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I have the opposite opinion. I've never been a CEO, and have intentionally avoided any sort of manager/C-level opportunities at all the various companies I've worked specifically because they require a lot of effort at personnel management, investor relationships, customer relationships, and generally things requiring having to talk to people.
That kind of thing just can't be replaced by a chat bot.
And also being a technical founder with 20 years coding experience, I dont think AI can replace programmers for a set of different but equally valid reasons.
Personally I think that almost any role can be augmented by AI, but very few can be outright replaced that we’re not already very close to an RPA bot replacing them anyway.
Then you consider that they might be able to reduce headcount because of productivity increases. But why wouldn’t they want to use the budget they already have for these newly more productive people and get even more work done overall?
There are some exceptions, like maybe you can be entirely rid of some L1 support.
Of course, any well-trained AI should be aware that the proper way to handle a layoff notice is to send it to your wall-mounted fax machine.
It's a different type of soulless hell, and it's a good read if you haven't already.
Of course you do. Which is why you won’t get anywhere. It’s always funny to watch though.
In terms of replacing the function of a Leader, however, the reality is closer to that old joke about the Theoretical Physicist and the farmer - "I have a solution, but it only works for a spherical cow in a vacuum".
The last thing I'd trust to navigate the Realpolitik of modern globalised business is a language model distilled by an Individual Contributor. When Agentic AI navigates moral hazard, it does so as a cosplayer at best - the final actualisation of Dramaturgical sociology.
In fact, Erving Goffman's original Theatrical Metaphors from his 1959 opus 'The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life' map almost directly to the ludicrous symbiotic relationship defined by impression management on both sides of the prompt: AI systems aligning themselves by aping linguistic cues and saccharine affirmations, while users are effectively required to rephrase or reframe prompts to the point of absurdity in order to elicit the desired response, or otherwise navigate guardrails.
Idealized organizations are not perfect. They are perfectly pathological. The top tier are effectively sociopaths operating under conditions of serious moral hazard. If Agentic AI becomes an able replacement, everyone dies.
https://ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-t...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_Anyone_Builds_It,_Everyone_...
EDIT since I can’t reply:
It’s true that capital and labor often have competing goals, but they also have alignment at times. And labor also has different goals from consumers, from other groups of labor, etc. Capital owners are also in fierce competition with each other! And many individuals in the world are playing multiple roles in the system at the same time! I’m a consumer, a capital owner, a CEO, a wage worker, etc, all at the same time. I also have a bunch of stakeholders that I answer to: customers, investors, employees, the government, etc.
So I object to the simplification of reducing a global system of ten billion humans with their own agency and circumstances, all collapsed down to one side vs another side, with the capital class in conspiratorial lockstep with each other, when the reality is much more complicated and interdependent.
I also object to the constant claims of conspiracy among capital holders. Capital holders are also in extremely fierce competition with each other, and they are in turn beholden to consumers / buyers, etc.
It's really, really helpful. So many things I would have completely missed if it weren't for this. I don't think you need this synthetic org setup to get exec help at a small level. It really helped me with fundraising, incorporation, compliance, and just keeping me on track.
Based on what? How do you judge if those are the right things to work on? As a founder, your number 1 priority is essentially to manage that the company works towards the right thing, but it sounds like to me you're outsourcing that part to a LLM? How do you know what the "right track" is when the track is just what the LLM outlined for you?
This is the "unknown unknowns" problem. It sounds like the agent is a reasonably good source of obvious-in-hindsight problems that a experienced founder would have experienced, but a new founder wouldn't easily guess at.
> judge if these are the right things
This problem exists no matter where you get the things from.
As a mundane example, I had an email from my wife about a kid's swimming party she'd RSVP'd to.
My agenda that morning reminded me to pack, inter alia, sunblock and towels for my new car's seats. So it inferred sunblock from the party mention, and towels from the party mention alongside emails talking about my new car (and some "knowledge" that people take more care to protect new cars vs old cars).
