don't know the basics of how businesses and finance work have no hope of defeating them.
Maybe, maybe not. A lot of folks would gleefully avoid rocking the boat if handed a job this cushy. If they do flake out you could ask if anyone in facilities would like to take a break from emptying trashcans...
If you think CEOs are the primary legal signatories for their company you might need to spend some time away from garage band startups. Companies maintain entire legal departments for a reason.
I’d be more interested to see a collection of independent guilds and co-ops that voluntarily coordinate through an AI intermediary.
Because the AI can’t really own things or be held responsible, the idea of a skeuomorphic AI seems quite silly. Keep the ownership in the humans, but plural, and have them in contact with the actual work.
Highly configurable. Looks like it is targeted at any level of management. The key features seems that it can generate its own vision of how to move something forward and that it can be set with degrees of freedom depending on the use case. Video demo here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_g97xxVTMk
Sometimes the claim is "set vision" - which AI can extract from the collective.
Someimes the claim is to prioritize the work (with bias), AI can extract that from the collective too, right?
Making resources available to the team? AI.
Coordinating between teams? AI.
Can the AI do this in a more un-biased way? Can it refine collective intelligence and desire into objective goals?
More than a software factory id love to see a manager-factory.
One thing, AI cannot do (yet) is bring the network. Like when you hire folk from Booth or Sloan so you can sell to places that hired Booth and Sloan grads.
> Sometimes the claim is "set vision" - which AI can extract from the collective.
To be an effective CEO, you have to make judgement calls that the collective can’t always have wisdom and context on, is confidential, or requires fast decision making during which there are interactive discussions or negotiations!
This is highly subjective and a gives an impression that every one is doing a very effective job. The reality is much more grey when you account for so many companies that get shut down.
My personal take, somewhere down the line people feel scared of taking responsibility for more than themselves and their family. This limits the ability for most people to take on such ventures. Not everyone falls in the same bucket but a lot of leadership in todays date is about taking the role without responsibility. They happen to be in the role with the help of network affect and somehow that just amplifies.
> This is highly subjective and a gives an impression that every one is doing a very effective job. The reality is much more grey when you account for so many companies that get shut down.
I believe that the average are average.
I don’t believe what I wrote suggests that. I was attempting to be as neutral as possible.
The answer is to be responsible to the business. The buck stops at the CEO. Therefore, their responsibilities are technically everything in the entire company. And I think many people who have only worked for other people underestimate how valuable that responsibility is.
> The job of an executive is: to define and enforce culture and values for their whole organization, and to ratify good decisions.
(And that's the whole list! Nowhere do you find set tasks or make decisions)
To me, that means that they're still pretty essential - on both fronts, AI needs values and AI needs a system that can tell whether decisions are good or not.
If the operation is to distill options into a few choices, and then pick the "best" one then, I think hivemind can win there too. Real-time democracy running a business.
For example an open-source project could/would still have a BDFL but, the AI-CEO could do the operational busywork while the BDFL is out talking to humans and presenting at PGCon or some other productive thing.
Business actually treats a pseudo-dictatorship (with the requisite yes-men) as "good leadership".
Most times it's pretty simple, in my experience. A CEO either runs a business as a (1) Sales focus [best deals and vendors] or (2) Marketing focus [best reputation and trends] or (3) Investor focus [best boardroom friends].
Lots of other opinions are usually thrown out until there's really only one facet used for running the company.
Nope! that's the subtlety. "distill options" is not the CEO's (or any executive's) job.
The way he phrases it, if I remember correctly (and this is by no means the only way to executive, I just really like his framing), is that the way you make decisions is by getting your immediate subordinates to agree, and they iterate. Decisions should be made at the lowest level that they can be made at, and if that's the CEO level, you've made mistakes.
So you make the values list, you make sure that people live by it (up to and including firing people who don't and hiring people who do, which he basically thinks is the whole day to day), and then you bring your subordinates together to agree on decisions. If they don't agree, you send them off to work through it together and come back with consensus (or, less great, compromise). If you have to put your thumb on the scale to get a good decision, again, you're not CEOing well.
Basically if you have to be a dictator, there's no way you can actually effectively do that. Proper leadership is getting people to act the way you would, if you had all the knowledge and perspective they do, but without having to make them do it. Lift them up, empower them, give them the responsibility and tools and values, and then endorse the result.
Enforcing culture is not something I believe is possible. Nobody is going to listen to the C suite suit over their own experience with their colleagues. People just end up saying the right buzzwords to appear that the culture has been adopted, but it will be mostly met with malicious compliance. If the culture is driven by incentives and rewards for behaviour,then that's a whole different ball game.
Be friends with the board. Negotiate high pay and benefits (for themselves), and a golden parachute in case things go south (which they do most often). Take credit for things that were going to happen anyways. Blame xyz for things that didn't work out.
