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CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs

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Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs

#51

Post by moregrist »

saadn92 wrote: post #22

It’s hilarious to me that when you stop investing in juniors and seniors who use your AIs retire, what are they going to do then?

You bring in contractors.

Ideally contractors that benefit you personally (eg: your buddy who now owes you one), but definitely contractors that let you outsource the responsibility.

Even better if you get some management consultant to suggest the idea and/or do the subcontracting.

Definitely buys you a few quarters of bonus and some time to land your next gig.

Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs

#52

Post by dominotw »

everdrive wrote: post #11

There are a lot of bad CEOs, though. It's a lot like a politician -- it's quite difficult to become a CEO, and the skills to make it to that position don't always intersect nicely with the skills necessary to actually do the job well.

what about zukerberg he didnt have to do any politics to get to ceo. yet he is the face of ai layoffs and bad ceo.

Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs

#53

Post by wwweston »

chopete3 wrote: post #42

>> Yes, the tools are powerful, but a CEO who thinks they replace the work of employees is simply a bad CEO. This is a broad generalization of employees. There will be some "routine tasks" that can be done by AI, now that is a lot more powerful. There won't be as many employees needed for routine work - for example L1 and L2 support work. For example, many companies had ML engineers building models for various models…

If L2 support work is the example then I doubt we’re near replacement.

L2 issues are already involved in some way often revealing some kind of system failure, requiring context and exploration to understand, and judgement (and perhaps even system overrides) to fix.

I could see “automated L2 is the new L1” improvements, but without a big capability jump and/or a resource bonfire, I don’t think even frontier models would effectively replace good L2 staff.

They might magnify good L2 staff so fewer are needed (and maybe even help L1 staff become L2).

Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs

#54

Post by dijit »

everdrive wrote: post #11

There are a lot of bad CEOs, though. It's a lot like a politician -- it's quite difficult to become a CEO, and the skills to make it to that position don't always intersect nicely with the skills necessary to actually do the job well.

> it's quite difficult to become a CEO

on the contrary, it seems to be one of the few jobs that seems to require absolutely no qualifications to have.

What you need to do to be CEO is.... convince someone to lend you money in the hope that you'll get it back to them.

I've worked under some absolutely awful people who wouldn't pass an interview anywhere, but somehow they're CEOs, because they can smarm there way into more money consistently.

Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs

#55

Post by socketcluster »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #39

Reminds me of the old joke "90% of the code is 90% of the work. The last 10% of the code is the other 90% of the work." I have spent almost my entire adult life (since 1986) shipping products. One of the very first things that I learned, was that "shipping" > "designing". There's so much work in delivering products that will carry your brand, and then must be supported. I liken it to having children. Conceiving them…

Fully agree. Shipping a complete product with a functioning user acquisition funnel is much harder. It's like; you have to build the whole product first with lots of features and then you have to try to create a highly condensed overview of all those features to expose them all on the landing page.

If you can't make the visitor understand your entire complex product in 10 seconds, then you've lost them.

Your product has to be complex because that's where the software market is at. All of the low-hanging fruits have been taken by the time you identify them. Sure, someone will find a way to make money using new low-hanging fruits that arise due to technological changes but it's not going to be you. You probably don't have the business connections to make that work.

Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs

#56

Post by orphea »

dominotw wrote: post #52
everdrive wrote: post #11

There are a lot of bad CEOs, though. It's a lot like a politician -- it's quite difficult to become a CEO, and the skills to make it to that position don't always intersect nicely with the skills necessary to actually do the job well.

what about zukerberg he didnt have to do any politics to get to ceo. yet he is the face of ai layoffs and bad ceo.

What about him?

  have to do politics -> bad ceo
doesn't mean

  NOT(have to do politics) -> NOT(bad ceo)

Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs

#58

Post by orphea »

ottoflux wrote: post #8
JTbane wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need custom built anything, ChatGPT could generate corporate initiatives and PR statements all day and no one would notice.

100% been saying this for a while now. the main thing AI will be able to replace is a C suite.

maybe this is the way forward. Imagine how many tokens one could burn given C suite salaries.

Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs

#59

Post by marcosdumay »

nickpinkston wrote: post #35
Henchman21 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re making the case for worker-owned cooperatives. Love it — we need more of them!

I'm very sympathetic to cooperatives, have traveled/know the Mondragon people (largest coop federation), etc. However, I think there's a reason why coops seem to succeed at smaller scales, but there are essentially no large innovative coops. There are a few large boring coops, and some small innovative ones, but seemingly something is making the CEO/investor board model the one large innovative companies are all usin…

If a company accumulates capital, it becomes vulnerable to the principal agent problem, and coops are way more vulnerable here than centralized companies.

If a company doesn't accumulate capital, it doesn't scale in complexity. It can grow by having more people do more of the same things, but it can't move into markets that demand anything complex.

Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs

#60

Post by ReptileMan »

A story from today - I needed a small utility to remap my logitech buttons under windows without installing their horrendous GHUB. Logitech Onboard Memory Manager still required ghub to be put into onboard mode.

The solution - linux has utility called piper. I downloaded the repo and just told codex - figure out what piper is doing and create me a small utility to do it under windows. So the jolly critter started experimenting with hex commands, then pulled some other repo on which piper depended figured out how to enable said onboard mode and 10-sh minutes later I had small python script that did what i needed to do.

That would have taken probably half a day of work for a human.

There are many stupid CEO and organizations which are not committed to quality. And a lot of employees that are too set in their ways. But the instinct that underinvesting in AI is more dangerous than overinvesting is right. Doomed if you do, doomed if you don't

"To err is human, but to really foul things up requires a computer" - this is from the 60, but right now is turned into overdrive.

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