Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

CEO fired developers to make room for AI. Developers create open source AI CEO

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

551–560 of 759 posts

Re: CEO fired developers to make room for AI. Developers create open source AI CEO

#551

Post by Aurornis »

vincnetas wrote: post #188
Aurornis wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. 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…

You again anthropologizing AI. AI does not have to make everyone busy to look useful like for some human managers, when right priorities are set. 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 possib…

> 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,

You’re just describing a company owned by employees who manage themselves. The AI isn’r relevant to your story other than being a proxy and note keeping apparatus for them.

Re: CEO fired developers to make room for AI. Developers create open source AI CEO

#552

Post by dan_gggggg »

shimman wrote: post #521
bre1010 wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. LLMs are the Manhattan Project of the class war. It really looks like they're betting everything that this will "win" it for them

The dream of a perpetual labor machine is the end goal of capitalists. It's how you usher in the extermination age. Much easier to do once you declare 20-40% of the population "useless."

> The dream of a perpetual labor machine is the end goal of capitalists.

Frankly, "AGI" just seems like a return to Antebellum slave economics.

Free labor is a C-suite's wet dream, and it has been since the 1520s.

Yeah "AI" doesn't work but that doesn't matter. Your boss believes that there is a coin-operated robot slave that is smarter than you, never gets tired, and never talks back. Good luck getting that raise now, asshole.

Re: CEO fired developers to make room for AI. Developers create open source AI CEO

#553

Post by hdgvhicv »

hdgvhicv wrote: post #340
midasz wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where does it end though? The most optimistic (or pessimistic, depending on your viewpoint) say that AI will be able to replace or displace lots of professions. Is there enough work for everyone? Is there enough meaningful work for everyone? A software engineer or accountant making ~150k a year will find another job that pays less, so he will also pay less taxes. What's going to happen in the short term, inbetween th…

Probably best to read dickens to see the future. Just remove the moral obligations the penning class felt they had in the 19th century.

Owning, not penning.

Re: CEO fired developers to make room for AI. Developers create open source AI CEO

#554

Post by r_lee »

ljm wrote: post #510
fwip wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuine question: am I missing some sarcasm here? When you say a CEO has to "talk to people", and then say it can't be done by a chat bot. That's literally the only thing a chat bot can do.

Is a client or investor going to have a conversation with an AI CEO and then negotiate funding? VC: "Hi, I'll offer you $3.75 for 95% equity and a load bearing position on the board" CEO Bot: "You're absolutely right. Agreed!"

That's the smoking gun—investor relations are all about human connection seams and load-bearing relationships.

Re: CEO fired developers to make room for AI. Developers create open source AI CEO

#555

Post by coliveira »

malux85 wrote: post #542
coliveira wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's funny when you said that a CEO reads the body language of programmers. CEOs and high executives don't even bother looking at you!

No I didnt, I said "A good CEO" you missed the GOOD qualifier, and then immediately described a bad CEO

A good CEO according to the market, which is what counts in the US, is one that drives up the valuation of a company and increases profit in a mature company. It has nothing to do with personal interaction as most of us would prefer.

Re: CEO fired developers to make room for AI. Developers create open source AI CEO

#556

Post by hdgvhicv »

groestl wrote: post #448
hdgvhicv wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For decades we have taxed what we want - productive work - far more than other forms.

And I think that is a major mistake, has many unwanted side effects, and only works because work supply does not yet exceed demand, so the taxes still keep flowing. But the relationship is beginning to break and I think a resource consumption based model helps with two very current challenges of society.

Helps who?

The people who make the rules (by brainwashing the population through a trillion dollar advertising industry what would make Pravda blush) only want to help themselves. As long as they have enough toys to prevent a French Revolution or for other people to take their wealth, they’re happy.

200 years ago, even 1000 years ago, the rich had to live in the same towns as the masses so they did actually put effort into keeping them nice. Building amenities, providing jobs, etc.

They don’t have to do that now. Power extends far beyond a 20 mile radius. They don’t have to go anywhere near the people.

Re: CEO fired developers to make room for AI. Developers create open source AI CEO

#557

Post by RIMR »

I like pushing the idea that an executive's job is both expensive and automatable. It's true, and they don't want people to figure that out.

But I do not like the idea that an AI like this could end up ranking higher than human beings in an org chart. That is still pretty dystopian.

Re: CEO fired developers to make room for AI. Developers create open source AI CEO

#558

Post by wongarsu »

wuschel wrote: post #547
alexpotato wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To be fair I think its far easier to automate leadership jobs despite how they believe in greater self-worth. Speaking as someone who has worked at multiple companies all the way from IC to team lead and even up to senior manager with a global team: Almost every job at every level has some version of "ok, what's the flowchart for this". People assume this is for tech jobs but they would be surprised that it's true…

The way you have expressed it there are optimized workflows not only the managerial/executive, administrative, content producing set of workers, but in almost every profession, encoded in beaurocracy, checklist, best practices and culture: doctors, care workers, lawyers, policing ... The question is how well language models have internalized the optimal decision pathway and mitigating strategies to deviating circumst…

That ends up going in the DeepMind philopsophy of making AI, rather than the OpenAI philosophy. DeepMind makes AI that can defeat the best human Go players, OpenAI makes LLMs that are much more versatile but struggle with finishing a chess match without making illegal moves, never mind winning.

The other question on my mind: Cases where we have known decision pathways is exactly what the expert systems of the 70s and 80s were about. And from my understanding there were some successes, but we mostly found that it doesn't scale. Both encoding optimal decisions and encoding the decision space of things that can happen are huge challenges. LLMs might be genuinely better here, because they can just make things up as they go along, but they are also difficult to control

Re: CEO fired developers to make room for AI. Developers create open source AI CEO

#559

Post by pessimizer »

crnkofe wrote: post #433

To be fair I think its far easier to automate leadership jobs despite how they believe in greater self-worth. As a developer I keep running into problems that require some measure of creativity to solve or workaround. And regardless of how many years I've been in the industry I'm not running out of issues. They just keep getting more obscure. On the other hand leadership communication and problem resolution seem like…

> To be fair I think its far easier to automate leadership jobs despite how they believe in greater self-worth.

I disagree for entirely different reasons than others; I think you can't replace a CEO with AI for the same reason you can't replace a king with AI. It's a title, not a job. You can't even replace middle management with AI - not because it won't (eventually) be able to do the job "just as well," but that the job is largely to take the blame for failure, not to do things.

These people like to take credit for being coordinators, just like property owners like to pretend that that's the same thing as a property manager, but they're different functions. One is a title, and one is a duty. If the person with the title takes up another duty, it's by choice. In the case of both property owners and business owners it's buying themselves a job, often (especially in the case of property owners) because they are in debt up to their eyeballs and can't afford another employee.

CEOs are people who select from and approve choices that are handed to them by experts. You hire and fire them to reassure stockholders. Their only real job is to make complex, convincing excuses for their performance.

Re: CEO fired developers to make room for AI. Developers create open source AI CEO

#560

Post by forgetfreeman »

cwillu wrote: post #248
forgetfreeman wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. You're starting to catch on. Same functionality, significant cost savings for the organization.

The intern might be convinced to do something other than what the bot says.

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...
Post reply on HN