It’s going to be funny when the Tesla robots start showing up at tee times because the CEO couldn’t make it. Like a meeting agent taking notes for people who didn’t attend
See, the issue is CEOs capture a fair amount of value but ultimately it is the owners and the main shareholders who hire them for that value to insulate themselves from day to day running of the company. The maximum value of the company is accruing to the shareholders in a public company anyways. While the morality of the right nos compared to median 'worker' can always be debated, I still find CEO earns 500x that of median worker type comparisons a little bit disingenuous and it totally insulates the owner class.
Yes, that is a good manager, but in my experience, it is better if the culture of the team is about ensuring everyone has opportunities to grow, build on their strengths, and connect with opportunities. When that is considered the manager’s job, and not the job of every member of the team, people get neglected, and many strengths and opportunities go to waste.
Marketing and they hire and fire important people. That's about it though, where we should take the product, what features to do next, partnerships, these are pretty obvious to anyone paying attention.
I don't think these things are obvious. I've worked at many places that have had big, company-changing forks in the road available to them and navigating those forks wasn't easy (and in my opinion several times we chose wrong). The crowd wasn't always right or even well aligned and sometimes the only agreement was that a middle of the road approach would be worse. My intuition says getting that right takes a lot of luck, good momentum, and a lot of departments working well together (bringing in and communicating market info, broadcasting marketing that works, making good partnerships, etc). The cynic in me thinks one big impact of a ceo is the various cheating and corruption tools that can make some of those things easier or at least less critical to get right (you don't need to make good cybertrucks or convince people to buy them if the government agrees to buy 450k of them as "armored vehicles", for example).
If that kind of thing is easy for you (the honest ones or the clandestine ones) then you might make a really strong entrepreneur/business leader.
At my current job, a 10 person startup, the CEOs job is to generate leads, talk to potential customers, and close deals. He, along with the other founders, shape what we work on based on what he thinks it’s possible for us to sell. He’s essential to the business.
At my previous 50k person company I never talked to anyone within 4 levels of the CEO and thought he was useless. But realistically he probably had a somewhat similar job - talking with the board, talking with politicians, and talking with the CEOs of other companies in the effort to lower costs (tax breaks, partnerships, etc) and generate sales (contracts, partnerships, etc).
A sales person is usually trained on an existing product or portfolio of products (including services). A good sales person might use their exposure to customers for gathering valuable information to feed back into their upstream org. But this is completely different from someone who has to actively shape a both sides of the company, value delivery and value creation, because both need to mature in a choreographed manner.
So you are right in one direction: a good CEO often has to be a good sales person. The reverse does not apply, though.
There’s a reason that many CEOs have a stint in sales.
In a stable, profitable company, you need sales to keep the business solvent. And understanding the sales pipeline is pretty essential to effectively running a business.
Where this breaks down is when the C-suite forgets that you also need a product, and you need to keep innovating on that product in ways that bring value to current and future customers. This seems to happen pretty frequently.
CEO's exist as a sink for liability. When something goes wrong, they are the fall guys, that's ultimately their job. That's why CEO compensation is generally correlated strongly to earnings and they usually have golden parachutes.
Without a CEO to fire when the business goes south, how is the board supposed to respond? Taking accountability? lmao
Not yet. Maybe soon. I'm not placing bets on timelines.
> What do CEOs do
No clue. I'm not there yet. Maybe it's critical. Maybe nothing.
> and other managers
There are a lot of bad managers. I'm halfway not terrible. A significant part of my job is setting technical direction in the same way I did as a staff+ engineer but without the overhead of asking somebody else's permission. Another large part is the "shit shield" function -- somebody thinks they want something, and they either find themselves blocked by me or immediately satisfied with whatever code I'm able to cook up between meetings, not breaking the team's concentration. A huge part is basically just being a teacher, and I love teaching (if it weren't so pessimized by society that might actually be my career). A large part of it is navigating organizational nonsense (for "reasons," I'm rambling, ask if you're curious). And... whatever. My job didn't get easier going into management. Not all of it should have to exist in the abstract, but in any specific company it's still an important function.
If you were legitimately suddenly saddled with the responsibilities of a typical ‘CEO’, chances are you’d shit your britches within a month.
Part of a CEO’s job is to be the target of all warranted and unwarranted blame for every single bad thing that anyone in the organisation experiences, even the inherent/inevitable ones, even the ones that others in the organisation see as a good thing.
Me. Not a CEO, and no desire to be. I’m also about as lefty as they come, definitely not a bootlicker or ladder climber. I’m just not a delusional, naive, unjustifiably self-righteous grunt, seemingly unlike many people sounding off on this thread.
