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.
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.
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?
Readit News
We should do the same for courts and judges
Deleted Comment
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?
How is replacing tech workers with AI any different?
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.
I get the chance to talk to a lot of people who think this will work, and, it's really striking how poor their grasp of the business is.
Replacing your whole workforce with a machine, at this state, is silly, but that's not the only option.
I'm still quite a bit better than SotA models, but I imagine that won't be true in 2034.
It is not?
Also, how can Perplexity do things like interviews, tours, and other things that still require large amounts of human interaction?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42044956
More discussion on main thread:
New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42040795