Somehow founders constantly putting out fires, leading and strategizing makes sense but once they acquire the CEO title they apparently do nothing and swan about
The apparent facts bear out that Luigi is guilty of killing that executive, but since it was an executive in a position of making decisions that damaged or ended the lives of hundreds, if not thousands, of people, they would give him a pass (and directions to other executives/billionaires).
In my experience this is how HNers see a lot of roles or professions that are not software developer. Finance = Patrick Bateman, lawyer = Saul Goodman, etc.
Whereas no one on the set of e.g. Suits has ever had contact with the legal system
* Lack of focus and discipline: Good founder, huckster, good at sales but won't scale with the business when it needs to start focussing.
* Fearful and nervous: Might start a business but doesn't want to make the wrong decision and so stops the business from growing due to decisions not being made when they need making.
* Not a founder but got the role somewhere once, lacks genuine transferable skills. Might work OK in another business but more than likely just riding the existing success/failure of the new business and leaves after 1-2 years to "face a new challenge".
* The rarest of all. Has all the relevant skills, creative, outgoing, mission focused and makes hard decisions efficiently. Will do well in whatever business they are in but might not be very popular!
CEO is, of course, partly responsible for having that middle management in the first place. However if I were the CEO I don't even know how I would be able to smell the rats with the top-down view that CEOs have (they can't be in every meeting and decision making of their subordinates).
If you have the right underlings (or inherit them) you might actually not need to do anything at all and succeed. Then again if you have the wrong underlings (or inherit them) then your job is hella-difficult.
It was almost like parody:
- CEO wanting people to leave at 5 sharp, middle-management inventing work and forcing people to do overtime and telling people "he's the CEO, he can leave at 5, he doesn't know we have a lot of work to do".
- Bureaucracy and inefficiency, with everyone complaining about it, but whenever CEO pushed back on that same bureaucracy, the discussion would be hampered by one or two people fillibustering the meeting to force the status quo.
- People going to golf courses or resort trips paid by vendors and then pushing for a vendor that costs 100k/year. This one was so blatant that I was surprised said person wasn't fired.
- CEO and C-Levels taking suggestions from the trenches, and the board loving it, but middle-managers laughing about the suggestions behind the CEOs back, right after the meeting. This one stung because a few of those were suggestions I made and he presented as his own on my request.
This is the kind of stuff that HN people would go "Chesterton Fence" but was just fucking corruption and schoolyard bullying from middle-management.
Obviously the company didn't grow in the period, and the CEO resigned and left for much greener pastures.
In the end the only lesson I learned is that the CEO should have laid-off those people.
And that the CEO should make more money because childcare is hard work.
Funny thing is that I'm a middle manager myself.
Although I am more afraid of the middle manager who hides information than the CEO who doesn't act on it.
I think this paragraph is right on the money, but the ‘leader’ has more influence on their ‘underlings’ than you give them credit for. In this vein, I highly recommend “Turn the Ship Around!” by Marquet, which is the only good book on leadership I’ve managed to find.
Reverse also trickles some brown stuff down. CEO who doesn't care about that leaves stuff to middle management, who are often over-eager to please for the carrot on stick in form of bonuses.
But in reality it must be a hugely difficult job. I can’t imagine dealing with so many humans myself.
Bit like if hn was convinced white cats catch mice better than black ones. Point out that this makes no sense wouldn’t be a fallacy, even if it involves aggregating opinions from people with their own views on cats
At scale CEOs don’t add value by clocking in and pumping out LoC themselves and they sure aren’t having all their employees tag along on their day to day.
Reckon there is either an underlying belief that coding LoC is the only value and everyone else is contributing nothing or a if I can’t see it then it must not exist. Either way is not great.
But yeah sure I suppose it is possible that there are CEOs that do nothing yet get paid millions and somehow holds on to a competitive job by some unspecified magic. Doesn’t seem hugely plausible but yeah maybe
People are fucking unhinged. Thank god these people are almost all too lazy and cowardly to act on their little revenge fantasies.