Good ones actually are quite aware of the industry, connect the dots and setup the company to be sustainable, growing and ready when its time to be ready.
Like investing in a prototype which solves industry issues the CEO understood.
Same as the CTO just that the CTOs focus is doing the same thing with technology. Like in an org with a lot of 'AI? who cares" saying and seeing the future of it and intorducing it in time and not until everyone else already did it.
Defining core principles like the tech stack, making the decision to keep the current setup or migrating to something 'new' but better in longterm (like migrating from or to kubernetes)
The point of a CEO is to be able to deploy a fully authoritative business delegation to any golf course on earth within 48 hours.
This isn't really a joke. At some point, you need to meet with your customers if you intend to close a deal. B2C is also an option but good luck actually making realistic income in this market without an army at your back.
I have yet to meet a developer (myself included) that I would trust to be alone in the board room with a very large client. Total mastery of the technology is great, but you also need to convince people who aren't compelled by rational technological arguments. Sometimes the only way to convince them is to go on a very expensive fishing trip.
CEOs get a lot of hate for the pay and power, but they endure a lot of shit that most developers couldn't handle for more than five minutes. Sitting at fancy restaurants with these people is torture. I can respect anyone who refuses to believe this, but it's true. There's no cuisine or vintage of wine that can compensate for awful company.
Ah yes, the unbearable burden of sipping fine wine at a Michelin star restaurant with a less than stellar company.
That's surely way worse than the fate Bezos inflicts on his workers, such as forcing them to work in extremely hazardous warehouses and to pee in bottles.
In companies large enough to have a board, the CEO's job is to manage relationships with customers, vendors, and wall street. If his company is big enough, he'll need to manage relationships with the government too. In fact, among founders whose business became big, the number one complaint you hear is how little of their busy day is spent on their actual product anymore.
AI is not very good at forming and building human relationships.
They siphon away as much money as they can get away with , screw over their underlings and hop onto their golden parachutes whenever shit hits the fan, which with their short-sighted coke-fuelled decisions always happens.
I’m all for productive people, brilliant engineers. I still get dirty with codes/work all the way down to the newly hired fresh out of college kids, to the production architects that shapes multi-million, if not billions, of P&L. I’m also very lucky to be included in key decision making, planning, negating amongst the boards of C-Suites, Directors, VPs.
A very personal view but many developers/engineers fail to see the overall picture. And yes, I was there and I went through all of the mistakes.
The things you see on the surface of those incompetent CxOs are just the tiny piece of the bigger picture. You cannot replace blames, decision in the face of uncertainty. Almost all decisions that businesses take have nothing to do with the proficiencies of technologies or engineering finesse, or even the best options, but mostly on “incentives” and who can take/own the “blame.”
“AI” replacing developers is evident because that is a rather tiny perspective and kinda easy to do the equation - developer can do that (good, bad, best) and can the AI do it - maybe, perhaps. So, replace.
A C-Suite took a decision to tick the final approval of a billion dollar deal with a service providers (amongst 10s of them). The idea might have sounded idiotic because there were 3 others better at the top than the chosen one. Even if all of the task and options were weighted with AI, but that last human decision is the Blame that the C-Suite took on, by betting his incentives on it (money, fame, pride, ego.)
> A very personal view but many developers/engineers fail to see the overall picture. And yes, I was there and I went through all of the mistakes.
What is failling to see the overall picture? I hate this overall picture mysticism. I bet that if people where given the same role and information as the CEO they would be able to see the overall picture.
> Almost all decisions that businesses take have nothing to do with the proficiencies of technologies or engineering finesse, or even the best options, but mostly on “incentives” and who can take/own the “blame.”
This argument always confuses me because it seems like lower level employees are the ones that get quickly dismissed when things get bad while a lot of C level executives seem to have some sort of compensation even if they fuck up.
I think a lot of this kind of talk treats the C-Suite as special, mystical "visionary" people who Know Things We Can't Know, and by virtue of this otherworldly magical power, are uniquely qualified to do their jobs. Like the average person with basic knowledge of his business and industry can't possibly choose one service provider out of 10 bids, or set business priorities, or drive and enforce culture. We're not talking about wizardry here.
People always dunk on me for saying this outrageous statement, but if you put me in charge of a random Fortune 500 company, I give myself a 50% probability of the company performing better than if its real CEO was in charge, and a 50% probability of it performing worse. I really don't think these guys bring as much to the table as they think they do and as much as the general public seems to think they do. Business success does not come from paranormal insight and abilities.
I think you could randomly nominate CEOs from the set of the general population with, say, a minimum of a college degree, and the randomly nominated CEO's performance would not statistically differ from "qualified" CEOs.
