Several years ago I read an article that went in to great detail on how LLMs are perfectly poised to replace C-levels in corporations. I went on to talk about how they by nature of design essentially do the that exact thing off the bat, take large amounts of data and make strategic decisions based on that data.
I wish I could find it to back this up, but regardless ever since then, I've been waiting for this watershed moment to hit across the board...
They... don't make strategic decisions... That's part of why we hate them no? And we lambast AI proponents because they pretend they do.
The funny part is that I can't tell whether you're talking about LLMs or the C-suite.
Buddam tsssss! I too enjoy making fun of big business CEOs as mindless trend-followers. But even "following a trend" is a strategy attributable to a mind with reasoning ability that makes a choice. Now the quality of that reasoning or the effectiveness of that choice is another matter.
As tempting as it is, dehumanizing people we find horrible also risks blinding us to our own capacity for such horror as humans.
I think you're getting caught up in semantics.
"Following a trend" is something a series of points on a grid can do.
They do indeed make strategic decisions, just only in favor of the short term profits of shareholders. It’s “strategy” that a 6 yr old could execute, but strategy nonetheless
I'd argue they do make strategic decisions, its just that the strategy is always increasing quarterly earnings and their own assets.
You're right. But then look at Musk. if anyone was ripe for replacement with AI, it's him.
Y'all are all missing the real answer. CEOs have class solidarity with shareholders. Think about about how they all reacted to the death of the United health care CEO. They'll never get rid of them because they're one of them. Rich people all have a keen awareness of class consciousness and have great loyalty to one another.
Us? We're expendable. They want to replace us with machines that can't ask for anything and don't have rights. But they'll never get rid of one of their own. Think about how few CEOs get fired no matter how poor of a job they do.
P.S. Their high pay being because of risk is a myth. Ever heard of a thing called the golden parachute? CEOs never pay for their failures. In fact when they run a company into the ground, they're usually the ones that receive the biggest payouts. Not the employees.
Loyalty lasts right up until the math says otherwise.
The math has never made sense for CEOs
One must include social capital in the math
> company gets super invested in AI.
> replaces CEO with AI.
> AI does AI stuff, hallucinaties, calls for something inefficient and illegal.
> 4 trillion investor dollars go up in flames.
> company goes under, taking AI hype market down with it
And nothing of value will be lost.
Companies never outsourced the CEO position to countries which traditionally have lower CRO salaries but plenty of competency (e.g. Japan), so they won't do this either. It's because CEOs are controlled by boards, and the boards are made up of CEOs from other companies. They have a vested interest in human CEOs with inflated salaries.
Should be way easier to replace a CEO. No need for a golden parachute, if the AI fails, you just turn it off.
But I'd imagine right now you have CEOs being paid millions and using an AI themselves. Worst of both worlds.
All of you are missing the point.
CEOs and The Board are the same people. The majority of CEOs are board members at other companies, and vice-versa. It's a big fucking club and you ain't in it.
Why would they do this to themselves?
Secondly, we already have AI running companies. You think some CEOs and Board Members aren't already using this shit bird as a god? Because they are
They would do it because the big investors--not randos with a 401k in an index fund, but big hedge funds--demand that AI leads the company. This could potentially be forced at a stockholder meeting without the board having much say.
I don't think it will happen en masse for a different reason, though. The real purpose of the CEO isn't to lead the company, but to take the fall when everything goes wrong. Then they get a golden parachute and the company finds someone else. When AI fails, you can "fire" the model, but are you going to want to replace it with a different model? Most likely, the shareholders will reverse course and put a human back in charge. Then they can fire the human again later.
A few high profile companies might go for it. Then it will go badly and nobody else will try.
AI? Yes probably. Current AI? No. I do think we'll see it happen with an LLM and that company will probably flop. Shit how do you even prompt for that.
It'll take a few years but it progresses exponentially, it will get there.
It progresses logistically; eventually it'll plateau and there's no reason to believe that plateau will come after "can do everything a human can.". See: https://www.promptlayer.com/research-papers/have-llms-hit-their-limit
Sure, but we don't know where that plateau will come and until we get close to it progress looks approximately exponential.
We do know that it's possible for AI to reach at least human levels of capability, because we have an existence proof (humans themselves). Whether stuff based off of LLMs will get there without some sort of additional new revolutionary components, we can't tell yet. We won't know until we actually hit that plateau.
Current Ai has no shot of being as smart as humans, it's simply not sophisticated enough.
And that's not to say that current llms aren't impressive, they are, but the human brain is just on a whole different level.
And just to think about on a base level, LLM inference can run off a few gpus, roughly order of 100 billion transistors. That's roughly on par with the number of neurons, but each neuron has an average of 10,000 connections, that are capable of or rewiring themselves to new neurons.
