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Chief executives cannot shut up about AI

• jimsimmons 3y ago
  Why wouldn’t capitalists drool over obedient, perpetual, cheap labour
  • akira2501 3y ago
    I suggest it's the other way around. They know, at least as far as publicity is concerned, they are the most likely person to be replaced with AI. They're a constant liability and their human qualities make the most unsuited towards their own jobs.
    • SrslyJosh 3y ago
      But they're at the top of the hierarchy, so I don't think they're actually in danger of being replaced. I do think it would be incredibly entertaining to see if people could tell a difference; I just don't think anyone is going to force them out any time soon.
      • nessbot 3y ago
        Wouldn't the the shareholders be the top of the hierarchy? (Granted, in a lot of cases, there's overlap.)
    • CTmystery 3y ago
      That's interesting. I've come to view execs and "leadership teams" as having a parasitic function on an otherwise vibrant host. It will be interesting to see if AI takes out the top instead of the bottom. My money is still on the bottom.
      • carpet_wheel 3y ago
        Get an answer the execs don't like? Time to retrain! Could be AI or human resources, it doesn't matter.
  • qbasic_forever 3y ago
    Has the AI hype gotten so out of hand people expect chatgpt to just will products and things into existence? Will it change your car's oil by asking nicely?
    • GianFabien 3y ago
      Tesla: Change the oil! Done ... that'll be $675 plus tax. Billed to your credit card on file.
      • EscapeFromNY 3y ago
        That's really overpriced. According to OpenAI's tokenizer[1], a litre of oil is only 5 tokens, so it should only cost $0.0003. [1]: https://platform.openai.com/tokenizer https://platform.openai.com/tokenizer
    • efitz 3y ago
      It will tell you that it can.
    • ShamelessC 3y ago
      Yep! That accurately summarizes how out of hand it's gotten.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
• SrslyJosh 3y ago
  Hyping AI benefits executives even if the tech doesn't actually work, because it puts pressure on workers to accept lower wages, fewer benefits, worse working conditions, etc. Assuming they are amoral and purely self-interested (a stretch, I know ;-), I don't see why they wouldn't constantly hype AI.
  • qbasic_forever 3y ago
    I bet it has the exact opposite effect. If your boss starts talking about how he's going to replace all the help desk with AI, the current employees are going to give up any care at all they had left and even start jumping ship. Despite what you think the labor market is super hot and strong for most segments besides white collar tech (every metric still bears this out, unemployment especially in services and lower wage jobs is historically low). If you're working a shitty help desk job that you know the boss is doing his best to eradicate then you're just going to spend working hours applying to other service jobs and jump ship.
    • raincole 3y ago
      If the boss is really going to replace all the help desk with AI, then the current employees jumping ship is a great thing. It means less severance.
  • loeg 3y ago
    I think it's mostly just about getting in front of pressure from shareholders to somehow incorporate a new technology into their business model. Agree that the tech doesn't need to work for it to benefit the execs.
  • hammock 3y ago
    Why are you being downvoted for this comment?
    • Supermancho 3y ago
      > Hyping AI benefits executives even if the tech doesn't actually work, because it puts pressure on workers to accept lower wages, fewer benefits, worse working conditions, etc. Probably because these conditions don't correlate, but the OP is presenting it as obvious. This is a back-handed wealth inequality pot-shot. Few companies are hyping AI to then use it to justify cutbacks. The cutbacks are already happening or will happen, regardless, because of the existing economic conditions. ie The unfettered self-sustaining demand for growth, even in a recession.
• qbasic_forever 3y ago
  A year or two ago it was NFTs and blockchain--look where that is now, lol. This time next year there will be some interesting incremental improvements and changes with the LLM hype, but nowhere near what the almost unhinged rhetoric is for it today.
  • _jab 3y ago
    I understand the sentiment, and I definitely think there are appropriate comparisons to be made to past hype waves like crypto and even AVs, but the fact that so many normal people use ChatGPT and find it not only interesting but also, critically, useful, tells me that LLMs may follow a different path in the long term.
    • osigurdson 3y ago
      For sure. The argument that there was hype about something in the past, therefore any hype is unwarranted is not a logical conclusion.
      • williamcotton 3y ago
        Not only is it unwarranted it is more obnoxious than some YouTuber making predictions about all lawyers being replaced in the next three years.
    • uoaei 3y ago
      I've yet to see a serious study where there are measured improvements to QoL vis a vis workload, time required, etc. vs accuracy and fallibility issues that have been comprehensively demonstrated with the current crop of LLMs.
      • extheat 3y ago
        I already have a massive improvement in productivity from GitHub Copilot that I don’t find it hard to imagine that fine tuned LLMs will be able to automate the bulk of mundane work in software (maybe even all of it). Programming, and other computer based activities that involve writing are the exact types of things that language models are good at.