This is absolutely spot on. CEO/C-Suite/VPs are surrounded by gatekeepers (usually something like the PMO org, program management) who feed them with garbage info. Even if a top level leader is genuinely interested in making things better, they would never know because the gatekeepers firewall any competent person.
The gatekeeping org has the highest density of incompetence. They only hire incompetent because loyalty to the person hired is the most important. Gatekeeping orgs of various leaders protect each other, there is almost never any blame, it is things are good and they are going to get better, announce xyz initiatives/projects.
There are some exceptional executives out there with strong vision, ability to execute and build. Those are rare. The rest are just a bunch of people who had risen to the position because of whatever. They often don't have any special knowledge or skills and succeed mostly because of how the system works. For instance, I can't imagine what one would need to do to fuck up in a company like Coca-Cola. It's super well established, supply chains are golden, everything works,etc. So does success in such a company really mean the executive is some sort of visionary genius? Absolutely no.
CEOs are probably by and large less technically competent than the average technical line employee, but what companies are actually paying for is personal connections to power structures that can be leveraged for profit. Look at someone like Condoleezza Rice- almost certainly her political science doctorate imparted her with no real technical knowledge, yet she's served on the boards of C3.ai, Chevron, HP, Dropbox, Transamerica, Charles Schwab and a million other vague leadership positions for other entities in fields she almost certainly lacks any competence in.
Many CEOs are bad and their businesses will either fail or be bailed out. But the work CEOs do is probably some of the last to get automated - higher order strategy, relationship building, managing people.
I get it’s a joke, and often a frequent cynical joke made here, but I actually think it’s a good thought experiment. Almost like a new Turing test
The thought experiment, to be clear, is building an artificially intelligent CEO or company founder with the intent of generating profit. If this AI can turn a profit, it has passed this new test
Of course, by the time this new AI starts turning a profit, it will be maximized to the extent that it loses its competitive advantage, and then we’re back to square 1
You’re presuming here that CEOs cause companies to make profit instead of serving as a scapegoat for their often unavoidable market dynamics (at best).
At what point does a company become a company if one person doesn’t make a company? What’s the threshold for non-labor where a company becomes a company?
I may be able to do all the labor myself, but need investors because I can’t afford the capital.
I may be able to do all the labor myself, but want to ensure continuity beyond my ability or interest to do the labor myself. (Sometimes this is by my wish; sometimes by the wish of consumers of my service.)
I may be able to do all the labor myself, but not expose my entire net worth to the financial obligations of the company.
There are plenty of cases where a single person company makes good sense.
Doesn't the incentive here, lead to privatizing the AI and possibly releasing a different product to the public - or at least with a delay? (not too unlike how the frontier labs work today).
Yes I would think that would be the endgame. But in practice, I’m very skeptical a purely AI-driven executor can stay competitive when the market and government supporting it and surrounding it is driven by humans
Yep. But, in most senses, trading algorithms don't need to interact with humans, or human society. Is the world around the "thought experiment" AI CEO dehumanized enough that that's also the case for it?
If not, I'd expect major problems there.
A related point - trading algo's can completely pivot in seconds, and live & die by extremely simple and short-term metrics. Even in a human-free world, that's not at all how the vast majority of industries work. What is "profit", when your AI CEO is organizing the construction of a new steel mill? Judging its performance then requires deep domain expertise.
This presupposes that a company's competitive advantage comes primarily from their CEO.
It also presupposes that success is zero sum and winner takes all, which isn't always the case (example: when you're building out a new market segment, it can be beneficial to have competitors that are also building it out).
> This presupposes that a company's competitive advantage comes primarily from their CEO.
It’s the premise of the thought experiment, so yes the AI must generate a profit for the company. To be able to make a profit, the AI executor must achieve competitive advantage in the market. If the AI doesn’t generate a profit, then it doesn’t fit the premise and that’s a different experiment
This has likely been the case as long as jobs have existed. Some CEOs spend their entire time tweeting, apparently.
The way any large company works, and this includes all the big tech companies, is that they end up in a state of constant churn. Every 6 months or so there's a reorganization. There'san old joke that you get an email that your manager's manager's manager's manager now reports to a new manager and you've never heard of any of these people.
The point of that churn is to make sure nobody is ever held responsible for something not working. It's never given enough time. That's by design. Middle (and even senior) management is about empire-building.
Another quote that springs to mind is that the bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy. That's how I feel about management bloat.
Anyone who has paid attention to Intel's downfall in the last decade will have heard stories about how the company descended into fiefdoms and it became impossible to get anything done. That's what happens.
Most people in these organizations aren't particularly talented at anything other than forming social relationships. the leadership of these companies always end up having an adversarial relationship with their workers and try to suppress their wages to increase profits so they can get their stock options and bonuses and the CEOs all sit on each other's boards of directors setting each other's compensation packages. It's a lootocracy.