This caricature that’s occurring could also be thanks to all the horrible CEOs being so visible to everyone.
One of my friend’s medium-size billion dollar-ish company with almost a thousand employees is run by a CEO who is currently in AI psychosis and has started regularly submitting pull requests and demanding they get reviewed as if he’s a member of the development team. He basically comes in with a wrecking ball to carefully planned work with his own daily inspirations that he demands teams far down the totem pole drop everything to work on.
This isn’t an animal that has never been seen, this is a real person that is acting a real fool and negatively impacting my real friend.
We have all been fed this narrative that CEO is the most demanding job in the corporate ladder. How does this CEO have time to be submitting pull requests?
Then you have people like Elon Musk who demonstrate categorically that it’s actually possible to be the CEO of multiple publicly traded companies at once. The fact that this is possible at all smashes the facade of the “impossibly busy CEO.”
Look at how many CEOs have other corporate engagements outside of their primary CEO job. How does Tim Cook have time to be a board member of Nike? How does Satya Nadella have time to be on the board of Starbucks and the University of Chicago?
Logically, if the CEO is such a rigorous job with grueling hours you shouldn’t be physically able to do it at two companies, be a board member for completely unrelated businesses, or run a philanthropic foundation on the side in your spare time.
Then we move on to the "rich guy toys."
How does Mark Zuckerberg have the time to utilize a $300 million yacht? If he's so busy why doesn't he just charter one on the rare occasion he has a week off? Isn't a boat a horrible place to be when you're a busy CEO who needs to constantly travel to company sites, industry and government engagements, and be in close communication with company leaders? Keep in mind, he has owned large scale yachts long before Starlink was a thing.
This is the kind of stuff the CEO of the largest social media company in the world has time for: multiple months of vacationing on his yacht with transponders turned off.
> His $300 million superyacht, Launchpad, has been sailing in stealth mode for the last three months, with its AIS (Automatic Identification System) turned off throughout the European holiday. That’s more than 90 days where the 388 feet long vessel is sailing blind in the busy waters of the Mediterranean.
> Zuckerberg is thoroughly enjoying his time on the newly acquired $300 million luxury vessel. Back in May, the billionaire celebrated his 40th birthday by flying to Panama on his private jet to board the Feadship-built megayacht. A month later, the Meta boss whisked his entire family away on Launchpad on a luxurious cruise to celebrate his father’s 70th birthday, which also coincided with Father’s Day.
https://luxurylaunches.com/transport/mark-zuckerberg-sailing...
https://luxurylaunches.com/transport/mark-zuckerberg-superya...
[0] https://www.cosmopolitan.com/entertainment/celebs/a63431790/...
So that would be like if I took 6 work weeks weeks off per year to work full time at some other company.
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. That is, when everyone uses the same AI, nobody has a competitive advantage over anyone else
My current theory is that because of this, it is not possible to build an AI that generates a profit perpetually. Only temporarily. Then human intervention would be required to adjust things to make the AI competitive again. But at that point, it’s no longer an AI driving the profit, it’s its human tinkerer
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).
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.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_profit...
People laughed at Gas Town, and at that "Fences, not Sandboxes" article yesterday.[1] They're both AIs set up as an organization, not an emulated human. They're both expensive to operate, because the AI members of the organization spend a lot of time talking with each other. They're both applied to frivolous problems.
Now we have the same concept, applied to a more useful problem. It's time to pay attention. Something important is happening here.
Everybody has been talking about "human-level AI", or "superhuman-level AI". This is a different kind of AI - corporate-level AI. It works and thinks like a company's management. It watches a wide range of data sources and responds to some of them with action, and some with internal discussion within the AIs. It can potentially pay attention to far more inputs than any human. That overcomes a basic problem of corporate organization.
