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

I know it's a joke but...

Power is what makes them what they are, not knowledge or skills or empathy.

If you don't like what this thing tells you to do, you just won't. It's not going to fire you. Therefore it's not going to steer the company away from disaster, or towards something good. It will be just a talking box.

A serious point about this is that it's an AI that's an organization. This matters.

People laughed at Gas Town, and at that "Fences, not Sandboxes" article yesterday.[1] They're both AIs set up as an organization, not an emulated human. They're both expensive to operate, because the AI members of the organization spend a lot of time talking with each other. They're both applied to frivolous problems.

Now we have the same concept, applied to a more useful problem. It's time to pay attention. Something important is happening here.

Everybody has been talking about "human-level AI", or "superhuman-level AI". This is a different kind of AI - corporate-level AI. It works and thinks like a company's management. It watches a wide range of data sources and responds to some of them with action, and some with internal discussion within the AIs. It can potentially pay attention to far more inputs than any human. That overcomes a basic problem of corporate organization.

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. They may soon be outperforming humans for that reason alone.

Think about this for a while. These team AI systems may be very useful.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49423146

Based on my observations, the most important characteristics of a CEO is to be over 6ft, and to walk about looking important.

CEO jobs are safe until the humanoid robots have mastered this skill.

CEO here, thanks just fired all my C suite team,

https://github.com/SenteLabsAI/OpenExecutive/blob/main/packa...

“Walking away costs you the deal. Signing costs you the company. The math is obvious in retrospect; harder in the moment when there's quota pressure”

such valuable, should I say load-bearing insights

Other gem from my new CFO:

“The financial statements are the result. The variance analysis is where the operating insight lives.”

And my new C(3-)PO just told me

“If we removed all sales involvement, what % of revenue would we still get? #5 is the honest PLG test. If the answer is <30%, PLG is supplementary at best. If the answer is >60%, PLG is the actual motion and the rest is overlay.”

It would be hilarious if the AI CEO also fired all the developers

What does a CEO(and other managers) do really?

Sometimes the claim is "set vision" - which AI can extract from the collective.

Someimes the claim is to prioritize the work (with bias), AI can extract that from the collective too, right?

Making resources available to the team? AI.

Coordinating between teams? AI.

Can the AI do this in a more un-biased way? Can it refine collective intelligence and desire into objective goals?

More than a software factory id love to see a manager-factory.

One thing, AI cannot do (yet) is bring the network. Like when you hire folk from Booth or Sloan so you can sell to places that hired Booth and Sloan grads.

I 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 maximized to the extent that it loses its competitive advantage, and then we’re back to square 1. That is, when everyone uses the same AI, nobody has a competitive advantage over anyone else

My current theory is that because of this, it is not possible to build an AI that generates a profit perpetually. Only temporarily. Then human intervention would be required to adjust things to make the AI competitive again. But at that point, it’s no longer an AI driving the profit, it’s its human tinkerer

This is good for satire, but the real solution is to use AI to become the CEO, or take over the scope of of product or decision-making roles. There are many business-savvy technical workers that get pigeonholed because they spend most of their cognitive effort on low-level technical details. This is an opportunity for these people to rise up and prove they work better than people who manage or direct them. CEO is really not a role to automate, unless it's a fully autonomous business that has zero humans.

Awesome. There's no reason why AI can't replace all these highly paid CEOs along with the rest of us. Looking forward to the Delamain future.

The 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?

One thing AI is actually good at: look at a bunch of data, make informed, unbiased, objective and quick decision, have a backup plan if that fails.

This is exactly what an executive is supposed to do. But since executives are the ones in charge, nobody talks about this, it’s all about getting rid of developers and how engineers arnt needed :).

I think it's pretty fun. Worker cooperatives no longer need different ranks of executive officers. They can all be peers with different functions. So if worker cooperatives are going to succeed in the US, they have pretty good conditions right now.

An auditable executive would certainly be a first.

I dislike performative business people as much as the next guy, but you can't tell me that you people really think that this is anything other than a petty and equally performative PR stunt.

Revenge of the nerds.

This reminds me of William Gibson's "Burning Chrome", where the head of a syndicate is a Russian AI (Chrome) running things behind a smuggling front. Gibson basically predicted the AI CEO forty years early!

A warning: Don't burn Chrome.

If human-led companies started consistently losing to AI led companies... would it say more about the intelligence of AI, or about how thoroughly power corrupts humans?

To the extent this is tongue in cheek it is funny, but I could imagine if I was building a startup I’d like something like this if it was good.

That said, if you look at what it’s actually doing (read the question carefully, then read what it actually said) I am not convinced this is better than what ChatGPT could do out of the box already.

https://youtu.be/O_g97xxVTMk

Good thought experiment but the flip side works just as well.

Let the C-suite do it all with AI alone and see where they get.

I've been slowly developing my hermes agent to do something similar but is very customized towards my needs. I should spin up another agent and give this one a shot and see what it's capable of. This is hilarious.

I think AI CEOs are dumb but AI 'enterprise decision-makers' could be very very interesting.

Imagine how quickly your meetings could get resolved if you had teams submit prompts / contexts, had a clear, documented set of overarching objectives, etc.?

Let's also replace politicians and other officials.

AI - might finally "care for miners and not the minors on the island somewhere".

Therefore, AI will not be blackmailed into doing shit.

Many CEOs are bad and their businesses will either fail or be bailed out. But the work CEOs do is probably some of the last to get automated - higher order strategy, relationship building, managing people.

there's unemployment due too lack of CEOs (companies). AI CEO solves this problem. Full employment can be achieved.