The point of all this is that the leadership will never decide that they are the problem. Take Meta's Metaverse. It was a $70 billion flop. A lot of people got laid off from that. Were any of those worker bees responsible? Nope. They didn't choose the strategy or probably even what they worked on. It takes a lot for heads to roll within senior leadership and with the vote-stacked share structures of many major tech companies, ousting a CEO is essentially impossible.
These executives think shifting peas around the plate is paramount to eating them. That's what toddlers do when they want to try and make mommy think they've done a good thing.
No one wants to just get down to the business of choking down these damn peas.
To the extent this is tongue in cheek it is funny, but I could imagine if I was building a startup I’d like something like this if it was good.
That said, if you look at what it’s actually doing (read the question carefully, then read what it actually said) I am not convinced this is better than what ChatGPT could do out of the box already.
Your comment is entirely emotionally driven. “These politicians! These bureaucrats!”.
Let me guess, it just happens that the role that you work in is amongst the only that actually provide value, and everything else is just waste.
Developers are among some of the least self-aware people ever, I swear. And I say this as a developer. The God complex instilled in techies in the ‘00s and ‘10s is unrivalled and I’m really enjoying seeing some of you being taken down a peg.
Number of people who think that a leader or a CEO can be replaced by AI and who themselves have actually risked everything to start a company, be a leader, or do anything similar: exactly 0.
The world is a whole lot more complicated than the simplistic "CEOs are evil" nonsense. I suggest you talk to an entrepreneur sometime. Or, better yet, do it yourself before judging others so harshly. Or is it too hard for you?
Interesting point, but CEO is not necessarily the same as owner.
For those that missed it, the question what current owner would turn over control to an AI?
I could more easily see a individuals delegating work to an AI but retaining actual approval/veto power. In that sense, the approver is basically still the CEO .
I think AI CEOs are dumb but AI 'enterprise decision-makers' could be very very interesting.
Imagine how quickly your meetings could get resolved if you had teams submit prompts / contexts, had a clear, documented set of overarching objectives, etc.?
“Walking away costs you the deal. Signing costs you the company. The math is obvious in retrospect; harder in the moment when there's quota pressure”
such valuable, should I say load-bearing insights
Other gem from my new CFO:
“The financial statements are the result. The variance analysis is where the operating insight lives.”
And my new C(3-)PO just told me
“If we removed all sales involvement, what % of revenue would we still get?
#5 is the honest PLG test. If the answer is <30%, PLG is supplementary at best. If the answer is >60%, PLG is the actual motion and the rest is overlay.”
Searching for PLG, I found: “In short, companies that use PLG models gain another revenue-generating channel: the company’s product itself.” What a world we live in, that a company's products being a revenue-generating channel is an innovation worthy of note!
The only thing worse than a human CEO is an AI CEO with power to fire you. People just don't think it will do stupid things, have nonsensicle orders which they have to follow, and likely fire people left right and center.
But oh ho there is no human ceo, must be a good place to work!!
Honestly the best use of AI at the moment is to replace non-technical middle management layers. Many of those yelling the loudest for “more AI now” are quite ironically holding the jobs best replaced by the current creation of AI.
We're all joking around here. But 5 decades down the line, with increasing cognitive offload to AI, is a slow erosion leading to this end state so crazy?
Depends on the board. The premium CEO robot will be powered by a bio-ethanol fuel cell so that it can play golf with the board of directors for as long as drinks are available.
> One of the miners, rejected on account of his size, offered to fight any man there as proof of his suitability as a soldier, and six men were eventually called upon to remove him.
(Corroboration, not deduction: "has four legs, so it is more probably a cat". That is vs falsification: "short, hence not all managers are tall". Which does not work anyway going from the logical context to the stochastic context, because it becomes "the exception that confirms the rule". I trust you knew, but.)
That’s how leaders throughout history have worked. Usually you prove your mettle in the first half of your career and then do the hard work of being the face of the company once you’re an executive. Diminishing what a leader does is the foremost underling cliché throughout all of history.
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[ 0.53 ms ] story [ 25.5 ms ] threadSun Tzu said to "know your enemy" and those who don't know the basics of how businesses and finance work have no hope of defeating them.
Because the AI can’t really own things or be held responsible, the idea of a skeuomorphic AI seems quite silly. Keep the ownership in the humans, but plural, and have them in contact with the actual work.
Most importantly, what is its golf handicap?
Sometimes the claim is "set vision" - which AI can extract from the collective.
Someimes the claim is to prioritize the work (with bias), AI can extract that from the collective too, right?
Making resources available to the team? AI.
Coordinating between teams? AI.
Can the AI do this in a more un-biased way? Can it refine collective intelligence and desire into objective goals?
More than a software factory id love to see a manager-factory.
