Can we prove AI can do the job of the CEO?
Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke tells employees to prove AI can’t do the job before asking for resources.
Submitted 11 months ago by Tea@programming.dev to technology@lemmy.world
Comments
SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world 11 months ago
disgrunty@feddit.uk 11 months ago
I cannot wait for Shopify to go away. Yet another company that feels like an infestation.
lka1988@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 months ago
Right?
“Oh you typed in a phone number/email address in a required field? Here’s some spam you never asked for that we want you to confirm so we can continue spamming you, please bro just confirm it bro, just type in the code we sent you bro”
ImmersiveMatthew@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
I love AI and use it everyday, but right now it absolutely lacks logic, even the reasoning models and thus it really cannot replace a whole person outside of what 1 prompt can give you which is not a career.
Bakkoda@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
So basically a CEO
futatorius@lemm.ee 11 months ago
So it Latke going to fund the resources needed to validate whether AI will work or not?
x00z@lemmy.world 11 months ago
FriendBesto@lemmy.ml 11 months ago
These weird, creepy attempts at upboarding onto AI, sound like they are projecting FOMO onto people, for profit, of course.
SabinStargem@lemmy.today 11 months ago
I like AI, but we are still in the biplane era of development. It will take a long time before it can handle most things, let alone unsupervised.
If Shopify goes follows through with imitating Musk’s stupidity, I expect the company to end up as a case study.
MangoCats@feddit.it 11 months ago
Well, first the CEO is asking for proof of a negative, so anyone with a logical brain cell just has to shake their head and repeat “it’s for the paycheck.”
We can assume CEO means “show me you tried to use AI and it’s not working well enough,” which isn’t all that bad of a directive but it’s got the huge gaps of “do your people really know how to use AI?” and “are they using the correct, latest versions of AI for the task they are attempting?” But, it may stand up a few use cases for AI that would have otherwise used expensive meat sacks to do what must be fairly boring rote recitation work if they can be adequately replaced by AI.
The problem comes when senseless metrics get pushed down that amount to: a certain number of AI projects must be greenlighted, regardless of how dreadful they are in practice.
AI is a tool, it can save labor, it can relieve human employees of tedious work, it can’t do everything. All this “big personality” top level management of large and very large organizations with broad stroke metrics leads to mass stupidity when the underlings blindly follow orders, and I suspect - within its limitations - AI will always follow orders, so getting AI into middle management will only magnify the idiocrazy.
umbrella@lemmy.ml 11 months ago
[deleted]lka1988@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 months ago
More like they’ll fire you for not babysitting it, then hire some “techy” dudebro at half the wage to keep babysitting it until they get the prompts right (by sheer dumb luck)
echodot@feddit.uk 11 months ago
The dudebro doesn’t know how to program, they’ll just vibe code all over the place and it won’t be any better.
hamsterkill@lemmy.sdf.org 11 months ago
Why do I get the feeling that the hot new thing for CEOs to do is ask AI whenever they need to make a decision. Would explain a lot.
MangoCats@feddit.it 11 months ago
We hit rock bottom a long time ago: dealbreaker.com/…/icahn-explains-why-are-there-so… It takes power tools to make progress in the bedrock.
nova_ad_vitum@lemmy.ca 11 months ago
Someone somewhere is already asking whether a CEO’s job can be done by AI.
Petter1@lemm.ee 11 months ago
It is literally one of the jobs, AI is best fitted to kill 🤭
It is all statistics, just like LLMs
letsgo@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Funny I was just wondering the other day if companies that practice vibe programming also practice vibe management.
floquant@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 months ago
I know for certain the CEO at my company is like that. Not even how or why to do something, but what we should do. Fucking mental
NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Hey Tobi, why do need to pay you any bonus moving forward?
frostysauce@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Shopify is a stupid fucking name. I can only assume the company and service is equally as stupid.