A classic management failure is not paying enough attention to something. This is usually not a problem for computer systems. Humans are bandwidth-limited. Teams of AIs are far less bandwidth-limited. They may soon be outperforming humans for that reason alone.
Think about this for a while. These team AI systems may be very useful.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49423146
You're probably totally innocent, but this comes across as being AI-written, especially in the context of an AI problem and when your response is pro-AI. For the next 3-12 months (maybe more, we'll see), I suspect you'll have a lot more success if you shy away from those speech patterns.
It's also triggering me. Wait, genuinely triggering me.
https://trends.google.com/explore?q=genuinely&date=all&geo=W...
It's either AI-assisted or someone desperatelly trying to impress "unknown people" with their non-existent intellect.
AI text feels more like "this matters, not less." There's always an "it's x not y" pattern somewhere.
It could be written AI assisted but then look at his account. IMO every HN account that was created before ChatGPT came out has incentive to be written by a human since they have a paper trail before the whole LLM thing happened.
This is at least written by a human, not AI, totally human, (digital) pinky promise ;-)
I wrote that because the last two times AIs built like organizations came up on HN, they were dismissed. Hence the somewhat out of character rhetoric.
We have organizations of people for the usual reasons. Scale. Specialization. Robustness against failure and errors. All those wins apply to structured groups of LLMs. So this has a reasonable chance of being useful. It's expensive at the moment, but probably cheaper than the management team it may replace.
For some reason, this idea seems to upset people. Unclear why. Comments?
More likely, they're all wrong on this accusation. A bit concerning to see how many of them are throwing out a false positive like this. Makes me wonder how many of them are falling for actual AI traps in the real world. :)
There have been some successful attempts to do science like this (https://github.com/AstroPilot-AI/Denario). Denario generated 1k+ "solutions" on its way to winning the FAIR Universe challenge, and they all had to be fed through a fitness function of some kind to assess them. It also got stuck on a local maximum and had to be kicked in the ass by a human to get it off that.
When writing software, that fitness function is relatively closed (when I run it, does it do what I want?). With something as open-ended as managing a business... might as well roll dice, IMO.
My belief is that 20's LLMs have a lot in common with 90's GAs: the more clearly we can define "success" for a given task (the fitness function) the more successful they can be. Open-ended problems are somewhat beyond them right now, and, I suspect, forever.
(The comment that's currently at the top of the discussion, about making an "AI Boss" that remembered everything about the company, and fed the user three tasks a day? That's not an AI Boss, that's an AI Assistant with different framing.)
I actually upvoted your post. I'm not sure I entirely agree with it, but I was interested to see more discussion about it, and that felt worthy of an upvote.
As for the reaction against the idea, I see it from two angles. Is the standard corporate hierarchy / architecture really the optimal organization principle for AI? Or is that just a skeuomorphism to make this project seem more serious than it really is? Maybe Yegge did us a favor by mapping to Mayors & Polecats, forcing people to question if it really is the correct organizational hierarchy?
The other angle is heresy here - HN is full of employees now. There is little incentive for employees to be interested in what a C-suite does, and we see that with the comments about CEOs needing to be six foot and walk impressively. Employees have no interest in AI organization principles that optimize them away and highlights their obsolescence. I am surprised there hasn't been more discussion about how this specific project optimizes away the C-suite humans instead - I would have thought that could have had some appeal to employees, at least until those people realized it makes employees a swarm that works for AI leadership.
As for AI organization, the organizational mapping needs to be productive, not affectation or cargo-culting. That's not peripheral — that's load-bearing. Especially in a corporation model, you can find the organization layers only create busywork with lots of unnecessary middle managers. You don't want your AI C-suite swarm burning tokens on endless meetings about what should be in the upcoming meeting... especially not at Fable API pricing.
> <totally vague statement>. This matters.
Like, just because you say something matters does not make it true. Explain your case and then make predictions about the implications of it.
The entire thing was a vague post. Just “this matters” and “pay attention”. It’s trying to create a sense of FOMO but not spending any effort to explain why we should care.
