[norseboar]

I think this confuses the responsibilities a CEO may have (write memos, etc) with the responsibilities they must have (ultimate authority/responsibility for company decisions/direction). If a CEO hired somebody to do ~all company comms, and maybe financial modeling, and even make important decisions about company strategy, the CEO did not hire another CEO. The CEO delegated. All managers do this to some extent, that's the point.

There still needs to be some entity who says "here is when we'll listen to the AI, here are the roles the AI will fill, etc", and that entity IMO is effectively the CEO.

I suppose you could say that entity is the board, and the AI is the CEO, but in practice I think you'd want a person who's involved day-to-day.

The article quotes:

> "...But I thought more deeply and would say 80 percent of the work that a C.E.O. does can be replaced by A.I.”...That includes writing, synthesizing, exhorting the employees.

If AI replaces those things, it has not replaced the CEO. It has just provided the CEO leverage.

[bartread]

> It has just provided the CEO leverage.

Exactly. And you could say this about a lot of other roles as well. AI certainly has its flaws, but at this stage it does rather frustrate me when people actively resist using that leverage in their own roles. In many ways I couldn't go back to a world without it.

My days are now littered with examples where it's taken me a minute or two to figure out how to do something that was important but not particularly interesting (to me) and that might otherwise have involved, for example, an hour or two of wading through documentation without it, so that I can move on to other more valuable matters.

Why wouldn't you want this?

[caeril]

Same reason people try to compete in sports without using PEDs, or prepare for standardized tests without a good nootropic stack.

There's some large contingent of the population who believes being "natural" places them on a moral high horse.

[Uehreka]

I think part of the idea here is that we’re not talking about putting GPT-4o in charge of a company, we’re talking about GPT-7a (for “agent”). By the time we get to that turn of the game, we may not have as many issues with hallucinations and context size will be immense. At a certain point the AI will be able to consume and work with far more information that the human CEO who “employs” it, to the point that the human CEO essentially becomes a rubber stamp, as interactions like the following play out over and over again:

AI: I am proposing an organizational restructuring of the company to improve efficiency.

CEO: What sort of broad philosophy are you using to guide this reoorg?

AI: None. This week I interviewed every employee and manager for thirty minutes to assemble a detailed picture of the company’s workings. I have the names of the 5272 employees who have been overpromoted relative to their skill, the 3652 who are underpromoted or are on the wrong teams, 2351 who need to be fired in the next year. Would you like me to execute on this plan or read you all the rationales?

CEO (presumably after the AI has been right about many things before): Yeah OK just go ahead and execute.

Like, we’re talking about a world where CEOs are no longer making high level “the ship turns slowly” decisions based on heuristics, but a world where CEO AIs can make millions of highly informed micro-decisions that it would normally be irresponsible for a CEO to focus on. All while maintaining a focus on a handful of core tenets.

[snowwrestler]

This is just saying “if an imaginary thing was good at being a CEO, it could replace a CEO.” Which is a tautology on top of a fantasy.

[Aurornis]

> I think this confuses the responsibilities a CEO may have (write memos, etc) with the responsibilities they must have (ultimate authority/responsibility for company decisions/direction).

The vast majority of articles about CEOs are populist rage-bait. The goal isn't to portray the actual duties and responsibilities of a CEO. The goal is to feed anti-CEO sentiment which is popular on social media. It's to get clicks.

[sandspar]

Then why did the CEO's in the survey agree with the premise?

[fennecfoxy]

Do CEOs have much responsibility though? I've only ever seen them punished when they've done something intensely illegal and even then they get off for lighter crimes usually.

Golden handshakes mean if they move on they win. They can practically suck a company dry & move on to another one thru MBA social circles.