I know people get a chuckle out of it, but does it not make more sense to have CEO LLM that will make decisions without regard for its own needs, self-interest, conflicts and so on? Honestly, the longer this particular debate rages on, I think shareholders are looking the wrong set of humans to replace.
Just hire a tall, handsome man with a full head of hair, but have all of their decisions and public statements scripted by CEO-BOT. You could train the LLM on a huge corpus of yes-men and sycophants, until it can perfectly imitate the output of a real CEO.
Our premise as a startup is that we should want CEOs that use AI to make higher quality decisions, than either status quo human only CEOs or AGI CEOs that do not have direct liability. The analogy is that planes are seen as safe using autopilot because the human pilot gets on board with you. Societally I think the same thing is true of CEO decision making AIs.
I think all key roles should have a LLM as a double-check. The CEO LLM recommends what the CEO should do and its another data point. Overtime, if the CEO does what the LLM recommends 99% of the time... you can replace the CEO.
Even if they didn't they'd be a hell of a lot cheaper. If, say, Microsoft can replace Satya Nadella with something that costs effectively nothing, is constantly available, and is even 95% as good, I'd think it would be a good deal for them.
I know this is more of a throwaway cynical quip, but this is a biased line of thinking. CEO's are, for obvious reasons, more likely to do things they wouldn't be held liable for, versus do things which would see them likely to be punished. So executives might, for example, get away with things by successfully skirting the line of legality.
Say an AI CEO blatantly crosses this line, now who is liable?
It is already used widely across industries where one would think people should be more conservative ( healthcare transcription services come to mind, but it is hardly the only example of this ). As always in America, only lawsuits will shows us how the dust has settled.
Well, at least one CEO is being honest about the owning class's end goal with AI: a new source of cheap labor, but this time without entities that can negotiate.
I like Perplexity as a product. I’ve used the product a bit and was always impressed that it seemed pretty balanced.
Why would the leadership of a fairly popular, generally well-liked company with a generally useful, generally well-liked product take a pretty strident stance at the maximally high-temperature moment: fuck labor as a bloc, we’ll cross the strike lines?
Don’t technology companies want to avoid this kind of political shit and just build and ship?
If it was about giving customers products yeah sure. But it's really about making the stock price go up. Politics is a great way to adjust the stock price. See esg scores.
It'll be a human-like-centipede of hallucinating bots writhing on a Metaverse conference room table, "air dropping" new shitcoins into each others mouths for eternity ... or until there are no more tires left to burn or the source of whatever they're using for power this week runs out.
To be fair, I think the public bristled at the longshoremen strike because the vast majority of their leverage comes not from (most) of their jobs being particularly high-skill but from the fact that they can unilaterally destroy the entire economy for everyone else. Add to that the fact that their union chief was extremely blunt about the whole thing, and that longshoremen make, on average, triple the average household income in the US, it wasn't a very sympathetic cause.
Fighting for anything but your right to be an asshole has never, ever been popular in the US. The labor wars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that led to modern professional comforts like the weekend were wildly unpopular; the women's suffrage movement was unpopular; the civil rights movement to end what we would clearly call Apartheid now was extremely unpopular; MLK was unpopular during his entire tenure in the public eye; today you see the same contempt and tone-policing of protestors against both police brutality and the mass slaughter in Gaza. It's a tale as old as time and media outlets are more than happy play along and fan the flames.
Popularity (especially with a population that's so easy to discomfort as americans are) is largely irrelevant to power, which is what actually matters. Unions would be complete fools to NOT leverage the american economy to better themselves or to force a move from the federal government.
What if they use it as an augmentation rather than completely replacement? Could it be used to reduce time required per person? Could it be used to reduce headcount, without a lack of quality?
Replacing your whole workforce with a machine, at this state, is silly, but that's not the only option.
I was able to get Perplexity to hallucinate very easily. Once it even cited the article where I got the prompt idea (I forget the URL, it was about teddy bears in space and published by the Signpost.) That was a while ago and I assume their model has improved, but hallucinations are still much more of a risk with AI than humans.
Also, how can Perplexity do things like interviews, tours, and other things that still require large amounts of human interaction?
Isn't the tech union the one striking? So what is he implying -- that perplexity would automate the software development of the NYT needle or something?
“ The NYT and Perplexity aren’t exactly on the best of terms right now. The Times sent Perplexity a cease and desist letter in October over the startup’s scraping of articles for use by its AI models.”
Just trying to smooth things over now… in the most supervillain way possible.
So much work to avoid being upset at this guy: "But to offer its services explicitly as a replacement for striking workers was bound to be an unpopular move."
No, really? You'd think these AI guys would have better PR departments.
Claude would tell you that this is a shitty move PR wise and likely to backfire.
Edit: Tried it, and yes claude started it's answer with: "I need to strongly advise against making such an offer publicly". No wonder these people are so impressed by their AIs, considering they are making worse choices than their models.
No, but the companies that operate them are thinking long term. Once they are completely embedded into the company (read: difficult to replace), they ratchet up the fees.
Nevermind all the costs and work involved with onboarding.
Current LLMs can (because they are still maintained by humans). I think it will be a decade still until we have software maintaining itself (i.e., rewriting its own code, fixing vulnerabilities, etc)
I don't see how this is negative PR. It's an effective, positive, advertisement for anyone actually interested in the service (business or personal): "Oh wow, it could replace a reporter? I should try it!".
The purpose of technology: reduce human effort. But, technology is always unpopular to those whose efforts are being reduced.
Now, is it possible for their AI to replace them is another question. What sort of reduction for headcount/time spent, without a negative impact on quality, is a better question. But, a question that people that hear this might be asking now.
And, to be fair, I don't know anyone who enjoys simple facts being wrapped in corporate bullshit. What would be better verbiage? I think it's refreshing that it was stated directly, rather than some nothing statement about striving to do good and support customers without responding to the issue at all, as is usually the case.
Honestly, the fact that he posted it the way he did, publicly in a tweet suggests he wasn’t trying to undermine workers but rather wanted to be seen as supporting election coverage. Based on his past interviews, he seems quite autistic in ways.
But really I think this could have been a good opportunity to strike some licensing deal in exchange for technology, had he been a bit more discreet
Because in a ruthless cuthroat world everyone but the very worst of people lose out, and even then the very worst tend to lose too since the whole distribution shifts down, not just the mean/mode/median but the min/max as well.
ultimately, if you create a system where the only tools left are those also avaliable to the stupid, and therefore skills the stupid have an edge in, given a lifetime of experience, then your whole system becomes run by / dominated by these types.
toxic behaviour and violenece in general are tools of the stupid, for only the stupid would fail to see mutually benefifial alternatives.
If the idea of immoral business (under the false guise of "amorality" - false because amorality still implies the avoidance of explicit harm) becomes too widespread, the resulting suffering will be large enough that people will start killing CEOs (or the closest thing they can get) in numbers. Which, to be clear, is bad.