One thing, AI cannot do (yet) is bring the network. Like when you hire folk from Booth or Sloan so you can sell to places that hired Booth and Sloan grads.
To be an effective CEO, you have to make judgement calls that the collective can’t always have wisdom and context on, is confidential, or requires fast decision making during which there are interactive discussions or negotiations!
My personal take, somewhere down the line people feel scared of taking responsibility for more than themselves and their family. This limits the ability for most people to take on such ventures. Not everyone falls in the same bucket but a lot of leadership in todays date is about taking the role without responsibility. They happen to be in the role with the help of network affect and somehow that just amplifies.
I believe that the average are average.
I don’t believe what I wrote suggests that. I was attempting to be as neutral as possible.
That is what the CEO is for – to be on the receiving end of beatings and flogging if the business they are at the masthead of effs something up.
The answer is to be responsible to the business. The buck stops at the CEO. Therefore, their responsibilities are technically everything in the entire company. And I think many people who have only worked for other people underestimate how valuable that responsibility is.
> The job of an executive is: to define and enforce culture and values for their whole organization, and to ratify good decisions.
(And that's the whole list! Nowhere do you find set tasks or make decisions)
To me, that means that they're still pretty essential - on both fronts, AI needs values and AI needs a system that can tell whether decisions are good or not.
Well, so do most CEOs.
So they need someone to review AI output huh?
For example an open-source project could/would still have a BDFL but, the AI-CEO could do the operational busywork while the BDFL is out talking to humans and presenting at PGCon or some other productive thing.
This is not a competitive advantage
Most times it's pretty simple, in my experience. A CEO either runs a business as a (1) Sales focus [best deals and vendors] or (2) Marketing focus [best reputation and trends] or (3) Investor focus [best boardroom friends].
Lots of other opinions are usually thrown out until there's really only one facet used for running the company.
The best products are usually from single minds with a strong vision. "Too many cooks in the kitchen" is a phrase for a reason.
Your least favorite products are designed by committee or a vision less person following trends.
The way he phrases it, if I remember correctly (and this is by no means the only way to executive, I just really like his framing), is that the way you make decisions is by getting your immediate subordinates to agree, and they iterate. Decisions should be made at the lowest level that they can be made at, and if that's the CEO level, you've made mistakes.
So you make the values list, you make sure that people live by it (up to and including firing people who don't and hiring people who do, which he basically thinks is the whole day to day), and then you bring your subordinates together to agree on decisions. If they don't agree, you send them off to work through it together and come back with consensus (or, less great, compromise). If you have to put your thumb on the scale to get a good decision, again, you're not CEOing well.
Basically if you have to be a dictator, there's no way you can actually effectively do that. Proper leadership is getting people to act the way you would, if you had all the knowledge and perspective they do, but without having to make them do it. Lift them up, empower them, give them the responsibility and tools and values, and then endorse the result.
> … the culture is driven by incentives and rewards for behaviour…
Not sure what your definition of enforcing is… but it doesn’t have to be by actual force.
Be friends with the board. Negotiate high pay and benefits (for themselves), and a golden parachute in case things go south (which they do most often). Take credit for things that were going to happen anyways. Blame xyz for things that didn't work out.
These are all impossible tasks for AI.
At least the good ones do.
If that kind of thing is easy for you (the honest ones or the clandestine ones) then you might make a really strong entrepreneur/business leader.
At my previous 50k person company I never talked to anyone within 4 levels of the CEO and thought he was useless. But realistically he probably had a somewhat similar job - talking with the board, talking with politicians, and talking with the CEOs of other companies in the effort to lower costs (tax breaks, partnerships, etc) and generate sales (contracts, partnerships, etc).
So you are right in one direction: a good CEO often has to be a good sales person. The reverse does not apply, though.
In a stable, profitable company, you need sales to keep the business solvent. And understanding the sales pipeline is pretty essential to effectively running a business.
Where this breaks down is when the C-suite forgets that you also need a product, and you need to keep innovating on that product in ways that bring value to current and future customers. This seems to happen pretty frequently.
Without a CEO to fire when the business goes south, how is the board supposed to respond? Taking accountability? lmao
Not yet. Maybe soon. I'm not placing bets on timelines.
> What do CEOs do
No clue. I'm not there yet. Maybe it's critical. Maybe nothing.
> and other managers
There are a lot of bad managers. I'm halfway not terrible. A significant part of my job is setting technical direction in the same way I did as a staff+ engineer but without the overhead of asking somebody else's permission. Another large part is the "shit shield" function -- somebody thinks they want something, and they either find themselves blocked by me or immediately satisfied with whatever code I'm able to cook up between meetings, not breaking the team's concentration. A huge part is basically just being a teacher, and I love teaching (if it weren't so pessimized by society that might actually be my career). A large part of it is navigating organizational nonsense (for "reasons," I'm rambling, ask if you're curious). And... whatever. My job didn't get easier going into management. Not all of it should have to exist in the abstract, but in any specific company it's still an important function.