This is brilliant! Immediately forwarded to the boss.

Awesome!!!

This is the best project ever.

I have been waiting for this for awhile. Now we can have real layoffs for an AI pivot starting with management :-)

Honestly, this is hilarious!

Please replace CTOs while you are at it and most architects can also be replaced easily!

Is this automated CEO any good? Is there a listing from a demo session?

When will we see the world's first fully autonomous company?

After firing all, when CEO can fire themselves to be just founders?

This will be epic.

A team of software developers were recently let go so a company could replace them with AI. So they got together and created an Open Source AI CEO to replace the CEO and other executives. Hopefully, turnabout is fair play and this might even get some folks to think twice about using AI to replace people.

looks like a good way to run up a really large anthropic token bill.

I really want to see a proper ai team that successfully replaced a bunch of people. I have not seen it yet. Only thing I hear is gold plated stories about the potential of agents running fully automated workflows without people touching a single lever. In the meantime I am using AI almost the entire day. I have to discuss these topics with managers that only use chatgpt and watch youtube videos from people disguised to promote their own crap AI products. All I can say is that AI is not good enough to replace entire teams. It can do some cool stuff. But automate entire workflows. Nah. It's just not gonna work.

We're all joking around here. But 5 decades down the line, with increasing cognitive offload to AI, is a slow erosion leading to this end state so crazy?

Everyone seems to be missing the point of the role of the CEO.

The CEO is not some masterful person answering all the questions for the company, I would argue that a CEO should be able to disappear for a year and if they had done their job correctly and assembled a good team the company would do just fine without them.

No the purpose of the CEO is to safeguard the Capital that has been invested in the company. That is all. They make sure it doesn't walk our the door in wages or other wasteful spending. They are the Capital's man on the ground.

Finally a use for Grok Bots!

What company fired them? I don't see that in the repo but maybe I missed it.

Remember that guy who applied for CEO OpenAI and said that he will replace the CEO and the board with a chatbot

I wonder why OpenAI didn't accept it! It would he such a great proof that AI is soooo good if the frontier pab itself uses AI to replace execs

I’m all for productive people, brilliant engineers. I still get dirty with codes/work all the way down to the newly hired fresh out of college kids, to the production architects that shapes multi-million, if not billions, of P&L. I’m also very lucky to be included in key decision making, planning, negating amongst the boards of C-Suites, Directors, VPs.

A very personal view but many developers/engineers fail to see the overall picture. And yes, I was there and I went through all of the mistakes.

The things you see on the surface of those incompetent CxOs are just the tiny piece of the bigger picture. You cannot replace blames, decision in the face of uncertainty. Almost all decisions that businesses take have nothing to do with the proficiencies of technologies or engineering finesse, or even the best options, but mostly on “incentives” and who can take/own the “blame.”

“AI” replacing developers is evident because that is a rather tiny perspective and kinda easy to do the equation - developer can do that (good, bad, best) and can the AI do it - maybe, perhaps. So, replace.

A C-Suite took a decision to tick the final approval of a billion dollar deal with a service providers (amongst 10s of them). The idea might have sounded idiotic because there were 3 others better at the top than the chosen one. Even if all of the task and options were weighted with AI, but that last human decision is the Blame that the C-Suite took on, by betting his incentives on it (money, fame, pride, ego.)

But can it avoid answering direct questions by telling you about past challenges and what it's doing to address those next year?

what's the backstory here?

Good luck finding investments by going to events in socal

The difference is that the CEO controls the capital and has the ear of the investors, whereas the developers generally don't. It's the investors that control whether the CEO is a bot or not.

Honestly the best use of AI at the moment is to replace non-technical middle management layers. Many of those yelling the loudest for “more AI now” are quite ironically holding the jobs best replaced by the current creation of AI.

Number of people who think that a leader or a CEO can be replaced by AI and who themselves have actually risked everything to start a company, be a leader, or do anything similar: exactly 0.

This has likely been the case as long as jobs have existed. Some CEOs spend their entire time tweeting, apparently.

The way any large company works, and this includes all the big tech companies, is that they end up in a state of constant churn. Every 6 months or so there's a reorganization. There'san old joke that you get an email that your manager's manager's manager's manager now reports to a new manager and you've never heard of any of these people.

The point of that churn is to make sure nobody is ever held responsible for something not working. It's never given enough time. That's by design. Middle (and even senior) management is about empire-building.

Another quote that springs to mind is that the bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy. That's how I feel about management bloat.

Anyone who has paid attention to Intel's downfall in the last decade will have heard stories about how the company descended into fiefdoms and it became impossible to get anything done. That's what happens.

Most people in these organizations aren't particularly talented at anything other than forming social relationships. the leadership of these companies always end up having an adversarial relationship with their workers and try to suppress their wages to increase profits so they can get their stock options and bonuses and the CEOs all sit on each other's boards of directors setting each other's compensation packages. It's a lootocracy.

The point of all this is that the leadership will never decide that they are the problem. Take Meta's Metaverse. It was a $70 billion flop. A lot of people got laid off from that. Were any of those worker bees responsible? Nope. They didn't choose the strategy or probably even what they worked on. It takes a lot for heads to roll within senior leadership and with the vote-stacked share structures of many major tech companies, ousting a CEO is essentially impossible.

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We've replaced our CEO for the better part of 6 weeks now. He has been on a media tour promoting a product we no longer sell, but it keeps him busy while we continue to grow.

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