I was a generalist who was technical and creative enough to identify technical and creative people smarter and more talented than myself and then fostering an environment where they could excel.
How unfitting to the storyline that got created here.
To explore this, I'd like to hear more of your perspective - did you feel that most CEOs that you met along your journey were similar to you (passionate, technical founder) or something else (MBA fast-track to an executive role)? Do you feel that there is a propensity for the more "human" types to appear in technical fields versus a randomly-selected private sector business?
FWIW I doubt that a souped-up LLM could replace someone like Dr. Lisa Su, but certainly someone like Brian Thompson.
I doubt my (or anyone else's) personal experience of CEOs we've met is very useful since it's a small sample from an incredibly diverse population. The CEO of the F500 valley tech giant I sold my startup to had an engineering degree and an MBA. He had advanced up the engineering management ladder at various valley startups as an early employee and also been hired into valley giants in product management. He was whip smart, deeply experienced, ethical and doing his best at a job where there are few easy or perfect answers. I didn't always agree with his decisions but I never felt his positions were unreasonable. Where we reached different conclusions it was usually due to weighing trade-offs differently, assigning different probabilities and valuing likely outcomes differently. Sometimes it came down to different past experiences or assessing the abilities of individuals differently but these are subjective judgements where none of us is perfect.
It seems like you're trying to reduce a complex and varied range of disparate individuals and contexts into a more black and white narrative. The archetypical passionate tech founder vs the clueless coin-operated MBA suit is a false dichotomy. Reality is rarely that tidy or clear under the surface. I've seen people who fit the "passionate tech founder" narrative fuck up a company and screw over customers and employees through incompetence, ego and self-centered greed. I've seen others who fit the broad strokes of the "B-School MBA who never wrote a line of code" character sagely guide a tech company by choosing great technologists and deferring to them when appropriate while guiding the company with wisdom and compassion.
You can certainly find examples to confirm your biases but interpreting the world through that lens is unlikely to serve you well. Each company context is unique and even people who look like they're from central casting can defy expectations. If we look at the current crop of valley CEOs like Nadella, Zuckerberg, Pichai, Musk and Altman, they don't reduce easily into simplistic framing. These are all complex, imperfect people who are undeniably brilliant on certain dimensions and inevitably flawed on others - just like you and I. Once we layer in the context of a large, public corporation with diverse stakeholders each with conflicting interests: customers, employees, management, shareholders, media, regulators and random people with strongly-held drive-by opinions - everything gets distorted. A public corporation CEO's job definition starts with a legally binding fiduciary duty to shareholders which will eventually put them into an no-win ethical conflict with one or more of the other stakeholder groups. After sitting in dozens of board meetings and executive staff meetings, I wouldn't have taken our CEO's job for any amount of money. Based on seeing it from the inside, I believe it's almost a certainty that at least one of some public corp CEO's actions which you found unethical from your bleacher seat was what you would have chosen yourself given the context, trade-offs and available choices the CEO actually faced.
These experiences have cured me of the tendency to pass judgement on the moral character of public corp CEOs who I don't personally know based only on mainstream and social media interpretations.
But more importantly, most already have enough money to not have to worry about employment.
You can claim that the AI is the CEO, and in a hypothetical future, it may handle most of the operations. But the government will consider a person to be the CEO. And the same is likely to apply to basic B2B like contracts - only a person can sign legal documents (perhaps by delegating to an AI, but ultimately it is a person under current legal frameworks).
Not only will AI run the company, it will run the world. Remember: a product/service only costs money because somewhere down the assembly line or in some office, there are human workers who need to feed their family. If AI can help gradually reduce human involvement to 0, with good market competition (AI can help with this too - if AI can be capable CEOs, starting your business will be insanely easy,) and we’ll get near absolute abundance. Then humanity will be basically printing any product & service on demand at 0 cost like how we print money today.
I wouldn’t even worry about unequal distribution of wealth, because with absolute abundance, any piece of the pie is an infinitely large pie. Still think the world isn’t perfect in that future? Just one prompt, and the robot army will do whatever it takes to fix it for you.
Manual labor would still be there. Hardware is way harder than software, AGI seems easier to realize than mass worldwide automation of minute tasks that currently require human hands.
AGI would force back knowledge workers to factories.
Fortunately no government or CEO is that cynical.
Individual people will decide what they want to build, with whatever tools they have. If AI tools become powerful enough that one-person companies can build serious products, I bet there will be thousands of those companies taking a swing at the “next big thing” like humanoid robots. It’s a matter of time those problems all get solved.
I'd like to believe personal freedoms are preserved in a world with AGI and that a good part of the population will benefit from it, but recent history has been about concentrating power in the hands of the few, and the few getting AGI will free them from having to play nice with knowledge workers.
Though I guess maybe at some points robots might be cheaper than humans without worker rights, which would warrant investment even when thinking cynically.
AI is raising individual capability to a level that once required a full team. I believe it’s fundamentally a democratizing force rather than monopolizing. Everybody will try and get the most value out of AI, nobody holds the power to decide whether to share or not.
Most technology is a magnifier.
I fully expect the distribution to be even more extreme in an ultra-productive AI future, yet nonetheless, the bottom 50% would have their every need met in the same manner that Elon has his. If you ever want anything or have something more ambitious in mind, say, start a company to build something no one’s thought of — you’d just call a robot to do it. And because the robots are themselves developed and maintained by an all-robot company, it costs nobody anything to provide this AGI robot service to everyone.
A Google-like information query would have been unimaginably costly to execute a hundred years ago, and here we are, it’s totally free because running Google is so automated. Rich people don't even get a better Google just because they are willing to pay - everybody gets the best stuff when the best stuff costs 0 anyway.
"Knowledge worker" is a rather broad category.
Today, instead of soldiers, it's capital, and instead of direct taxes, it's indirect economic rent, but the principle is the same - accumulation of power.
If this theory holds true, we'll actually be quite resilient to AI—the rich will always need people to scapegoat.
In practice though, they're the ones closest to the money, and it's their name on all the contracts.
For a Star Wars anology, remember that the most important thing that happened to Anikin at the opera in EP III was what was being said to him while he was there.
Because the first company to achieve AGI might make their CEO the first personality to achieve immortality.
People would be crazy to assume Zuckerberg or Musk haven't mused personally (or to their close friends) about how nice it would be to have an AGI crafted in their image take over their companies, forever. (After they die or retire)