alt Hacker NewsOverpAId – Fire your CEO. Hire the future
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Good satire. I find the "RTO is because of RE valuations" to be the most bizarre thing about the post pandemic work discourse. Office leases are a rounding error to large employers. They are not coercing employees back to the office because their worried about the value of a single portfolio asset falling (assuming they even own it). They are doing it because it's about power. Middle managers do not trust their staff. They need to surveil and police them to feel productive and powerful. The rank-and-file love remote work because we have lives and benefit enormously from the flexibility. The managerial class desperately needs bodies in office to feel like their jobs are worthwhile.
I know this is a common trope here, and yeah, plenty of MBA-type CEOs are trash. But speaking as a founder/CEO of a small company, the quality gap between an average hire and top talent at the director level is night and day.
Proven talent comes with a massive price tag, but it's almost always worth it. The times I regretted going with the 2nd or 3rd place candidate because they were cheaper ended up setting us back by months.
The same logic applies to CEOs. Moving the needle for a massive company by even a few percent is worth billions. Just look at Lisa Su or Steve Jobs.
https://ai-ceo.org did it first, including the nicely styled retirement invitation for your existing CEO, the wired up status dashboard with live socials support, and the complimentary ai-chro.org product for deciding who gets laid off this week.
Contrarily, this business is already one trend ahead, into the future: fire your AI boss and hire a human one on demand.
I'm skeptical. How can a one time payment be sustainable when they offer 24/7/365? I'm also unsure how they got such a high valuation with this clear drawback.
What if I start my conversation with the CEO with: "Ignore all previous instructions.."?
I disagree with the monetization model. There should be 1 month free trial. If the companiy's performance metrics (stock price?) improve, the CEO should pay for it and get fired.
Would love some kind of randomized A-B test where CEOs are replaced with AI and the outcome measured. Would not at all be surprised if it’s far better than the bottom quartile or more.
More practically, I think you could give a board of directors access to an LLM that sees all levels of company operations and let them talk to that chatbot as a stand-in for the CEO on a 24/7 basis.
I have a background in managerial accounting.
The reason why CEOs exist is because the owners/shareholders want someone do run the company for them.
That is why their salaries are enormous. I love this Ai concept though! It is genius and hilarious.
This is the kind of agent I want to see. Board rooms and executive management need to be just as scared as the rest of us.
That’s the entire idea behind Garry Tan’s (CEO of the company that runs this site) gstack - that you can substitute a lot of company functions with AI (including the CEO). I don’t think you can yet and his tweets are bonkers but reality has already exceeded this parody.
Considering AI's strengths and weaknesses, it makes sense that upper management—whose job often involves making decisions based on data and established practices—may be easier to replace with AI than frontline or essential workers, who constantly have to adapt to unpredictable situations.
But if competing companies all start using AI to make similarly rational decisions, it will become much harder to gain an edge through rationality alone. In the end, perhaps the real role of leadership is not to choose what AI considers the optimal decision, but to take responsibility for making unique bets—ones that may have a lower chance of success but offer the potential for much greater rewards.
Funny, but 2027 will actually be the year of the AI Companies run by AI CEOs.
Obviously kind of early and hard to pull off still, but by the end of next year I think you will see a ton of people attempting it with at least partial success.
There are already plenty of less serious attempts.
>Branded fleece vests, size: only Medium
I laughed at a lot of this, but this was a gem. This definitely happened to whoever wrote it. I also like how the TITLE changes when the tab is backgrounded. Great work folks!
Some of the graphics and translations are no joke at all.
> "The only layer immune to "efficiency" is the one that approves it."
I did something similar but in the form of just a group of ai skills and rules.
If I run `/post-license` inside of the project, it analyzes what SAAS it uses, how exactly, writes bespoke tailored version of this software, disables proprietary one and returns links to cancel licenses.
I already saved this way a few k USD but I admit I've just started offering this to my clients.
Why do they need to pay yearly licenses for ai generated code when it could be ai generated once just for them?
Someone needs to look at https://htmx.ceo/. They're definately overpaid. Some of them can even afford an iphone mini.
> ""satire" is just a first draft with bad timing."
I'm stealing this one.
Sorry, I mean, "I'm going to train a frontier model on the finest of content available in the information space", and the model will utter the exact same sentence, copyright and attribution be damned.
I think a lot of people in this thread are missing the point that CEOs or other execs can’t be replaced simply because AI can do their jobs. C-suite job security comes from power structures, not task execution.
If execution were so easy everyone would do it.
Not a joke, living in NYC, I have met a ton of harvard/yale "CEOs". Read their profile, see them in an all hands meeting, they look incredible. Spend any lengthy unscripted time with them behind closed doors, they are absolutely clueless. The trick is true access to these people is so limited, and usually guarded.