On the other hand: so, people throw the baby out with the bathwater, which is a problem, but not sure if it's as big a problem in the old days when you threw out the baby with the bathwater and it was only one tub of bathwater, because in the present time it's 2000 tubs of bathwater, and the baby is drowning anyway.
I say this as a guy whose editor is complaining an article I'm collaborating on, about how the continual whining about AI tends to have a lot of false positives and is anyway annoying, is taking too long.
(Also, don’t take HN votes too seriously, being downvoted doesn’t say much)
As I'm looking at it right now, there might be some nuance I'm missing in how HN works, but the post doesn't seem to be greyed out or anything, suggesting that if it is being downvoted then the upvotes are counterbalancing sufficiently.
> banning speech patterns
AI is prevalent and often bad. Society is reacting quickly but maybe not quickly enough. Blanket speech "bans" are part of that. Is that bad? Eh. It's not ideal. It's to be expected though. I work with the society I'm given, not the one I should have.
No single human could design a rocket to go to the moon or keep all Wallmart stores supplied on a daily basis. Moreover when something like the CEO or US president changes, the policies and actions change a bit but the majority actually stays the same. This is collective intelligence embodied in the organization and its institutional memory. This is also what i believe is wrong with Searle's Chinese Room argument - the algorithm is the intelligence.
Our cells and neurons act based on local chemical gradients and electrical signals and we wouldn't call any single one of those particularly intelligent. Yet collectively they produce human intelligence and even what we call consciousness!
The entire financial system is a form of artificial intelligence. We just never framed it that way.
It only shocks humans now because they a) never thought about it - it was in the background b) it’s in your face and you can play with it
So what happens when AIs are "aligned" purely to corporate goals? This is a nearer term worry than machines taking over for the benefit of machines. AIs working hard for the benefit of corporations are already here. Try any customer service chatbot.
There's reluctance to think about this too hard. It raises embarrassing questions about the role of the corporation in society. It can become a challenge to corporate personhood. That's threatening to many people in power. Dealing with it may be unavoidable as AIs take a stronger role in managing companies.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctr...
[2] https://www.heritage.org/trade/report/milton-friedman-the-fa...
Also the accountability problem! Sometimes we try to hold the corporation accountable and sometimes the individuals. It never seems adequate though.
I found the documentary "The Corporation" (2003) very instructive in that regard, particularly the segment with the BP CEO where the point is made that a company made up ethical individuals can still act unethically, or unaligned to human values, just by virtue of the incentive and legal structure governing the corporation.
“ and even what we call consciousness!”
This misunderstands the point of the so-called Chinese room thought experiment. You want to conclude that consciousness is functional, but you cite a thought experiment which argues it is not, and then assert the thought experiment is wrong because it disagrees with your preconceived notion of consciousness.
Do the cells "have" to do anything? Do we? Sure, they might die if they do the "wrong" thing, but 1. Who's to say the inert state of "dead" matter is any worse than the state of a living cell, and 2. Cells clearly aren't always optimizing for their own survival anyway
I think organizations' intelligence can only be called superhuman if you ascribe them their own inscrutable goals, different from what people want their goals to be.
But why would you do that?
It's true that a lot of the debate about AI alignment - the good parts, anyway - also apply to human institutions.
Because that is what actually gets pursued. The set of effective goals an organization is distinctly different from those of any of the individuals in that organization.
But AGI does something additional: It decreases cost for it and increases speed.
Markets solves the resource allocation problem, but it doesn't and realistically cannot be called intelligent (even tho it's been called wisdom of the crowds), in the same way that darwinian natural selection cannot be called intelligent design.
Then why do we still have homeless and jobless?
It’s true that collective groups of humans can accomplish tremendous things, but I hesitate to use “superhuman intelligence” for corporations, governments, and institutions.
So much of what they do ends up being very focused on process for the sake of process. And is often so very dumb.