Take risk with other people's lives and earn the big bucks for that.
Part of a CEO’s job is to be the target of all warranted and unwarranted blame for every single bad thing that anyone in the organisation experiences, even the inherent/inevitable ones, even the ones that others in the organisation see as a good thing.
Me. Not a CEO, and no desire to be. I’m also about as lefty as they come, definitely not a bootlicker or ladder climber. I’m just not a delusional, naive, unjustifiably self-righteous grunt, seemingly unlike many people sounding off on this thread.
Like investing in a prototype which solves industry issues the CEO understood.
Same as the CTO just that the CTOs focus is doing the same thing with technology. Like in an org with a lot of 'AI? who cares" saying and seeing the future of it and intorducing it in time and not until everyone else already did it.
Defining core principles like the tech stack, making the decision to keep the current setup or migrating to something 'new' but better in longterm (like migrating from or to kubernetes)
The point of a CEO is to be able to deploy a fully authoritative business delegation to any golf course on earth within 48 hours.
This isn't really a joke. At some point, you need to meet with your customers if you intend to close a deal. B2C is also an option but good luck actually making realistic income in this market without an army at your back.
I have yet to meet a developer (myself included) that I would trust to be alone in the board room with a very large client. Total mastery of the technology is great, but you also need to convince people who aren't compelled by rational technological arguments. Sometimes the only way to convince them is to go on a very expensive fishing trip.
CEOs get a lot of hate for the pay and power, but they endure a lot of shit that most developers couldn't handle for more than five minutes. Sitting at fancy restaurants with these people is torture. I can respect anyone who refuses to believe this, but it's true. There's no cuisine or vintage of wine that can compensate for awful company.
That's surely way worse than the fate Bezos inflicts on his workers, such as forcing them to work in extremely hazardous warehouses and to pee in bottles.
AI is not very good at forming and building human relationships.
Please replace CTOs while you are at it and most architects can also be replaced easily!
A very personal view but many developers/engineers fail to see the overall picture. And yes, I was there and I went through all of the mistakes.
The things you see on the surface of those incompetent CxOs are just the tiny piece of the bigger picture. You cannot replace blames, decision in the face of uncertainty. Almost all decisions that businesses take have nothing to do with the proficiencies of technologies or engineering finesse, or even the best options, but mostly on “incentives” and who can take/own the “blame.”
“AI” replacing developers is evident because that is a rather tiny perspective and kinda easy to do the equation - developer can do that (good, bad, best) and can the AI do it - maybe, perhaps. So, replace.
A C-Suite took a decision to tick the final approval of a billion dollar deal with a service providers (amongst 10s of them). The idea might have sounded idiotic because there were 3 others better at the top than the chosen one. Even if all of the task and options were weighted with AI, but that last human decision is the Blame that the C-Suite took on, by betting his incentives on it (money, fame, pride, ego.)
What is failling to see the overall picture? I hate this overall picture mysticism. I bet that if people where given the same role and information as the CEO they would be able to see the overall picture.
This argument always confuses me because it seems like lower level employees are the ones that get quickly dismissed when things get bad while a lot of C level executives seem to have some sort of compensation even if they fuck up.
People always dunk on me for saying this outrageous statement, but if you put me in charge of a random Fortune 500 company, I give myself a 50% probability of the company performing better than if its real CEO was in charge, and a 50% probability of it performing worse. I really don't think these guys bring as much to the table as they think they do and as much as the general public seems to think they do. Business success does not come from paranormal insight and abilities.
I think you could randomly nominate CEOs from the set of the general population with, say, a minimum of a college degree, and the randomly nominated CEO's performance would not statistically differ from "qualified" CEOs.
The gatekeeping org has the highest density of incompetence. They only hire incompetent because loyalty to the person hired is the most important. Gatekeeping orgs of various leaders protect each other, there is almost never any blame, it is things are good and they are going to get better, announce xyz initiatives/projects.
The thought experiment, to be clear, is building an artificially intelligent CEO or company founder with the intent of generating profit. If this AI can turn a profit, it has passed this new test
Of course, by the time this new AI starts turning a profit, it will be maximized to the extent that it loses its competitive advantage, and then we’re back to square 1
I may be able to do all the labor myself, but want to ensure continuity beyond my ability or interest to do the labor myself. (Sometimes this is by my wish; sometimes by the wish of consumers of my service.)
I may be able to do all the labor myself, but not expose my entire net worth to the financial obligations of the company.
There are plenty of cases where a single person company makes good sense.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_profit...