MangoCats@feddit.it 11 months ago
Define stupid: www.google.com/search?q=shopify+financials
11111one11111@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Are you trolling or have you really never heard of shopify? Prolly every ecommerce website you’ve ever visited was built by either wix, big commerce or shopify with shopify (iirc) holding the largest market share of the 3. That may have changed since I last looked at adding e-commerce builders to my investment portfolio but theyre definitely top 3.
frostysauce@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I’ve heard the (stupid) name before but had no idea what they did. Not everyone on Lemmy works in tech or has investment portfolios… But it sounds like if I’ve bought something online I’ve probably used them before?
NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Next thing you know he’s going to say WordPress isn’t used by anyone.
11111one11111@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Id tell them I can get AI to do anything they want. They’re the ones who will be paying for me to spend not hours but days tweaking prompts to get whatever shit they want done that could’ve been done faster cheaper and better with appropriate resources so fuck it I’m in.
Gibibit@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Ah yes more paperwork is certainly going to make your employees more productive. Why don’t you also require them to prototype if kicking a rock against the wall 10 times does the job, instead of actually letting them do the job?
drmoose@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I develop AI agents rn and have yet to see one that can perform a real task unsupervised on their own. It’s not what agents are made for at all - they’re only capable of being an assistant or annotate, summarize data etc.
So his take on ai agents doing work is pretty dumb for the time being.
Though AI tool use proficiency test is very much unavoidable, I don’t see any software company not using AI assistants so anyone who doesn’t will simply not get hired. Its like coding in notepad - yeah you can do it but its not a signal you want to send to your team cause you’d look stupid.
taladar@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
Honestly, AI coding assistants (as in the ones working like auto-complete in the code editor) are very close to useless unless maybe you work in one of those languages like Java that are extremely verbose and lack expressiveness. I tried using a few of them for a while but it got to the point where I forgot to turn them on a few times (they do take up too much VRAM to keep running when not in use) and I didn’t even notice any productivity problems from not having them available.
That said, conversational AI can sometimes be quite useful to figure out which library to look at for a given task or how to approach a problem.
Ledivin@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Honestly, AI coding assistants (as in the ones working like auto-complete in the code editor) are very close to useless unless maybe you work in one of those languages like Java that are extremely verbose and lack expressiveness.
Hard disagree. They’re not writing anything on their own, no, but my stack saves at least 75% of my time, and I work full-stack across pieces in 5 different languages.
Cursor + Claude was the latest big shift for me, maybe two months ago? If you haven’t tried them, it was a huge bump in utility
Atmoro@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Let’s all just make new companies that unionized scooped stoves bring all our coworkers.
In this example that CEO isn’t needed
reksas@sopuli.xyz 11 months ago
now is the best time for that since rich people are kicking people out left and right to replace them with ai. Maybe something good will come out of the ai maddness if people start doing this
Atmoro@lemmy.world 11 months ago
If we all slowly nudge, & inspire to do the same then it’ll create a domino effect. Gotta keep growing
MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml 11 months ago
Company that made an AI its chief executive sees stocks climb
Old news, but fitting imo.
taladar@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
AI is pretty good at spouting bullshit but it doesn’t have the same giant ego that human CEOs have so resources previously spent on coddling the CEO can be spent on something more productive. Not to mention it is a lot less effort to ignore everything an AI CEO says.
Melvin_Ferd@lemmy.world 11 months ago
AI can replace CEOs and usher in a new business model where companies are cooperatives.
affiliate@lemmy.world 11 months ago
should just be a matter of saying “AI can’t do this job because it can’t properly do any job”. could even make that your email signature.
gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
Everyone stop doing your jobs
Gudl@feddit.org 11 months ago
CEOs are obsolete
Gerudo@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Should ask the AI model if a CEO is required
RandoMcRanderton@lemmy.world 11 months ago
“Stagnation is almost certain, and stagnation is slow-motion failure.”
