[neilsimp1]

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.

[brettgriffin]

> but I'm of the opinion that CEO's don't do a whole lot.

Rather, you just don't understand what CEOs in large public companies actually do. You're comparing them to earlier stage CEOs, who can be more hands on.

When running a public company of a quarter million people, the CEO's responsibility starts to look more like an asset manager responsible for a $4 trillion dollar book.

And no - nobody wants that role replaced by an LLM.

[sharts]

Just invest in a reasonably diverse index fund ( or a few). This is actually the optimal drama free way to go for most.

In the long run nobody out performs consistently anyway. We all get hit due to market events.

You may be giving CEOs much more credit than is due. And for all that they actually do, the outperformer is a rarity not the norm.

LLM could certainly fit this. Particularly when trained with all the MBA nonsense education in the world. It wouldn’t be the end of the world and it wouldn’t be substantially better/worse. But it would be cheaper.

[blairbeckwith]

I'm sorry, I must be missing something. Which companies make up the index funds if (most) CEOs liquidated their companies and invested in index funds? And how would they liquidate at anything close to their valuation without being priced based on their future expectations?

[alpinisme]

I don’t think they meant it literally. They were responding to the comment that their job was “like” managing a portfolio of investments. And in that respect the strategy of diversifying “like” with an index fund seemingly appealed to the commenter.

[al_borland]

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?

[jimbomins]

An AI may be making an ultimately random choice (prove the CEO isn't) but it's actual options are weighted on statistical grounds from much wider sources of data than a human can knowingly handle.

I say knowingly because actually the sum total of accumulated info for just a month or two of human activity eclipses even today's LLM.

And the CEO decisions are frequently flawed because there's a strong filter of the information from below.

Perhaps a crowd sourced (employee sourced) decision making process would be best with the wisdom of crowds.

[sharts]

But his decision quality is why Amazon is full of fake and low quality garbage these days, isn’t it?

[al_borland]

Maybe, but Bezos hasn’t been CEO in over 4 years. Amazon has seemed to double down on the race to the bottom under Jassy.

[swiftcoder]

> his decision quality is why Amazon is full of fake and low quality garbage these days

Is that actually negatively impacting Amazon's bottom line? One tends to assume they'd do something about it if they viewed it as a serious threat to revenue

[fogzen]

Having been a CEO and around many CEOs... they of course do work. But they don't do x250 times more work of another worker. It's just a different type of work. Yet all work from every employee is critical for the enterprise to function. And in my experience, they often do less work than many employees in terms of hours. If you're an on-call engineer for example, your CEO doesn't get paged and have to wake up in the middle of the night. If you look at any enterprise the CEO is likely not the one doing the most work. That's kind of the whole point and the reason they want to become a CEO/founder (to capture a larger share of the wealth for the work they put in).

Capitalist enterprises (with owners vs non-owner workers) are fundamentally non-meritocratic and exploitative. Everyone works to generate value, and only a small class of workers captures the bulk of the value.

[trenchpilgrim]

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.

[paulcole]

> the larger the company, the less I think that CEOs or other C-Suite types actually do

What, specifically do you think they do?

[neilsimp1]

Buy yachts