Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many people observe reality, where the workers end up being the ones held accountable for the CEO's decisions, not the CEO.
Many people observe a limited subset of reality. It's highly visible when a company hits a crisis and people lose their jobs; it's much more common, but much less visible, for a CEO to get an after-hours call about a brewing problem which they must immediately work to smooth over.
CEO fired developers to make room for AI. Developers create open source AI CEO
401–410 of 759 posts
Re: CEO fired developers to make room for AI. Developers create open source AI CEO
#402Neither CEO nor dev here but must say hn comments on CEOs are always wild. It’s like some caricature - like an attempt to draw an animal that has never been seen from a description 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
* 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!
Re: CEO fired developers to make room for AI. Developers create open source AI CEO
#403Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's John Nagle as in Nagle's algorithm, I'm sure he has an existing intellect.
Heh. We are now at the point where people might end up deliberately inserting typos and bad grandma into their writing, just to signal they aren’t AI. I mentioned once, that one of the reasons that AI sounds the way it does, is because it learned from us. That didn’t seem to be a popular point.
Except what humans write will continue to be fodder for the LLM's so they'll "learn" that at some point.
The Anti-Turing Test - Prove you aren't AI becoming a thing is very... well Black Mirror.
Re: CEO fired developers to make room for AI. Developers create open source AI CEO
#404Re: CEO fired developers to make room for AI. Developers create open source AI CEO
#405The best use of AI is to replace CEOs, C-Suite, politicians and bureaucrats. Let them feel the heat for the first time in their life. 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.
Re: CEO fired developers to make room for AI. Developers create open source AI CEO
#406Earlier quoted context omitted.
Intelligence is only meaningful with respect to a goal or set of goals. 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.
> But why would you do that? 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.
The set of things an organization ends up doing may be distinctly different from those of the individuals, but that does in no way oblige us to ascribe agency to the organization on its own.
Re: CEO fired developers to make room for AI. Developers create open source AI CEO
#407Earlier quoted context omitted.
> An is XYZ. This matters. 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.
Sigh. I did write that personally, just as I have all my other HN posts. I'm moderately well known, and not anonymous. See www.animats.com. 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 wi…
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.)
Re: CEO fired developers to make room for AI. Developers create open source AI CEO
#408I 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 maximi…
reminds me of trading algorithms
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.
Re: CEO fired developers to make room for AI. Developers create open source AI CEO
#409Re: CEO fired developers to make room for AI. Developers create open source AI CEO
#410Earlier quoted context omitted.
In a 1-person company, who or what generates a profit?
One person isn't a company. Legally maybe, but there's no point in a company if you can profitably do all the labor yourself.
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 want to 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.