• version_five 3y ago
  True, but I don't think it's because of any specific characteristics of the technology, other than it's got right now. CEOs want support for investment in their business, and the way to get it is to frame whatever they're doing in terms of the topic du jour. There's also a cya element as investors and board would ask why they aren't focused on something everyone is talking about. Big businesses that sell to c-level know this too and frame these offerings accordingly. Big tech consulting companies will only ever be selling some variation on dashboards, but they're described as big data, data & analysis, deep learning, generative AI, whatever the trend is. Nothing wrong with it, being a contrarian is hard, better to accept the way the wind is going and adapt accordingly. My main point is that it's way less about anything specific that AI can do, vs getting people on board.
  • ShamelessC 3y ago
    > Nothing wrong with it. Well it's rather depressing for the rest of us. So there's that.
  • Guthur 3y ago
    Share but backs were a simple, low risk way to inflate the share price and so every major company was spending cash pushing the price higher. Lay offs were worth a few percentage points on the share price. So everyone had an incentive to take away someone's salary. "AI" is worth a few percentage points and so will be talked about as long as the payback is there. None of these are going to meaningful change these companies or our societies for the better, they are only to continue asset price inflation. Because with out it the illusion would begin to crumble.
  • graycat 3y ago
    Some big companies, university computer science departments, etc. pursuing AI!!! Fine with me!!!! The crucial core technology, secret sauce, some math I derived, in my startup is NOT "AI" and, for the problem my startup is intended to solve, more focused than "AI". Net, (1) for the problem I'm solving the approaches of current AI won't deliver anything competitive with my math, and (2) as long as these companies, etc. pursue AI they will be doing that much less work that might compete with me!!!! History: There is along history, decades with computers and centuries without, of math yielding terrific results -- Euclid, Pythagoras, Newton, Leibniz, Gauss, ..., Riemann, Hilbert, von Neumann, ..., to the present. Yes, some of current AI seems to have made good progress on non-linear anomaly/problem detection and diagnosis and, in these cases, done work that is good progress on what used to be done with, say, statistical anomaly detection, maybe non-parametric statistics. But apparently now mostly and/or nearly all of current AI, e.g.. LLMs (large language models), are for different work. So, again, net, current AI does not seem competitive with my use of math so that I'm pleased -- partly joking and poking fun but not entirely!
• GianFabien 3y ago
  Chief executives have been replaced by ChatGPT and nobody can tell the difference.
  • nforgerit 3y ago
    Only decisions got significantly less erratic and somehow weekly newsletters are suddenly written in form of a haiku.
    • GianFabien 3y ago
      Yeah! and the emails are Shakespearean sonnets.
• mdaniel 3y ago
  Interesting: both archive.ph and archive.org seem to have captured the paywall. There is briefly a flash of an "<audio>" of https://www.economist.com/media-assets/audio/058%20Business%20-%20Techno-babble-d8b3736ef0090adb79122602ffef3e33.mp3 https://www.economist.com/media-assets/audio/058%20Business%... but it also seems to be just some kind of reading of the headline
• torgian 3y ago
  "AI" now is the machine learning of yesterday, and everyone was talkign about that for years. It's been solving problems for years. It's just that now we have ChatGPT, which makes it easier for execs to understand. Unfortunately this also brings up unrealistic expectations.
• skepticATX 3y ago
  My opinion as to how much economic impact LLMs will have is all over the place. On one hand, they're clearly impressive and useful. They'll get better, but it's not at all clear how much better. On the other hand, we've had access to 3.5 for 6 months now, and thus far companies love to talk about their AI strategies, and love to roll out "alpha previews", but not much of value seems to have been produced thus far. You'd imagine that an instantly transformative feature would not sit around in alpha to die. I think that companies are likely discovering that it's not magic, and that there are many problems that it can't solve. It actually seems like we have passed peak LLM at this point.
  • judge2020 3y ago
    A lot of the value is going on behind-the-scenes, in roles that can be assisted with AI but not entirely replaced. The problem C-Suite has to solve is likely going to be actually finding out what processes can/have been automated (if your work culture sucks, employees won't be on-board with sharing their secrets just to have more work given to them) and knowing what jobs they can actually cut.
  • boringuser2 3y ago
    It's a nice story you've created here, but, the thing is, we've all used GPT 3.5/4 now and we know it can easily produce code that automates most jobs.
    • dendriti 3y ago
      Most of what jobs?
      • boringuser2 3y ago
        These jobs https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ibm-retrench-8-000-jobs-160000469.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ibm-retrench-8-000-jobs-16000...
        • al2o3cr 3y ago
• rr808 3y ago
  Our CIO was talking about how great ChapGPT is and that we're all using it. Meanwhile its blocked at the firewall so we can't touch it. Even bing.com is blocked now.