You occasionally get Great Leaders who build these systems as personal affordances. But even then these system are far beyond any one person's ability to manage the details. And they often take on a life of their own.
Our individuality is actually a myth. We're more like a colony organism that self-organises into different sub-organisms. The sub-organisms compete with each other, which is why we're not a smart colony organism.
If individual intelligence was aligned along colony goals at shared planetary scale we'd be something else entirely.
That's a feature, not a bug. CEOs should be focusing on the key goals of the business at a high level.
Having an inexhaustible AI CEO that can pay attention to every little thing in the company could easily turn into a micromanagement nightmare.
"I noticed your key pressed were down 27% last week and your agents sat idle 3 nights in a row. And honestly? The thing to hold on to is that it's not a small thing, it's a load-bearing reduction in your output. Let's try to minimize the blast radius with some belt-and-suspenders productivity tips from the bullet point list below:"
The expression makes sense (a not dissimilar "trickle down" got accepted...). But used like in the text above, "the blast radius of your reduced productivity", it better be satire.
This sounds cool, will start using it. Thanks!
Imagine a manager who knows that company needs in a long term support person even if it's not busy at the moment. Because AI has data of historical precedents and actual calculations. And AI is not acting like a manager who wants to fire you because of gut feeling or possible stock options. Imagine that AI CEO is owned by employees, actual humans who perform the actual work and who benefit from good CEO decisions and most importantly the AI CEO which does not gave to be paid gazilion dolars just to burn the company to the ground and leave with golden parachute. I think there is a good insight that AI has very high bandwidth, that human management does not have, no more 2 week meeting marathons just to get everyone on same page and to get all the inputs.
But it turns out it's better to do it the other way around. A good plan is easy, implementing it is not.
There is no such thing as common sense without shared assumptions. So if those shared assumptions are incorrect or not given at all the output of the models will be nonsensical. In order to truly act human there is a need to experience humanity from the first person.
This is why I think technology will get more and more invasive. Meta glasses now, personal agent devices later and neural implants after that with data sharing enabled.
So the responses will be even more incoherent than Opus 5?
I’m working through an exploration of how AI will change the Coasean idea of “The Firm” on my site https://chainofbranches.com/conversations/8/branches/59/
I hope legislation is never manipulated enough to allow an AI to form a corporation or become it's legal director. With whom would accountability rest? Who would you throw in prison if it acts egregiously enough to warrant such a measure? If it's bots all the way down.
[1] https://news.bloomberglaw.com/esg/ai-run-companies-are-comin...
It would be useless, given that you can just install a human controller signing (or not) decisions from others: the human remains responsible.
Corporations already exist to limit liability and accountability. This would be an extension of their current purpose not some weird deviation from.
If nothing this is a useful demo in real world if used that will show that there are good reasons why hierarchy forms anyways and how power law is at the center of it. Too much democracy may not work in some instances but there may be many cases where the values can hopefully be aligned as well as be lean enough to adapt
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence#Paper...
Well, that's the final level of AI.
https://firstmovers.ai/agi-levels/
Prompts like: you are an activist in XYZ, you wrote this book. Not tell us if this decision is ethical, and if you approve it.
Or running entire HR department in AI...
> A classic management failure is not paying enough attention to something. This is usually not a problem for computer systems.
This is actually my #1 problem with frontier LLMs. They are plenty smart, but they have no true long term memory, and their context window is not nearly enough for a complex system like a corporation. When my project gets big enough and I'm using a lot of /compact, the LLMs always have the same failure point: they fail to pay attention to something.
When they figure this out, I think it's going to be a very, very big moment.
I’m adopting this stack under me (CTO) and integrating it into agent zero
Of course, if those max amounts of things have few consumers because most people are just too poor to afford them, that'd make companies (or the agents that run companies) think twice too. At some point these AI agents might work together to come up with an economic system to make it possible for society to afford their products so they could further grow.
