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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

#261

Post by jcgl »

Spooky23 wrote: post #217
jcgl wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t see how that helps, unless you actually mean open source, rather than open weights like most people do. Without everything that goes into the model, including training data, these things are opaque.

Actual open source is hard without a big war chest that allows you to flagrantly steal the training data.

That may very well be the case. In fact, I'm nearly certain that you're right. But it doesn't change the fact that open weight models are altogether insufficient on a number of important dimensions regarding freedom and transparency. And so often (such as the comment I replied to, I think), even technical people seem to just ignore the difference. Open weights are just weights. No amount of open-washing changes that.

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

#262

Post by bob1029 »

AI will never be able to replace a human board member. I think that's what bothers technology people the most here. It's quite asymmetric. At best, LLM agents will be granted certain non voting advisory roles, but anything the llm generates will need a human to assume responsibility.

The point of a human being on the board is that they can be made to suffer the consequences of bad decisions. Executive pay might seem astronomical, but it is often commensurate with the level of stress and responsibility involved. It's easy to look at the perks and not see the struggle behind them. No one in media is going to get a lot of clicks if they publish articles about how being a CEO is actually really hard and maybe some of what they're doing is actually justified once you assume all of the same context and stress they have.

If we want to do to the executive staff what is being done to the technical staff, I'm afraid we will need to first figure out a way to make the AI experience human emotions as strongly as we do. It often sounds fun in first order terms to threaten to fire a CEO and replace them with a clanker, but have we considered the consequences of this? What would it be like to be under the management of an emotionless robot? Being managed by a robot vs managing robots are wildly different things to me.

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

#264

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

cpt_sobel wrote: post #256
safety1st wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly I am burned out on public discussion of AI. There are so many hot, low info takes on both sides. All the dumb stuff revolves around this imbecilic notion that AI will take your job. In that sense Altman and Dario et. al. were extremely successful in their cringeworthy campaign to establish themselves as priests of a new machine god religion. Even the people who don't want it believed them. The good news is a…

I think this is the most level-headed take I've read in a while, sums up perfectly the HN discourse on "AI taking our jobs", thanks!

Agreed.

It is a fairly good summary of my PoV.

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

#265

Post by matheusmoreira »

bob1029 wrote: post #262

AI will never be able to replace a human board member. I think that's what bothers technology people the most here. It's quite asymmetric. At best, LLM agents will be granted certain non voting advisory roles, but anything the llm generates will need a human to assume responsibility. The point of a human being on the board is that they can be made to suffer the consequences of bad decisions. Executive pay might seem…

> What would it be like to be under the management of an emotionless robot?

Depends. Is the robot looking out for our best interests? Or is the robot looking out for the shareholders?

I already ask AI to manage a lot of things, including my own activities. It all depends on whether the model can be trusted to act in our best interests.

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

#266

Post by cableshaft »

bob1029 wrote: post #262

AI will never be able to replace a human board member. I think that's what bothers technology people the most here. It's quite asymmetric. At best, LLM agents will be granted certain non voting advisory roles, but anything the llm generates will need a human to assume responsibility. The point of a human being on the board is that they can be made to suffer the consequences of bad decisions. Executive pay might seem…

> Executive pay might seem astronomical, but it is often commensurate with the level of stress and responsibility involved.

I call bull on that. Employees often have just as much stress, often imposed on them from those higher up, where if they don't do well they could get fired and it could mean they can't put food on the table.

Several times I've worked in environments where the stress was incredibly high, and once it even put me in the hospital after a long stretch of working 70 hour weeks to satisfy the insane deadlines my CEO boss wanted (this was at a startup).

Whereas if an executive screws up they just golden parachute to another cushy gig elsewhere, oftentimes, because even if they screw up, they're still valued as having experience running companies by other companies. And even if they cannot, they still likely got paid enough that they won't be struggling financially if they go through a period without a job.

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

#267

Post by hansmayer »

hintymad wrote: post #109
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…

> There's so much work in delivering products that will carry your brand, and then must be supported. People think otherwise with AI partly because Anthropic kept telling us that they didn't have to write code or review code any more for most of their work. Their agent swarms just comb through their github, slack and wikis to figure out what to do next, and another swarm of agents just review, test, merge, deploy, A/…

[dead]

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

#268

Post by creativeSlumber »

zerobees wrote: post #210
willio58 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CEOs do get there with lots of politics in almost all cases. It’s all about who’s ass you kiss and who’s ass you don’t and if you’re lucky with timing things might just fall into place. I think it’s exceedingly rare that a CEO is actually competent at their job. In most cases it’s the labor class propping the company up, and in some cases the workers are doing so against the wishes of the CEO. Not that executives wan…

> It’s all about who’s ass you kiss and who’s ass you don’t ... I think it’s exceedingly rare that a CEO is actually competent at their job. But... that is kinda the job? CEOs are, first and foremost, the public face of the company. They're the one who talk to VCs / banks, regulators, major customers, the press. They're very highly paid PR reps / fall guys that shield everyone else, including the board of directors a…

> it's not important for a CEO to be good with software engineering

If you are the CEO of a company, you should have expertise in whatever your company does, and If your company is primarily a software company, then you should have expertise in software engineering. You cannot effectively manage something that you don't understand.

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

#269

Post by safety1st »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #264
cpt_sobel wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is the most level-headed take I've read in a while, sums up perfectly the HN discourse on "AI taking our jobs", thanks!

Agreed. It is a fairly good summary of my PoV.

Thanks guys!

It's happening! We can see it! The future is somewhat legible and in it we don't all die! (Well we do, but mostly for the usual reasons)

We just gotta keep getting out of bed and making a smart choice or two between now and then!

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

#270

Post by leokennis »

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…

Beautifully said. Engineering is often just a cost center and I often have the feeling management is suspicious that the engineers are just wasting time and throwing up roadblocks for nothing. This in turn makes managers always on the lookout for "the shortcut" to cut out as many of those engineers as possible.

There is a definite lack of appreciation for the often repetitive grit, toil and maintenance work required to just have profit generating working software running reliably in production.

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