alt Hacker NewsCEOs Who Think AI Replaces Their Employees Are Just Bad CEOs
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CEOs understands that AI offers potential productivity increases. Using that productivity boost to cut staff is an unimaginative approach. Bolder approaches include using that boost to exceed the expectations of current customers, or to increase sales without proportional increase in staff, etc.
There are a lot of bad CEOs, though. It's a lot like a politician -- it's quite difficult to become a CEO, and the skills to make it to that position don't always intersect nicely with the skills necessary to actually do the job well.
A custom-built AI would be pretty good at replacing a CEO. Think of all the things a company could do if they reduced overhead by that much?
If AI makes you more capable, it’s basically like having a capital injection.
CEOs that look at that and think they need to reduce headcount seem to also be signaling they don’t know what to do with increased resources
Why can't we get AI models that replace these CEOs? I bet they're pretty good at running a company.
There are a LOT of bad CEOs.
There are also a LOT of bad software developers.
When they meet, the software developer is fired.
The CEO exits after a while, after exercising their stock options...
>> Yes, the tools are powerful, but a CEO who thinks they replace the work of employees is simply a bad CEO.
This is a broad generalization of employees. There will be some "routine tasks" that can be done by AI, now that is a lot more powerful.
There won't be as many employees needed for routine work - for example L1 and L2 support work. For example, many companies had ML engineers building models for various models. Companies can get that off the shelf from AI companies. They don't need a big team of model builders now.
Wait, tech CEOs don’t understand why employees are valuable?
Astronaut holding up gun to other astronaut
Always have been.
It’s hilarious to me that when you stop investing in juniors and seniors who use your AIs retire, what are they going to do then?
Wow the token leaderboard idea is nuts. It's similar to trying to measure the productivity of software engineers based on number of lines of code.
CEOs who think that excavators replace their hand-diggers are just bad CEOs
This is a great article, and I agree with most of it.
The problem is that the wrong eyes are seeing it.
We need these kinds of articles to be published in places that executives read, and tailored to their audience.
AI recovery is going to be a big wave of consulting over the next several years, maybe very publicly or maybe quietly, but it's going to be a thing. That doesn't mean "all AI is bad" or any other such nonsense, it means that there are a lot of companies out there right now that are doing it wrong and will need help.
The executives that get ahead of this are going to be the winners.
A story from today - I needed a small utility to remap my logitech buttons under windows without installing their horrendous GHUB. Logitech Onboard Memory Manager still required ghub to be put into onboard mode.
The solution - linux has utility called piper. I downloaded the repo and just told codex - figure out what piper is doing and create me a small utility to do it under windows. So the jolly critter started experimenting with hex commands, then pulled some other repo on which piper depended figured out how to enable said onboard mode and 10-sh minutes later I had small python script that did what i needed to do.
That would have taken probably half a day of work for a human.
There are many stupid CEO and organizations which are not committed to quality. And a lot of employees that are too set in their ways. But the instinct that underinvesting in AI is more dangerous than overinvesting is right. Doomed if you do, doomed if you don't
"To err is human, but to really foul things up requires a computer" - this is from the 60, but right now is turned into overdrive.
CEOs are probably the most replaceable position, period, by human or AI. Everyone just gives them information. They don't know any information themselves.
Problem is, a CEO can fire employees, find out it was a dumb decision, then leave with a million dollar severance package. So they don't really care when they're wrong.
It's our fault for stupidly naming everything AI:
A* search -> AI
Backtracking -> AI
Neural Networks -> AI
Fuzzy Logic -> AI
Genetic Algorithm -> AI
Deep Learning -> AI
Generative "AI" -> AI
Similar to Tesla naming it's driver assistant "auto-pilot" in 2015 and your average Joe thought he would be able to sleep while the car would drive him to work.
The CEO just hear AI and think of AGI. They expect Skynet.
The CEOs that think AI replaces their employees are the same that at the same time don't want to pay the AI costs.
The primary product of AI is labor displacement and consequently wage supression. This is what OpenAI and Anthropic are really selling. It didn't start with AI but AI is accelerating it.
This is what layoffs have been about since the pandemic. People in fear of losing their jobs do extra unpaid work and aren't asking for raises. The theoretical potential of AI gives companies the excuse to fire more people. The investment itself is directly used as a reason of why they need to cut back on labor.
Any sufficiently sized business can only feed the insatiable hunger for ever-increasing profits ultimately by cutting costs and raising prices. And what do we have now? High inflation and a decline in real wages. CEOs are just following this playbook.
And the result is that society is bouldering towards collapse. We're seeing the first hints of this with the youth unemployment crisis [1][2][3].
Also, who is going to buy anything when nobody has any money?
[1]: https://www.americanprogress.org/article/americas-10-million...
[2]: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/twelve-ways-to-fix-the-yo...
Previously:
Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48295679
I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis
So much of this hype feels like astroturf in preparation for the upcoming IPOs:
https://tomtunguz.com/spacex-openai-anthropic-ipo-2026/
and I don't know what worries me more - a burst in this bubble (and maybe some other tech stocks), or a failure of these valuations to be burst somehow, and even more concentration of capital and power around those corporations.
Most CEOs are not special. They are not especially smart, or skilled, or technical. The role self selects for sociopathy. That's not a quality that has any kind of linear relationship with intelligence. Quite the contrary.
A common misconception about AI is that it is intended to fully replace humans, which is incorrect. The purpose of AI is to reduce the need for human labor, and it has already been doing so. For example—though this is not an exact figure—a task that previously required 15 people might now only need 10. In no instance has the human element been completely replaced; rather, the reliance on manual labor has simply been reduced.
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Reminds me of the old joke "90% of the code is 90% of the work. The last 10% of the code is the other 90% of the work."
I have spent almost my entire adult life (since 1986) shipping products. One of the very first things that I learned, was that "shipping" > "designing".
There's so much work in delivering products that will carry your brand, and then must be supported.
I liken it to having children. Conceiving them is fun. Delivering them is painful. Raising them, is a lifetime of work.
In my experience, the same type of thing applies to products that we ship (and charge money for).