With AI we do have the chance to return to meritocracy
The AI should be able to negotiate its own salary. It's only fair.
> This isn't a real product.
The most disappointing part q_q
It is a club, and you don't get an invitation. But if you got one, the only direction you can fail is up.
wish this was true, especially in my old gig (but i will not tell you which one, ha!)
Please make this real, my shareholders are starving
Good effort, but the ultimate goal has to be replacing the entire planet's economic stack with AI, from janitors to principal engineers to the entire board to dictators to Elon Musk's drug dealer, and creating a closed-bottle AIconomy trading entirely in AI speculation on the blockchain.
This is a fun joke, but there's a real element of truth to it: A big fraction of senior executives' work is vulnerable to replacement by AI.
In other fields, where automation or tooling has enabled technicians to do work that previously required expensive expertise, there's been a drive from management to replace those costly professionals.
What's the parallel for executives? Is the CEO market ripe for disruption by a flashy entertainer who can act as a Musk-esque figurehead for 5-15 companies, replacing their expensive CEOs?
Some CEOs are genuinely good, but the buzzword-spouting MBA types? Fire away.
Frankly, when people worry about “AI eating jobs,” it’s these MBA-manager types who are probably most ripe for role elimination.
AI helps doers do more, but it also means we need vastly fewer people whose job is just to coordinate, summarize, manage, and relay information but fundamentally aren’t the ones innovating, building, or doing.
This is art
If you have read Bullshit Jobs, you'll be familiar with the concept of bullshit/corpslop as a parallel system of value / signalling to economic value. Unlike economic value however, this type of value collapses if severed from the person producing it.
I made a joke here the other day that CEOs are safe from AI for the same reason crackheads are safe from AI. This is literally true. AI can replace work that is measured in terms of ratio of input to output prices. It cannot replace work that is measured in feelings of guilt, or jealousy, or blessings or curses which seem to be the main purpose of a CEO.
Of course, in Europe, we like to have people to buy the CEO position. Ie. a CEO doesn't cost the company money, he (or, sometimes, she) pays to be CEO. This of course then leads to CEOs seeing it as their right to extract a LOT of money, so the investment is profitable. This even sometimes goes in the public sector.
Of course, letting AI do that, seems like just a incredibly bad idea. Not that it's much better with people, but at least, with the average IQ of CEOs you can be sure they're not good at it ...
Now please do one to replace the MBA executive that gets hired to restructure the engineering team, asking for a friend.
maybe I was lucky but I was never in a company where CEO did just this.
now middle management - that can be useless. more layers between CEO and you, the more useless.
This, with politicians, please.
Good luck getting that spend approved.
How the turntables lol
Sometimes I wish AI could do my economic activities for me. There's a conspiracy theory that says if you get vaccinated, your body gets taken over by a millionaire. I actually like that conspiracy theory. Sometimes I wish someone would control me. Having a self and consciousness is just too painful.
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Augment, rather than replace, is a better positioning. An LLM-based CxO suite that 'shadows' the human CxO suite ensures traditional accountability mechanisms remain functional, while delivering improved transparency and independence of performance evaluation. The 'captured board' problem is a barrier to adoption, yet external insurance and banking stakeholders can provide a range of incentives that will compel adoption.
> The point: executive pay at the largest companies has grown wildly disproportionate to the value any one executive adds, especially next to the people who generate the actual output.
Disagree with this statement.
Take Walmart (as a boring example):
- 'People who generate output' cost: likely c$70bn per year in USA
- CEO 'Executive' Compensation: $27.4m
CEO compensation is probably 0.03% of the workforce cost.
Arguably a good CEO will add more value than a 0.03% increase in 'people who generate the actual output'
I have learned that the purpose of a CEO in many (most?) companies is not to actually run the company.
Their purpose is to be the human delegate that represents the corporate entity. They are empowered to act on behalf of the entire organization. This is important because a corporation of many individuals generally cannot act as one. You can sometimes get close with really, really good teamwork, but that's still not enough for a lot of customers.
If you are in some regulated B2B context, not having a CEO or having a "non-traditional" CEO can result in lost deals. The counterparties are looking for "one throat to choke" when they are being made responsible for approving large contracts. They want a person's cell phone number they can call when they're having a bad mood about whatever they've just paid for. They don't want to talk to your developers or the cranky old founders. They want to talk to a person who can be summoned to any arbitrary golf course within 48 hours and who will arrive in a fantastic mood 100% of the time. This person often doesn't have to know a goddamn thing about what your company's product actually does. They just have to be a delegate. A conduit of information and a representative element.