Technology

Here's why:

Boards of directors are CEOs of other companies that are buddies of the CEO of the company they are directors of. This is like a shitty musical chair of board of directors.

There's an important thing that the CEO provides that no AI can: the acceptance of risk.

On a day-to-day basis the CEO makes decisions, ignores expert advice, knocks off early for tee time, etc. For this work they are wildly overpaid and could easily be replaced by having their responsibilities divvied up amongst a small group of people in leadership roles.

To see the true purpose of the CEO we need to look at a bigger scale - the quarter-to-quarter scale. What could be bigger than that in the world of the MBA?

Every quarter the CEO must have the company meet the financial performance expectations of the board/owner(s)/shareholders. Failure is likely to result in them losing their job and getting a reputation as an underperformer, thus ruining their career. If the company does poorly or those expectations are unreasonably high then the CEO must cut corners in the operation. This of course hampers their ability to meet expectations later, but they'll make it through this quarter.

When (inevitably) too many corners have been cut something catastrophic will happen. Either the company's reputation will go to shit with customers slowly, or a high-profile scandal will blow up in the company's face.

This is the moment when the CEO provides their most valuable service: to fall (or be pushed) onto their sword. The CEO is fired, ousted, or resigns. This allows the board/owner/shareholders to get a new face in and demand that they fix the most egregious issues, or at least the most glaring ones that don't cost too much to fix.

This service cannot be provided by an AI. Why? Because the AI is a creation of the company. If it is used as a scapegoat it solves nothing. The company is pointing at their own creation and saying "see, that's the problem". It's much more effective to point at a human they didn't make and scream that that person made a mistake.

This podcasting bro is NOT chasing revenue (yet).

He wants power.

He wants to collect 11-12 figure sums of venture capital and then built things that let him rule the world.

And afterwards, maybe revenue.

Another year of this shit? I don't think we can take it, honestly

Mah, won't happen like this. It was similar with Facebook 10 years ago and look at where it is now.

Or when you do just assuming you can override them eventually

We had a guy like that at work, he said basically "how far above you do I have to go to get what I want"

IMO it's even worse than that. At least from what I gather from the AI/Singularity communities I follow. For them, AGI is the end goal - a creative thinking AI capable of deduction far greater than humanity. The company that owns that suddenly has the capability to solve all manner of problems that are slowing down technological advancement. Obviously owning that would be worth trillions.

However it's really hard to see through the smoke that the Altmans etc. are putting up - how much of it is actual genuine prediction and how much is fairy tales they're telling to get more investment?

And I'd have a hard time believing it isn't mostly the latter because while LLMs have made some pretty impressive advancements, they still can't have specialized discussions about pretty much anything without hallucinating answers. I have a test I use for each new generation of LLMs where I interview them about a book I'm relatively familiar with and even with the newest ChatGPT model, it still makes up a ton of shit, even often contradicting its own answers in that thread, all the while absolutely confident that it's familiar with the source material.

Honestly, I'll believe they're capable of advancing AI when we get an AI that can say 'I actually am not sure about that, let me do a search...' or something like that.

Oh wow I didn't actually know he was bipolar (checked to confirm it is the case). I knew he was on the autism spectrum.

I can't imagine those 2 play nice together.

I think it's a delusion of grandeur.