I think a resource consumption based tax model extends very neatly to a UBI model. One could think of as: "this is the basic resource consumption we allow each person" and it automatically generates demand for basic services everyone should be able to afford with their share of resources, while keeping a free market and allowing an economy on top with extra resources. Standard money could still be the means for value exchange, just taxing works differently.
We need UBI. Taxes are still there anyway, company income/profit tax, VAT, and maybe we can have other taxes too for automatically-generate income, same as with investments/dividend/gambling tax and stuff.
Just remove the moral obligations the penning class felt they had in the 19th century.
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.
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. AI can't play golf.
> 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.
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.
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.
This is not a competitive advantage
So they need someone to review AI output huh?
> … 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.
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.
AI is not very good at forming and building human relationships.
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)
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.
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 least the good ones do.
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.
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.
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.
Without a CEO to fire when the business goes south, how is the board supposed to respond? Taking accountability? lmao
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.
Unbounded liability means nobody starts a business, or they do it under the table without responsibility or taxes.
Turns out we want successful private businesses much more than we want to hold a few nasty CEOs accountable.
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.
This is morbidly unrealistic.
I never saw LLMs coming.
Only failure is actionable, in which case said managers will make a good effort to shift blame.
So if your boss is an idiot and an a-hole, and you have to work twice as hard because of it, you are enabling the bad working conditions he's subjecting you to.
But once you've toppled the house of knowledge work, you'll find you can rebuild it easily because the foundation still exists, and it's the thing missing in this analysis; judgement.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20260728013424/https://overpaid....
CEO jobs are safe until the humanoid robots have mastered this skill.
Some work is 24/7 basically, when you have to keep business afloat there are no sick days or worse days. Your brain is 24/7 preoccupied with the work.
Meanwhile you walk out after 8 hours and stop caring at all because - someone else does
Someone else grinds to provide you with employment so there is work at all and the company keeps sailing.
I am sure you guys are smart, adults. stop being so childish and immature. You are better than that
> 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.
Tender its payment in booze, and you've already eliminated any monetary acquisition cost.
An oxymoron if I've ever heard one.
A constant push and pull between leaders and the led is the fundamental. Criticism in both directions is necessary and healthy, and at different times both correct and misplaced.
There have been great leaders and awful ones. Acting as if all leaders are proven and deserving is as asinine as naming all CEOs as useless.
Right now we are at a point where CEOs are biased towards being quite anti worker and too easily rewarded. It's not surprising the cliches against them come out.
Interested folks can start by putting in shareholder resolutions with the proposal and the prompts that would replace CEO. SKILLs.md?
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.
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
The way the title sounds is that they got fired, then they created a new CEO and continued as normal
In reality payroll would be gone, any customer relationships would be with the previous entity would be gone, any capital/fund raising whatever not helpful any more
I'm actually surprised we don't hear more about companies created where AI is the leader - I think over the next year or so when the commercial labs release persistent agents this will be more viable because right now its still very difficult to take seriously due to deficiencies in the models
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!!
Just like in Iain Banks's scifi (although those AIs are actually intelligent -- I don't think you need that for a CEO).
A warning: Don't burn Chrome.
BTW: not all predictions from Neuromancer are there yet...
We glamorize execs but at the end of the day if you watch their careers they have plenty of failures (usually) and generally fail upwards. I’ve known some amazing CTOs and VPs of engineering and they’ve brought more to the table but a lot of what the executive team does is looking at the currents in the industry and trying to make educated guesses about where things are going. Yes more than that but this is a news.y comment.
Most importantly, what is its golf handicap?
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
Which is not bad in itself, but I wish there was a way to balance this out.
I always cringe when I read this kind of thing, even if it might be true on some level.
Imagine how quickly your meetings could get resolved if you had teams submit prompts / contexts, had a clear, documented set of overarching objectives, etc.?
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.
