Why do you think senior managers would replace themselves if they could? Given the choice between saving a company and giving a senior manager slightly more money or power, the senior manager will always win.
The ultimate authority in any public company is the board.
The majority of employees will never have to think about it, but everyone from the CEO down is ultimately hired at their discretion.
To see how things normally operate read up on the OpenAI drama. If Sam Altman wasn't as politically savvy as he was the board would have fired him in a Friday announcement and by Monday a new CEO would have been in charge.
And boards are largely made up of senior management of other companies, scratching each other's backs.
If it ever became clear that an LLM or other AI of some sort could genuinely replace senior management, I guarantee you'd see two things:
1) The price for access to that level of AI (assuming it wasn't possible with an open model on commodity hardware, which seems like a safe assumption for the foreseeable future) would quickly rise to be merely competitive with the cost of hiring senior management.
2) Boards would (nearly) all quickly agree that the human factor is very important, and regardless of what statistics you might have seen on the decisions made by these AIs in completely fabricated scenarios, or even a few _obviously_ rigged "real-life tests", there's no way these so-called "AIs" could ever really replace a human where it matters (ie, at the senior management level).
>And boards are largely made up of senior management of other companies, scratching each other's backs.
My experience with boards is that everyone on them would rather be doing something else. If they could offload 90% of their work to AI they would.
I know I did when I was a secretary of (several) boards and used a stt model + Claude to write minutes and agendas for the meetings I was presiding over.
Everyone rather enjoyed having a full and (near) real time overview of everything that had been said over the last three years.
I'm still hoping someone would come up with a good diarization model so we can have in person board meetings with as good transcripts as the zoom ones.
> Boards would (nearly) all quickly agree that the human factor is very important, and regardless of what statistics you might have seen on the decisions made by these AIs in completely fabricated scenarios, or even a few _obviously_ rigged "real-life tests", there's no way these so-called "AIs" could ever really replace a human where it matters (ie, at the senior management level).
Exactly how AI researchers have felt since they AI started doing better than humans in the first tasks. From the ridiculous stat that more chess champions have been disqualified for using AI than we have chess champions. Right now in every chess tournament everyone is "fighting" TWO chess opponents. Their actual opponent ... and an AI chess player (and yes, it's an AI now, IBM and their "not-quite-AI" program is out). If they come even remotely close to beating the AI player, on a move by move basis, they are disqualified and the match is halted.
Humans aren't going to play fair in competing with AIs.
Think roughly L7-L10 at Google, M2-D2 at Meta, 66-70 at Microsoft, etc. People that make "law partner" money but are not C-level executives mentioned in SEC filings.
Decisions would be made 1-2 levels up, so they would not be replacing themselves.
The majority of employees will never have to think about it, but everyone from the CEO down is ultimately hired at their discretion.
To see how things normally operate read up on the OpenAI drama. If Sam Altman wasn't as politically savvy as he was the board would have fired him in a Friday announcement and by Monday a new CEO would have been in charge.