CEO fired developers to make room for AI. Developers create open source AI CEO

GrumpySciGuy

A team of software developers were recently let go so a company could replace them with AI. So they got together and created an Open Source AI CEO to replace the CEO and other executives. Hopefully, turnabout is fair play and this might even get some folks to think twice about using AI to replace people.

Animats

Is this automated CEO any good? Is there a listing from a demo session?

edoceo

What does a CEO(and other managers) do really? Sometimes the claim is "set vision" - which AI can extract from the collective. Someimes the claim is to prioritize the work (with bias), AI can extract that from the collective too, right? Making resources available to the team? AI. Coordinating between teams? AI. Can the AI do this in a more un-biased way? Can it refine collective intelligence and desire into objective goals? More than a software factory id love to see a manager-factory. One thing, AI cannot do (yet) is bring the network. Like when you hire folk from Booth or Sloan so you can sell to places that hired Booth and Sloan grads.

nullorempty

Honestly, this is hilarious! Please replace CTOs while you are at it and most architects can also be replaced easily!

cactusplant7374

What company fired them? I don't see that in the repo but maybe I missed it.

Brajeshwar

I’m all for productive people, brilliant engineers. I still get dirty with codes/work all the way down to the newly hired fresh out of college kids, to the production architects that shapes multi-million, if not billions, of P&L. I’m also very lucky to be included in key decision making, planning, negating amongst the boards of C-Suites, Directors, VPs. A very personal view but many developers/engineers fail to see the overall picture. And yes, I was there and I went through all of the mistakes. The things you see on the surface of those incompetent CxOs are just the tiny piece of the bigger picture. You cannot replace blames, decision in the face of uncertainty. Almost all decisions that businesses take have nothing to do with the proficiencies of technologies or engineering finesse, or even the best options, but mostly on “incentives” and who can take/own the “blame.” “AI” replacing developers is evident because that is a rather tiny perspective and kinda easy to do the equation - developer can do that (good, bad, best) and can the AI do it - maybe, perhaps. So, replace. A C-Suite took a decision to tick the final approval of a billion dollar deal with a service providers (amongst 10s of them). The idea might have sounded idiotic because there were 3 others better at the top than the chosen one. Even if all of the task and options were weighted with AI, but that last human decision is the Blame that the C-Suite took on, by betting his incentives on it (money, fame, pride, ego.)

yunnpp

An auditable executive would certainly be a first.

walrus01

looks like a good way to run up a really large anthropic token bill.

bwhiting2356

Many CEOs are bad and their businesses will either fail or be bailed out. But the work CEOs do is probably some of the last to get automated - higher order strategy, relationship building, managing people.

jameslk

I get it’s a joke, and often a frequent cynical joke made here, but I actually think it’s a good thought experiment. Almost like a new Turing test The thought experiment, to be clear, is building an artificially intelligent CEO or company founder with the intent of generating profit. If this AI can turn a profit, it has passed this new test Of course, by the time this new AI starts turning a profit, it will be maximized to the extent that it loses its competitive advantage, and then we’re back to square 1. That is, when everyone uses the same AI, nobody has a competitive advantage over anyone else My current theory is that because of this, it is not possible to build an AI that generates a profit perpetually. Only temporarily. Then human intervention would be required to adjust things to make the AI competitive again. But at that point, it’s no longer an AI driving the profit, it’s its human tinkerer

jmyeet

This has likely been the case as long as jobs have existed. Some CEOs spend their entire time tweeting, apparently. The way any large company works, and this includes all the big tech companies, is that they end up in a state of constant churn. Every 6 months or so there's a reorganization. There'san old joke that you get an email that your manager's manager's manager's manager now reports to a new manager and you've never heard of any of these people. The point of that churn is to make sure nobody is ever held responsible for something not working. It's never given enough time. That's by design. Middle (and even senior) management is about empire-building. Another quote that springs to mind is that the bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy. That's how I feel about management bloat. Anyone who has paid attention to Intel's downfall in the last decade will have heard stories about how the company descended into fiefdoms and it became impossible to get anything done. That's what happens. Most people in these organizations aren't particularly talented at anything other than forming social relationships. the leadership of these companies always end up having an adversarial relationship with their workers and try to suppress their wages to increase profits so they can get their stock options and bonuses and the CEOs all sit on each other's boards of directors setting each other's compensation packages. It's a lootocracy. The point of all this is that the leadership will never decide that they are the problem. Take Meta's Metaverse. It was a $70 billion flop. A lot of people got laid off from that. Were any of those worker bees responsible? Nope. They didn't choose the strategy or probably even what they worked on. It takes a lot for heads to roll within senior leadership and with the vote-stacked share structures of many major tech companies, ousting a CEO is essentially impossible.

janalsncm

To the extent this is tongue in cheek it is funny, but I could imagine if I was building a startup I’d like something like this if it was good . That said, if you look at what it’s actually doing (read the question carefully, then read what it actually said) I am not convinced this is better than what ChatGPT could do out of the box already. https://youtu.be/O_g97xxVTMk

thelastgallon

The best use of AI is to replace CEOs, C-Suite, politicians and bureaucrats. Let them feel the heat for the first time in their life. Interested folks can start by putting in shareholder resolutions with the proposal and the prompts that would replace CEO. SKILLs.md?

matchbok3

Number of people who think that a leader or a CEO can be replaced by AI and who themselves have actually risked everything to start a company, be a leader, or do anything similar: exactly 0.

theodorewiles

I think AI CEOs are dumb but AI 'enterprise decision-makers' could be very very interesting. Imagine how quickly your meetings could get resolved if you had teams submit prompts / contexts, had a clear, documented set of overarching objectives, etc.?

IronWolve

Finally a use for Grok Bots!

euio757

CEO here, thanks just fired all my C suite team, https://github.com/SenteLabsAI/OpenExecutive/blob/main/packa... “Walking away costs you the deal. Signing costs you the company. The math is obvious in retrospect; harder in the moment when there's quota pressure” such valuable, should I say load-bearing insights Other gem from my new CFO: “The financial statements are the result. The variance analysis is where the operating insight lives.” And my new C(3-)PO just told me “If we removed all sales involvement, what % of revenue would we still get? #5 is the honest PLG test. If the answer is <30%, PLG is supplementary at best. If the answer is >60%, PLG is the actual motion and the rest is overlay.”

respectattentio

After firing all, when CEO can fire themselves to be just founders? This will be epic.

cmiles8

Honestly the best use of AI at the moment is to replace non-technical middle management layers. Many of those yelling the loudest for “more AI now” are quite ironically holding the jobs best replaced by the current creation of AI.

nullorempty

Let's also replace politicians and other officials. AI - might finally "care for miners and not the minors on the island somewhere". Therefore, AI will not be blackmailed into doing shit.