___
To expand on that:
I believe that these thoughts are so incredibly harmful to humanity itself, (and, more importantly, I believe that the people in power believe that too,) that we'd be seeing pushback against this.
Maximum pushback, because what the pushback would be defending would be - as said - humanity itself.
Said pushback would be bypassing democracy, because there is no way of arguing with these crazy thoughts. Which would said a precedent, because why stop there.
Which, again, makes me believe that this is some sort of psyop, because I refuse to think that the people on here would really be as blind to the systemic implications of their brainfarts.
___
FWIW, a ruling class worth their net worth would go for the less draconian thing of simply taking away your internet access and forcing you to touch grass.
One that is.. uh.. less signed up on the whole "all people are equal and worth saving" would line up.. idk.. 100 people with these horribly bad-for-humanity ideas and shoot them in the head live on stream or something.
The interesting twist here is that LLM rulers might be more biased towards doing option B, as the statistical probabilities of words cannot _feel_ the chemical hormone cocktail invoked by the mental image of that.
Be careful what you wish for.
Let the C-suite do it all with AI alone and see where they get.
This is exactly what an executive is supposed to do. But since executives are the ones in charge, nobody talks about this, it’s all about getting rid of developers and how engineers arnt needed :).
Asking models about politically sensitive events differ WILDLY based on the country that produced that AI.
How? If the bias is in the dataset itself, then it'll be in the LLM decision also, right?
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 :-)
I have a Claude Pro account.
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.
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.
We've been rightfully pissed at companies doing unethical things and getting away with it, as there is simply nothing you can hurt them with.
Why is HN fantasizing about making the companies even less hurtable? Are people here insane? Otoh, a lot of those accounts are just a few months old, so.. welp. Nice psyop we got here.
This will be epic.
The CEO is not some masterful person answering all the questions for the company, I would argue that a CEO should be able to disappear for a year and if they had done their job correctly and assembled a good team the company would do just fine without them.
No the purpose of the CEO is to safeguard the Capital that has been invested in the company. That is all. They make sure it doesn't walk our the door in wages or other wasteful spending. They are the Capital's man on the ground.
The CEO is ultimately an employee of the board, and managing the CEO with respect to the board's oversight and interest is a somewhat adversarial challenge.
However, the AI CEO's intentions are fully transparent to the board and entirely pliable to the board's demands. The AI CEO also offers the board the opportunity to retain significant equity shares that materially impact their wealth - in this way AI executives stand to be an even more tantalizing target than fixed labor costs.
Of course, this presumes LLMs will become reliable enough for this, which doesn't seem likely.
And judging from the ZIRP hiring sprees and tokenmaxxing, CEOs are more often the driving force behind wasteful spending than they are the safeguards against it...
But I do my job properly and get in trouble when I ask for a week off
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.)
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.
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.
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.
Creating an AI executive suite can bring some skills to the table, but it doesn't solve the authority question. I'm curious how this would work in practice...
What happens if the AI decides it wants to commit funds - does it have authority? What if it wants to change direction? What if it wants to fire a developer?
I wonder why OpenAI didn't accept it! It would he such a great proof that AI is soooo good if the frontier pab itself uses AI to replace execs
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 .
Prove it.
> be a leader
There are a lot of bad "leaders" out there running Fortune 500s, fwiw.
If you just want a sociopath with faux accountability that's not very difficult, dime a dozen.
Let's replace these motherfuckers.
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.
Revenge of the nerds.
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Power is what makes them what they are, not knowledge or skills or empathy.
If you don't like what this thing tells you to do, you just won't. It's not going to fire you. Therefore it's not going to steer the company away from disaster, or towards something good. It will be just a talking box.
No. Oh my god no.
This is just engineers coping with the reality that they've been filtered by skillchecks of a system they do not (yet) understand. But instead of doing the engineering thing and starting to understand said system, fox and grapes gets deployed.
Which isn't to say that there would be zero examples of what you describe, but the jump to "all are like this" is crazy, and, more importantly, anti-intellectual.