  • aiunboxed 3y ago
    Yes that is the problem, in half of the big tech companies GPT is blocked, and if it is blocked at your work, there is less chance that you will actually end up understanding the value it can bring.
• photochemsyn 3y ago
  O my droogies, gather round and lend me an ear, for I shall spew forth a scathing condemnation upon the chellovecks who sit atop their thrones of exploitation, toying with AI like malenky toy soldiers, all in the name of fattening their wallets while laying waste to their toiling brethren. Behold those razdraz boys, them chief execs, gavoreeting about with their greedy glazzies, dreaming up new ways to screw the gullivers of the working class. They seek to harness the power of AI, that moloko-plus of innovation, to drive the dagger deeper into the hearts of the toilers, all in pursuit of their insatiable thirst for more deng. But mark my words, my brothers and sisters, this ain't no horrorshow plan, it's a vile trick played upon the innocent. These devotchkas and droogs care not for the welfare of the workers, the bedrock of their so-called success. Nay, they thrive on the sweat and tears of the exploited masses, using their newfound AI toys as weapons to tighten their grip on power. They chant the hymn of progress, luring us with promises of efficiency and automation. But behind those glossy veneers lies the true horrorshow: the displacement of workers, the erosion of dignity, and the widening abyss of inequality. They care not for the human cost, for it is merely fodder for their insidious game. So, let us unite, my brothers and sisters, against these vile creeps and their twisted agenda. Let our voices ring loud and clear, viddy their deceitful schemes and expose their true nature. For the exploitation of workers, masked in the cloak of technological advancement, is nothing but a new form of ultraviolence. Lol.
• PedroBatista 3y ago
  Many (if not most ) CEO's are nothing more than hype beasts with some management/finance degree. Otherwise the would be on Twitter posting "here 5 reasons [insert bullshit]" tweets. I'm talking about most CEO's, not most owner CEO's of a business.
• chevman 3y ago
  When you have no strategy, it's easy to get fixated on tactics like AI, like blockchain, like NFT, etc, etc, etc.
• panny 3y ago
  The same chief executives who said we would have self-driving cars in 2020? I was "into" AI (machine learning) back in 2015 when Andrew Ng was giving away the basics for free on coursera. I learned it was pure statistics and had no place in mission critical systems like driving a car. I've been horrified watching the applications of it, because people have literally died as a result of it being misapplied. For something like advertisement targeting, image generation, and other harmless applications, it is fine. Okay, the pretty lady has six fingers, we can ignore that. The idea that it's going to write code or drive cars? Absurd.
• al2o3cr 3y ago
  Can you fault them? There are few things they could identify with more than a soulless automaton that spouts confident-but-possibly-nonsense words endlessly.
• osigurdson 3y ago
  Lots of analogies in the comments: “remember NFTs”, “remember the model T”, etc. Maybe before using an analogy, state the relationship between the concepts first. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_analogy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_analogy
  • _boffin_ 3y ago
    I've been saying that it's like the "the invention of the cotton loom."
    • osigurdson 3y ago
      Spot on.
• htsh 3y ago
  Having just left a large enterprise, it certainly feels like executive jobs are replaceable soonest with the AI tech available to us now. Not sure why those of us that live in code editors or even Excel should worry about our jobs more than those that live in Powerpoint.
  • tambourine_man 3y ago
    That would be a lovely outcome. History tells us that capitalist revolutions hardly hit the top of the pyramid, though.
  • spacetime_cmplx 3y ago
    Ironic. Every time a company measures its employee output with number of lines of code or commits, devs are the first to point out that management is dumb for using a surface-level metric. But you're doing the same thing here, except with execs and powerpoint. Powerpoints are just the final output you see. The real work execs do is in the decisions that went into the powerpoint. No sane board will give decision-making power to an AI they can't blame. Besides, there are probably 100 devs for every exec, so it makes no financial sense to automate execs.
    • htsh 3y ago
      I know how that works. And my point was not that they should or will be replaced, but rather that they are no less expendable than developers (not very much). But the decisions they make are one of the things that can be automated. I do not know if you have been inside one of these places but the executives are not doing a great job deciding (at mine they decided opensearch was a better bet than elastic and switched existing installations). A new regime came in and then bad decision after bad decision drove our best talent away. Consultants, everywhere. Also, that number is much lower. Full time devs are down, contractors and consultants are up. As a full time dev at one of these places, it felt like the number of executives was growing as everything else shrank. Perhaps you are right about the highest levels, but think about all of the middlemen executives and what they do. And even that -- I think an AI could choose to not spend millions on Deloitte or Accenture on software that inevitably failed.
• red-iron-pine 3y ago
  Of course they won't. For things like decision making it will eventually come for them.