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If A.I. Can Do Your Job, Maybe It Can Also Replace Your CEO

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Re: If A.I. Can Do Your Job, Maybe It Can Also Replace Your CEO

#171

Post by falcor84 »

htrp wrote: post #119
falcor84 wrote: post #2

I keep thinking of that Warren Bennis's quote: "The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment." Only now I think the dog will be robotic too.

You can buy a robot dog for probably cheaper than an actual dog these days (looking at you unitree)

And that is exactly the setting of "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" - where everyone still on Earth is socially expected to take care of at least one animal, but because of being so expensive, there's a black market of robotic animals.

Re: If A.I. Can Do Your Job, Maybe It Can Also Replace Your CEO

#172

Post by HumblyTossed »

batch12 wrote: post #170
djohnston wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty comical to read - "no no no, it can't predict THOSE tokens!!!" XD

Making intelligent decisions != predicting tokens. Current AI only resembles intelligence to those that don't understand it. It's a tool that should operate with the guidance of a human.

It is a statistical model. Why would it not be any better than a CEO looking at spreadsheets? (Rhetorical question.)

Re: If A.I. Can Do Your Job, Maybe It Can Also Replace Your CEO

#173

Post by batch12 »

HumblyTossed wrote: post #151
batch12 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really can't. It can finish some text though that infers the most likely completion taking into account tokens in the prompt and generated content.

I love the HN mindset. See, most people here have some aspiration towards being the next great CEO so of course AI can’t possibly do that job. But, sure, it can do everyone else’s job and even drive cars and fly planes. Please.

Since you asked nicely- I have no real desire to be a CEO. I also have no yearning to work for a glorified shell script. There's a disturbing mindset shared by some people here who can't differentiate between intelligence and the babbling of a mechanical turk.

Re: If A.I. Can Do Your Job, Maybe It Can Also Replace Your CEO

#174

Post by batch12 »

HumblyTossed wrote: post #172
batch12 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making intelligent decisions != predicting tokens. Current AI only resembles intelligence to those that don't understand it. It's a tool that should operate with the guidance of a human.

It is a statistical model. Why would it not be any better than a CEO looking at spreadsheets? (Rhetorical question.)

Because that's not all a leader does? Maybe it could replace some of the repeatable parts of spreadsheet looker worker's job though- or augment the decision making process of spreadsheet reader CEO if she's okay with hallucinations sometimes.

Re: If A.I. Can Do Your Job, Maybe It Can Also Replace Your CEO

#175

Post by falcor84 »

raincole wrote: post #71
hashtag-til wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this different from grammarly, that has been around for many years? This was a middleman job anyway, so it was just waiting to be removed, like travel agents.

> How is this different from grammarly, that has been around for many years? I'm not sure how to answer this, because the compatibility gap between Grammarly and ChatGPT (even 3), in terms of English writing, is just too large. So large that I can barely categorize them as "the same kind of tools". I can only confidently tell you one fact: before ChatGPT, people here were aware of Grammarly's existence. Yet they stil…

Indeed, I think it's middlemen all the way down. Everything eventually boils down to one of: survival, pursuit of happiness and pursuit of meaning. None of these actually require any actual "job" to be performed, and I can absolutely imagine us dealing with them in a post -scarcity world.

Re: If A.I. Can Do Your Job, Maybe It Can Also Replace Your CEO

#176

Post by smarm52 »

greg_V wrote: post #13

Jokes on you, I bet there's a good portion of CEOs who just use chatgpt in their day-to-day life instead of reading up on stuff, thinking through it and making decisions

This would result in a sharp increase in the quality of CEO decisions. I haven't seen anything like that. ;)

Re: If A.I. Can Do Your Job, Maybe It Can Also Replace Your CEO

#177

Post by smarm52 »

123yawaworht456 wrote: post #10

the only jobs "AI" will take in the foreseeable future is the journos'. And That's a Good Thing - Here's Why.

heh that's good. A headline about replacing writers with LLMs in the style of those clickbait headlines generated by LLMs.

Re: If A.I. Can Do Your Job, Maybe It Can Also Replace Your CEO

#178

Post by smarm52 »

ein0p wrote: post #134

In my experience, LLMs are mostly useful if you already have expertise either directly in the field you’re asking about or in adjacent fileds. They’re also useful in fields which you are exploring so as long as your exploration does not need 100% reliability of information, which most domains do not. As far as business is concerned, however, there’s so much obscure regulation and (in VC) so many opportunities for oth…

That's actually an interesting point. Do CEOs matter?

Startup CEOs certainly do, they're actually doing something that involves work. But do CEOs of more mature companies matter? Arguably not, since they commonly do more harm than good.

The focus of the latter CEO is to secure their own power at the expense of the organization [1]. And so, having a CEO that doesn't do that, even if flawed, seems like a better thing to have.

[1] De Mesquita, B. B., Smith, A., Siverson, R. M., & Morrow, J. D. (2005). The logic of political survival. MIT press.

Re: If A.I. Can Do Your Job, Maybe It Can Also Replace Your CEO

#179

Post by yencabulator »

tossandthrow wrote: post #152
oxfordmale wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The current generation of ChatGPT hallucinates far more systematically than that. The problem is that it can regurgitate what the random dudes from local accelerators have written in their blog posts. We all know blog posts are often a sales pitch and don't include useful advice, because you can charge for the useful advice you give.

> The problem is that it can regurgitate what the random dudes from local accelerators have written in their blog posts. This is not how modern training pipelines work. The models are trained on proprietary alignments that ensure factuality. Regardless, that random dude from a local accelerator probably regurgitates those blog articles himself.

"ensures", really?

Re: If A.I. Can Do Your Job, Maybe It Can Also Replace Your CEO

#180

Post by dasil003 »

djohnston wrote: post #159
dasil003 wrote: post #150

Wow, this is some ultimate clickbait, combining peak AI hype with timely economic concerns as well as the evergreen hatred of bad bosses. The fact that articles like this get traction is ironically exactly why an AI can’t be a good CEO—picking a popular next token is worthless if not backed by some reasoning and organizational structure to benefit the business. It’s a trope that CEOs are out of touch with the ground…

> but what’s less obvious is that the majority is also pretty ignorant about the inner workings of executive leadership. Idk, I tend to think that people in positions of leadership overestimate their competence and ability to actually effect positive change in an organisation. They're kind of a monkey in the cockpit that we get to point at and say "Because of the monkey we are now doing x, y, z", but whether that mon…

> I tend to think that people in positions of leadership overestimate their competence and ability to actually effect positive change in an organisation.

To the contrary, I think executives in large companies are far more lucid about how hard it is to effect change than you give them credit for. Of course they can't say that directly because they need to maintain the optics of control for a variety of reason, but in practice CEOs have lots of power but very little control. The levers they have are crude and subject to interpretation of humans up and down the chain. The more ambiguous and dynamic the business environment (eg. consumer tech) the more agency needs to be pushed down and the less specific of policies and procedures can be implemented. Despite all that, setting the culture and vision to get thousands of people rowing more or less in the same direction is important.

My thesis is not that CEOs are highly competent as a group, it's that the problem is hard, and current forms of AI are nowhere close to be able to do anything approaching a better job on a consistent basis. Sure, in practice there are probably some businesses where an AI could outperform a CEO just by luck of the draw, but that's not going to convince owners and boards to swap out human CEOs. Humans can be held accountable and controlled with tried and true techniques of power and capitalism. An AI cannot be understood and manipulated as a human, if it gives owners/directors an answer they don't like, they have no real leverage or recourse. Going back to the engineers—or worse, a third party tech company providing the AI—is not going to work when urgent issues come up.

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