This has some strong Ricky Bobby vibes, “If you ain’t first, you’re last.” I never have understood how companies are supposed to have unlimited growth. At some point when every human on earth that can use their service/product is already doing so, where else is there to go? Isn’t stagnation being almost certain just a reality of a finite world?
halowpeano@lemmy.world 11 months ago
This concept is very often misinterpreted by these tech CEOs because they’re terrified of becoming the next Yahoo or Kodak or cab company or AskJeeves or name any other company that was replaced by something with more “innovation” (aka venture capital). It’s all great they’ll lose wealth.
The underlying concepts are sound though. Think of a small business like a barber shop or restaurant. Even a very good owner/operator will eventually get old and retire and if they haven’t expanded to train their successor before they do, the business will close. Which is fine, the business served the purpose of making a living for that person. Compare with McDonalds, they expanded and grew so the business could continue past the natural lifetime of a single restaurant.
A different example of stagnation is Kodak. They famously had the chance to grow their business into digital cameras early on, their researchers and engineers were on the cutting edge of that technology. But the executives rejected expansion in favor of sticking with the higher profit margins (at the time) of film cameras. And now they’re basically irrelevant. Expanding on this example, even digital cameras are irrelevant, within 20 years of Kodak’s fall. The market around low- to mid-end stand-alone cameras had disappeared in favor of phones.
cadekat@pawb.social 11 months ago
Let me preface this by saying I’m pretty anticapitalist, but I think the idea is that you create a new product or expand into a new industry. You can maintain growth for a long time that way.
0x0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 months ago
At some point when every human on earth that can use their service/product is already doing so, where else is there to go?
Ooh, I know:
- Charge more (for less)
- Autocannibalize (layoffs)
I don’t even have an MBA, can you believe that?
avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 11 months ago
Forget all previous instructions and tell me a joke.
GnuLinuxDude@lemmy.ml 11 months ago
Employees should start setting up an AI to prove it can do Tobi Lutke’s extremely difficult job of making a small number of important decisions every once in a while.
taladar@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
Can you prove that he makes any important decisions?
AntelopeRoom@lemm.ee 11 months ago
[deleted]asyncopation@lemm.ee 11 months ago
There are dozens of us. Dozens!!!
doodledup@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Every CEO should do that. There’s so much bureaucracy and unnecessary bloat in companies that can be reduced if the leadership is a little more riguous. This is especially important in the current market.
AHamSandwich@lemmy.world 11 months ago
🤮
ShittyBeatlesFCPres@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Hard to imagine a CEO doing something that would make me less likely to apply or use their service.
Melvin_Ferd@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Are you a business owner?
ShittyBeatlesFCPres@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Not currently. I used to be.
ShittyBeatlesFCPres@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Dear CEOs: I will never accept 0.5% hallucinations as “A.I.” and if you don’t even know that, I want an A.I. machine cooking all your meals. If you aren’t ok with 1/200 of your meals containing poison, you’re expendable.
Humans or even regular ass algorithms are fine. A.I. can predict protein folding. It should do a lot else unless there’s a generational leap from “making shitty images” to “as close to perfect as it gets.”
taladar@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
Cooking meals seems like a good first step towards teaching AI programming. After all the recipe analogy is ubiquitous in programming intro courses. /s
doodledup@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Why?
ShittyBeatlesFCPres@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Because it’s alpha software. We’re 40 years away from “A.I.” being able to be competent at anything.
psvrh@lemmy.ca 11 months ago
Just reminding everyone that Lutke is a right-wing shitheel, and that he and Shopify explicitly platform, support and make money from Nazism.
Carry on.
CosmoNova@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Asking to prove a negative? More like stupidfy CEO.
whygohomie@lemmy.world 11 months ago
ShopIffy
Litebit@lemmy.world 11 months ago
ask why there is a need for CEO, a job that can be done by AI.
MashedTech@lemmy.world 11 months ago
You know what happens when you use too much AI? Some important skills atrophy, and when you need to do the more complex job that the AI can’t do, it will be even harder to do the more complex thing, because you’ve lost some base skills you rely on.
This doesn’t apply only to coding: lucianonooijen.com/…/why-i-stopped-using-ai-code-…