And there are so many distinct types of neurons, with over 10,000 unique proteins.
On top of there over a hundred neurotransmitters, and we're not even sure we've identified them all.
And all of that is still connected to a system that integrates all of our senses, while current AI is pure text, with separate parts bolted onto it for other things.
The human brain is doing a lot of stuff that's completely unrelated to "being intelligent." It's running a big messy body, it's supporting its own biological activity, it's running immune system operations for itself, and so forth. You can't directly compare their complexity like this.
It turns out that some of the thinky things that humans did with their brains that we assumed were hugely complicated could be replicated on a commodity GPU with just a couple of gigabytes of memory. I don't think it's safe to assume that everything else we do is as complicated as we thought either.
No, because someone has to be the company's scapegoat... but if the ridiculous post-truth tendencies of some societies increase, then maybe "AI" will indeed gain "personhood", and in that case, maybe?
I don't see any other future.
I could imagine a world where whole virtual organizations could be spun up, and they can just run in the background creating whole products, marketing them, and doing customer support, etc.
Right now the technology doesn't seem there yet, but it has been rapidly improving, so we'll see.
I could definitely see rich CEOs funding the creation of a "celebrity" bot that answers questions the way they do. Maybe with their likeness and voice, so they can keep running companies from beyond the grave. Throw it in one of those humanoid robots and they can keep preaching the company mission until the sun burns out.
What a nightmare.
Check out the novel Accelerando by Charles Stross, that thing is part of the plot.
Thanks for the suggestion, I'll check it out!
in all dialectical seriousness, if it appeases the capitalists, it will happen. “first they came with ai for the help desk…” kind of logic here. some sort of confluence of Idiocracy and The Matrix will be the outcome.
Love that term dialectical seriousness, have to admit i had to look it up :)
Wasn't it Willy Shakespeare who said "First, kill all the Shareholders" ? That easily manipulated stock market only truly functions for the wealthy, regardless of harm inflicted on both humans and the environment they exist in.
Sadly don't think this is going to happen. A good CEO doesn't make calculated decisions based on facts and judge risk against profit. If he did, he would, at best, be a normal CEO. Who wants that? No, a truly great CEO does exactly what a truly bad CEO does; he takes risks that aren't proportional to the reward (and gets lucky)!
This is the only way to beat the game, just like with investments or roulette. There are no rich great roulette players going by the odds. Only lucky.
Sure, with CEOs, this is on the aggregate. I'm sure there is a genius here and a Renaissance man there... But on the whole, best advice is "get risky and get lucky". Try it out. I highly recommend it. No one remembers a loser. And the story continues.
Isn’t this sorta paradoxical? Like either ceos are actually worth what insane money they make, or a palm pilot could replace them, but somehow they are paid ridiculous amounts for…. What?
No, it's not paradoxical. You are conflating time points.
I won't debate the "value" of CEOs, but in this system, their value is subject to market conditions like any other. Human computers were valued much more before electrical computers were created. Aluminum was worth more than gold before a fast and cheap extraction process was invented.
You could not replace a CEO with a Palm pilot 10 years ago.
From what people on Lemmy say, a CEO (and board) isn't there to do a good job they are there to be a fall guy if something goes wrong, protecting shareholders from prosecution. Can AI do that?
It can do so even better than a human. They would just announce a patch for it
I guess in theory there would be no need for a fall guy as AI would cover all angles.
If AI ends up running companies better than people
Okay, important context there. The current AI bubble will burst sooner or later. So, this is hypothetical future AGI.
Yes, if the process of human labour becoming redundant continues uninterrupted, it's highly likely, although since CEOs make their money from the intangible asset of having connections more than the actual work they'll be one of the last to go.
But, it won't continue uninterrupted. We're talking about rapidly transitioning to an entirely different kind of economy, and we should expect it will be similarly destabilising as it was to hunter gatherer societies that suddenly encountered industrial technology.
If humans are still in control, and you still have an entire top 10% of the population with significant equity holdings, there's not going to be much strategy to the initial stages. Front line workers will get laid off catastrophically, basically, and no new work will be forthcoming. The next step will be a political reaction. If some kind of make-work program is what comes out of it, human managers will still find a place in it. If it's basic income, probably not. (And if there's not some kind of restriction on the top end of wealth, as well, you're at risk of creating a new ruling elite with an incentive to kill everyone else off, but that's actually a digression from the question)
When it comes to the longer term, I find inspiration in a blog post I read recently. Capital holdings will eventually become meaningless compared to rights to natural factors. If military logic works at all the same way, and there's ever any kind of war, land will once again be supreme among them. There weren't really CEOs in feudalism, and even if we manage not to regress to autocracy there probably won't be a place for them.
It's what republicans need, yes
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