This might be a less popular opinion on a site like HN, but I'm of the opinion that CEO's don't do a whole lot.
Maybe at small startups they are more involved, but the larger the company, the less I think that CEOs or other C-Suite types actually do.
While I also think ChatGPT is over-hyped and largeley incorrect in what it says, I would answer your question with a "yes". ChatGPT is perfectly capable of writing/delivering speeches at MS Build or whatever.
Jeff Bezos once talked about how his job depends on the quality of his decisions. He might not make very many decisions, but they are very high impact. Delegating this high-impact decision making to AI, which often makes random low-quality decisions, sounds like a bad idea.
The CEO also needs to sell those decisions to the organization to get buy-in on the vision and carry it out. How inspired will the organization be by the direction of an AI? No one in an organization will care about this stuff more than the CEO (if they are decent). An AI can’t care, so why would anyone else?
The main responsibility of the CEO of a large company is to set the company's culture and make top-level decisions about what the company does and does not choose to do. Depending in the company they may bring relationships with executives, investors and experts inside and outside the company.
Everything else is delegated to lower level executives and staff.
To even ask this question shows no understanding of what a CEO of a large corporation does.
1) Investor relations: Yes an AI could answer questions about the financials on the quarterly earnings call. With a lot of careful handling you might maybe even get it to do this in a way that it wouldn’t hallucinate and lead to shareholder lawsuits and SEC enforcement action. But would it go out for lunch with a bunch of fund managers and convince them to keep their investment when you’ve had a bad quarter? No. Would it take a 3-hour meeting with investment bankers to talk through how to recapitalize or refinance debt? No. If you’re talking a startup CEO is it going to convince a16z, SVF, etc to invest? Nope. If you think it will you’ve never done any of those things. It’s trying to capture lightning in a bottle- not a process you can automate. For example, how did Adam Neumann convince Steve Cohen to invest in WeWork? (I have this on the authority of a friend who was one of about 10 people there) He showed up late, and drunk for a small dinner at Steve Cohen’s apartment and got everyone there doing tequila shots. This is not something an AI is capable of.
2) Corporate strategy. Yes you can get it to generate meaningless gibberish on powerpoint, so you might think corporate strategy would be covered, but consider just a few of the big calls Satya Nadella has made (off the top of my head) in the last couple of years. 1) betting big on OpenAI 2) Intervening to save Sam Altman’s ass after he was fired 3) basically giving up on the “console wars”, ceding the hardware victory to Sony, shutting down a bunch of game studios telling the world how tough the climate is even though you’ve just had the most profitable years in your history, betting big on gamePass etc? Gonna do that? No it won’t.
3) Managing the top executive team. Is it going to do this? Of course not.
Not saying an AI couldn’t possibly do a much better job than current CEOs in some hypothetical world where CEOs do different things from what they do now, but in our world, there is literally none of the black magic bs that CEOs pull to get corporations to be worth obscene bucks that an AI could do.
Practically, it's far easier to simply ask this at your next all-hands when they are source for questions about AI. To make this a meta: use ChatGPT to ask this as a pointlessly-long-worded question to evade HR/marketing from filtering the question until it's too late ;)
This might be a less popular opinion on a site like HN, but I'm of the opinion that CEO's don't do a whole lot.
Maybe at small startups they are more involved, but the larger the company, the less I think that CEOs or other C-Suite types actually do.
While I also think ChatGPT is over-hyped and largeley incorrect in what it says, I would answer your question with a "yes". ChatGPT is perfectly capable of writing/delivering speeches at MS Build or whatever.
Jeff Bezos once talked about how his job depends on the quality of his decisions. He might not make very many decisions, but they are very high impact. Delegating this high-impact decision making to AI, which often makes random low-quality decisions, sounds like a bad idea.
The CEO also needs to sell those decisions to the organization to get buy-in on the vision and carry it out. How inspired will the organization be by the direction of an AI? No one in an organization will care about this stuff more than the CEO (if they are decent). An AI can’t care, so why would anyone else?
The main responsibility of the CEO of a large company is to set the company's culture and make top-level decisions about what the company does and does not choose to do. Depending in the company they may bring relationships with executives, investors and experts inside and outside the company.
Everything else is delegated to lower level executives and staff.
Yes. AI is actually perfectly suited for the CEO role, as it's a big generalizer. The biggest generalist in a company is the CEO.
I have no idea why so many companies are focusing on replacing entry level work with AI; the real alpha is at the top of the org chart.
> I have no idea
I have an idea. Turkeys don't vote for Christmas.
It's still not good enough to manage a vending machine: https://www.anthropic.com/research/project-vend-1
I remember reading an article that concluded "if someone were to be replaced, it would be the shot callers"
So yes, in theory.
My first thought was"but an AI is not responsible", but how responsible is a CEO? They seem to get away with a lot. I could be wrong though
Sure, they could. Would it be effective, probably not.
To even ask this question shows no understanding of what a CEO of a large corporation does.
1) Investor relations: Yes an AI could answer questions about the financials on the quarterly earnings call. With a lot of careful handling you might maybe even get it to do this in a way that it wouldn’t hallucinate and lead to shareholder lawsuits and SEC enforcement action. But would it go out for lunch with a bunch of fund managers and convince them to keep their investment when you’ve had a bad quarter? No. Would it take a 3-hour meeting with investment bankers to talk through how to recapitalize or refinance debt? No. If you’re talking a startup CEO is it going to convince a16z, SVF, etc to invest? Nope. If you think it will you’ve never done any of those things. It’s trying to capture lightning in a bottle- not a process you can automate. For example, how did Adam Neumann convince Steve Cohen to invest in WeWork? (I have this on the authority of a friend who was one of about 10 people there) He showed up late, and drunk for a small dinner at Steve Cohen’s apartment and got everyone there doing tequila shots. This is not something an AI is capable of.
2) Corporate strategy. Yes you can get it to generate meaningless gibberish on powerpoint, so you might think corporate strategy would be covered, but consider just a few of the big calls Satya Nadella has made (off the top of my head) in the last couple of years. 1) betting big on OpenAI 2) Intervening to save Sam Altman’s ass after he was fired 3) basically giving up on the “console wars”, ceding the hardware victory to Sony, shutting down a bunch of game studios telling the world how tough the climate is even though you’ve just had the most profitable years in your history, betting big on gamePass etc? Gonna do that? No it won’t.
3) Managing the top executive team. Is it going to do this? Of course not.
Not saying an AI couldn’t possibly do a much better job than current CEOs in some hypothetical world where CEOs do different things from what they do now, but in our world, there is literally none of the black magic bs that CEOs pull to get corporations to be worth obscene bucks that an AI could do.
Top executive team could bs-it the CEO using LLM injection in their reports, so no.
You have been marketed. Congrats.
Practically, it's far easier to simply ask this at your next all-hands when they are source for questions about AI. To make this a meta: use ChatGPT to ask this as a pointlessly-long-worded question to evade HR/marketing from filtering the question until it's too late ;)