DoppelBot: Replace Your CEO with an LLM
19 comments
·February 4, 2025tombert
My dad had a manager recently that he started calling "VPGPT" behind his back.
He felt like the guy primarily spoke in truisms and with long-winded statements that ultimately said very little but gave the illusion of having depth. He wasn't a huge fan.
Aurornis
I had one of those. I thought he was fooling upper management until I started working directly with the CTO, who was very open about the fact that this VP was more about performance than execution. He explained that the guy’s overwhelming desire to look good and be viewed as a thought leader also made him very receptive to incentives. You could give him a task, tell him it was important for his career, and he’d get it done because he was so afraid of looking bad. If it was something he could write about on LinkedIn or his personal newsletter, even better.
The challenge was setting the incentives correctly so he couldn’t game them. He was tasked with hiring a team to accomplish some specific goal once and the first set of people he tried to hire were not qualified at all, they were just the first people he could get to interview and want to join. You had to watch him like a hawk to make sure he wasn’t running yet another performative game.
The other weird part is that a lot of candidates were really impressed by him. He dressed well and had hair that obviously took a long time to do every morning and he spoke with confidence. This was remarkably effective at convincing many candidates that he knew what he was doing and could run a tight ship. Lot of disappointed people trying to leave his team after the first 6 months.
empath75
It used to be the case that speaking in that register was a strong signal of a social pedigree and an expensive education. Now it's a signal of people being brainless and easily replaceable.
You're also seeing it in politics where politicians that don't think before they speak too much are seen as more authentic and competent than ones that hire teams of consultants to carefully massage every statement they make.
thundergolfer
> It used to be the case that speaking in that register was a strong signal of a social pedigree and an expensive education.
It's not the same register. There's a vast difference between the extemporaneous speech of the old school patricians and today's C-suite corp-speak.
Here's Robert F Kennedy Jr. speaking off the cuff at a public event moments after hearing that MLK had been assassinated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2kWIa8wSC0&t=238s.
That's the speaking style of social pedigree and an expensive education. You'll tend to find it contains lifts of poetry, like Kennedy's evocation of Aeschylus, and little reference to 'synergy', 'collaboration', 'efficiency', etc.
babyshake
This effect will probably be more pronounced in coming years. Being able to speak and act in ways that are obviously not AI.
empath75
The thing is that AIs are also good at mimicking informal/off-the-cuff speech, too. And people are lazy, so they'll fall back on "casual" cliches, which AIs (and consultant-driven politicians) will be just as good at mimicking. It's going to be the rare person who can stay ahead of that. It'll be an endless treadmill.
lenerdenator
It's fun to think about, but if you want to really reign in the C-suite, you need to start setting up systems within companies that allow for the rank-and-file to replace bad CEOs.
We've spent the last 80 years (ostensibly) talking about how great representative government is, then we let people own a majority of voting shares so that they can run companies like dictatorships. I've worked at a company that could have remained more competitive (and done a better job of maintaining software that is critical to human life) if there had been more uptake of ideas from workers instead of simply trying to make shareholders happy.
number6
Strange that economic power is still handed down the generations like political was in the days of kings
blackeyeblitzar
> We've spent the last 80 years (ostensibly) talking about how great representative government is, then we let people own a majority of voting shares so that they can run companies like dictatorships.
I think it’s basically admitting that the right dictator, if they are there based on merit, can really perform better than someone who wins by their skill at campaigning. Forget voting shares - even when a single person doesn’t have that amount of control, you have a small board elected by shareholders who is essentially electing a dictator.
Personally I think most companies would do far worse if rank and file employees selected the CEO. But I haven’t thought much about it. Curious what ideas HN has on this aspect.
lenerdenator
I don't see it much of an admission of anything, personally. The admission would have had to come as an answer to a question that was never asked. To me, it's more of a way to keep the ruling class in place. It used to be done through government, now it's done through corporations.
And honestly, the corporation is a far more attractive model if you're in that racket. Rioters don't burn down corporate HQs, they burn down police stations. Public sector pay sucks. The corruption would be far too obvious... well, it would have been until relatively recently.
benxh
To prove you right, you can read up on the incredible giga-brained countrywide experiments by Kardelj in Socialist Yugoslavia [0]. The result being a country where no-one wanted to work, and everyone had a great standard of living (while the IMF didn't call in its loans). And then the entire country collapsed all at once under the accumulated mismanagement.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workers%27_self-management#Yug...
siva7
I'm saddened to tell you fellow hackers here that the real world will be more like: "Replace your knowledge worker with an LLM" ordered by your CEO.
tbrake
I feel most bad for the other frogs in roles whose pots haven't even been put on the AI stovetop yet. I have general feeling they feel they're safe.
Looking at you specifically, Project/Program managers with little output other than attending meetings and asking for status updates and futzing with JIRA to get reports.
The dev frogs might not even be finished boiling before you notice your steam.
kerblang
Yet again HN gets weird with highly contradictory popular posts trending simultaneously
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42923870 "A computer can never be held accountable"
coreyh14444
I'm mostly curious about the decision to do fine-tuning here instead of synthesizing a good system message, maybe a RAG setup with access to the slack database, etc. I tried fine-tuning on a content generation case when GPT 4 first came out and we had much better results without it. Also, you don't get the benefit of upgrading to new models when they are released.
empath75
I think you're putting way too much thought into what is basically a comedy bit.
bawana
imagine the share price jump when the first corp announces this!
null
Unfortunately our CEO at a 5000 person company that heavily uses Slack, still hasn't activated their Slack account, so I don't have much to finetune the bot on.