If not, I'd expect major problems there.
A related point - trading algo's can completely pivot in seconds, and live & die by extremely simple and short-term metrics. Even in a human-free world, that's not at all how the vast majority of industries work. What is "profit", when your AI CEO is organizing the construction of a new steel mill? Judging its performance then requires deep domain expertise.
This presupposes that a company's competitive advantage comes primarily from their CEO.
It also presupposes that success is zero sum and winner takes all, which isn't always the case (example: when you're building out a new market segment, it can be beneficial to have competitors that are also building it out).
It’s the premise of the thought experiment, so yes the AI must generate a profit for the company. To be able to make a profit, the AI executor must achieve competitive advantage in the market. If the AI doesn’t generate a profit, then it doesn’t fit the premise and that’s a different experiment
The way any large company works, and this includes all the big tech companies, is that they end up in a state of constant churn. Every 6 months or so there's a reorganization. There'san old joke that you get an email that your manager's manager's manager's manager now reports to a new manager and you've never heard of any of these people.
The point of that churn is to make sure nobody is ever held responsible for something not working. It's never given enough time. That's by design. Middle (and even senior) management is about empire-building.
Another quote that springs to mind is that the bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy. That's how I feel about management bloat.
Anyone who has paid attention to Intel's downfall in the last decade will have heard stories about how the company descended into fiefdoms and it became impossible to get anything done. That's what happens.
Most people in these organizations aren't particularly talented at anything other than forming social relationships. the leadership of these companies always end up having an adversarial relationship with their workers and try to suppress their wages to increase profits so they can get their stock options and bonuses and the CEOs all sit on each other's boards of directors setting each other's compensation packages. It's a lootocracy.
The point of all this is that the leadership will never decide that they are the problem. Take Meta's Metaverse. It was a $70 billion flop. A lot of people got laid off from that. Were any of those worker bees responsible? Nope. They didn't choose the strategy or probably even what they worked on. It takes a lot for heads to roll within senior leadership and with the vote-stacked share structures of many major tech companies, ousting a CEO is essentially impossible.
These executives think shifting peas around the plate is paramount to eating them. That's what toddlers do when they want to try and make mommy think they've done a good thing.
No one wants to just get down to the business of choking down these damn peas.
That said, if you look at what it’s actually doing (read the question carefully, then read what it actually said) I am not convinced this is better than what ChatGPT could do out of the box already.
https://youtu.be/O_g97xxVTMk
Interested folks can start by putting in shareholder resolutions with the proposal and the prompts that would replace CEO. SKILLs.md?
See you can add anything there and the sentence will make sense.
I will never vote for an AI system to actually make laws lol wtf are you even saying
Let me guess, it just happens that the role that you work in is amongst the only that actually provide value, and everything else is just waste.
Developers are among some of the least self-aware people ever, I swear. And I say this as a developer. The God complex instilled in techies in the ‘00s and ‘10s is unrivalled and I’m really enjoying seeing some of you being taken down a peg.
So the only potential heat is boredom.
For those that missed it, the question what current owner would turn over control to an AI?
I could more easily see a individuals delegating work to an AI but retaining actual approval/veto power. In that sense, the approver is basically still the CEO .
Imagine how quickly your meetings could get resolved if you had teams submit prompts / contexts, had a clear, documented set of overarching objectives, etc.?
https://github.com/SenteLabsAI/OpenExecutive/blob/main/packa...
“Walking away costs you the deal. Signing costs you the company. The math is obvious in retrospect; harder in the moment when there's quota pressure”
such valuable, should I say load-bearing insights
Other gem from my new CFO:
“The financial statements are the result. The variance analysis is where the operating insight lives.”
And my new C(3-)PO just told me
“If we removed all sales involvement, what % of revenue would we still get? #5 is the honest PLG test. If the answer is <30%, PLG is supplementary at best. If the answer is >60%, PLG is the actual motion and the rest is overlay.”
But oh ho there is no human ceo, must be a good place to work!!
This will be epic.
AI - might finally "care for miners and not the minors on the island somewhere".
Therefore, AI will not be blackmailed into doing shit.
I guess that would be at least a nice bang to let democracy finally die. Let's hope that we never see that happening.
CEO jobs are safe until the humanoid robots have mastered this skill.
Tender its payment in booze, and you've already eliminated any monetary acquisition cost.
> One of the miners, rejected on account of his size, offered to fight any man there as proof of his suitability as a soldier, and six men were eventually called upon to remove him.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politician%27s_syllogism
or, more probably I have probably used some fallacy to analogize the wrong fallacy :)
An oxymoron if I've ever heard one.
This is the best project ever.
I have been waiting for this for awhile. Now we can have real layoffs for an AI pivot starting with management :-)