What does OpenAI need a CEO for anyway? Just let chatGPT run the company if they are so gung-ho about it.
I’ve been saying this for almost a year. Not open AI specifically but any company with a board of directors.
They aren’t considering the shareholder value of their most expensive liability: the CEO.
He (because let’s face it. It’s going to be a he in most cases) is paid millions of dollars with a golden parachute. Literally money that could be given back to shareholders through dividends.
The fact that Boards of Directors aren’t doing this could be evidence that they aren’t looking out for shareholders’ interests
There’s an important thing that the CEO provides that no AI can: the acceptance of risk.
On a day-to-day basis the CEO makes decisions, ignores expert advice, knocks off early for tee time, etc. For this work they are wildly overpaid and could easily be replaced by having their responsibilities divvied up amongst a small group of people in leadership roles.
To see the true purpose of the CEO we need to look at a bigger scale - the quarter-to-quarter scale. What could be bigger than that in the world of the MBA?
Every quarter the CEO must have the company meet the financial performance expectations of the board/owner(s)/shareholders. Failure is likely to result in them losing their job and getting a reputation as an underperformer, thus ruining their career. If the company does poorly or those expectations are unreasonably high then the CEO must cut corners in the operation. This of course hampers their ability to meet expectations later, but they’ll make it through this quarter.
When (inevitably) too many corners have been cut something catastrophic will happen. Either the company’s reputation will go to shit with customers slowly, or a high-profile scandal will blow up in the company’s face.
This is the moment when the CEO provides their most valuable service: to fall (or be pushed) onto their sword. The CEO is fired, ousted, or resigns. This allows the board/owner/shareholders to get a new face in and demand that they fix the most egregious issues, or at least the most glaring ones that don’t cost too much to fix.
This service cannot be provided by an AI. Why? Because the AI is a creation of the company. If it is used as a scapegoat it solves nothing. The company is pointing at their own creation and saying “see, that’s the problem”. It’s much more effective to point at a human they didn’t make and scream that that person made a mistake.
It’s crazy what kind of bullshit some people will spout, like CEOs taking personal responsibility.
CEOs? Ruin their career? By what, jumping ship and taking a $100M bonus?
Lol, like the previous Boeing CEO. Kill a few hundred people, planes or plane components falling out of the sky, absolutely tank all manufacturing quality control, fail a NASA contract and strand a few astronauts…
Peace out and take a $62M bonus.
I wish I could get paid that much for failure or “accepting responsibility” lol
I can’t wait for the AI bubble to burst.
We are all waiting. If they don’t come up with proven revenue opportunities in the next ~18 months, it’s going to be difficult to justify the astronomical capex spend.
Which tech titan does it take with it?
My money is on Microsoft as owners of OpenAI, but most have sunk more into it than they should.
Microsoft are bullet proof. Their share price will take a big hit, and an exec or two will take a golden parachute, but they’ll bounce back very quickly. The bigger problem is that along the way they’ll balance the capex with multiple rounds of cutbacks and layoffs in other departments, and that’s before they’re finally forced to layoff everyone actually connected to this AI nonsense (who isn’t a senior manager or c-suite; they’ll all be fine).
Nvidea. Their share price would be a fraction of what it is without AI. Just like the last two cryptocurrency bubbles, they went all in and then acted surprised when they popped.
At the same time, they’ve lost a lot of goodwill with gamers, formerly their core audience. With the AAA industry pulling back, games might not be pushing the limits of GPU tech anymore. Microsoft still has their old core products, but Nvidia may return to it to find a wasteland.
Nvidia isn’t going to be holding any bag. They’re selling through what they make, and LLMs are just one of many uses for the massively parallel math they’re at the forefront of. At most they have to bring pricing down, but they don’t own the fab, so if demand did drop (which isn’t really all that likely), their costs will go down too. They have contracts in terms of volume and price, but they’re not near long term enough to do them more than a blip, and all their investment in developing architecture/tooling has value well outside of LLM nonsense.
I’ve heard someone call it billionaire brain rot. I think at some point you end up with so much money and not enough people telling you no, that it literally changes your brain.
Seems likely.
Imagine never hearing the word “No.” as a complete sentence ever again in your life.
$7trillion is three times the GDP if Brazil. It is bigger then the US federal budget. Seriously it is insane.
A-and all that money is basically scammed out of hype over something that won’t be the thing people think it will be, because that would be a magic wand for everything.
When they mean artificial intelligence, they mean some kind of self-designing civilization, except it does their bidding. Goethe’s Zauberlehrling comes to mind.
And a lot of money does find a way to do things, just like a lot of effort applied does find a way to break something. Except the curves are not linear, and no amount of effort and money has allowed us to settle Mars yet.
He is an empty husk of a man who has completed his transformation into a pure PR machine
His involvement in the infamous WorldCoin provides useful insight into his character.
An oligarch and a degenerate (outside the US many oligarchs have a more or less sober understanding of who they are, although degeneracy among oligarchs is a global issue).
