DoppelBot: Replace Your CEO with an LLM

https://modal.com/docs/examples/slack-finetune

by gk1 • 1 year ago

232 117 1 year ago

tombert2• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

mjburgess• 1 year ago

They tie up heavy, cumbersome loads and put them on other people's shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them. Everything they do is done for people to see: They make their desks wide and the ties on their garments long; they love the place of honor at corporate retreats and the most important seats in the interviews; they love to be greeted with respect in the meeting rooms and to be called a Leader by others.

...the more things change, the more they stay the same...

empath753• 1 year ago

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.

babyshake• 1 year ago

This effect will probably be more pronounced in coming years. Being able to speak and act in ways that are obviously not AI.

thundergolfer• 1 year ago

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.

bufferoverflow• 1 year ago

the guy primarily spoke in truisms and with long-winded statements that ultimately said very little but gave the illusion of having depth.

The term for that is deepety.

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Deepity

siva7• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

hibikir• 1 year ago

This makes perfect sense when you consider who is making the decisions. If you are trying to, say, replace an ad-buying team with an AI that supposedly does the job better, your goal has to be to sell it at a high enough level that the political pressure of having the old department employed doesn't tank everything regardless of results.

One can try to sell to a CEO than an IT department is a cost center, and they can bring in the same results for less. But to replace a CEO you need to sell to the board, and the board is typically full of CEOs. Even a far superior CEO that costs $1 a day is a hard sell when the CEO is your buddy, and you aren't going to be making a mint as a board member for getting rid of said buddy.

woah6• 1 year ago

If far superior AI CEOs existed then only one board would need to replace their CEO with AI. The company would then dominate the marketplace because of the far superior decisions being made, and the rest would be forced to follow.

If AI CEOs were slightly inferior to human CEOs, but cost $1 per year, it still wouldn't be worth replacing an expensive human CEO, unless that CEO's compensation was worth more than a few percent of revenue (it never is).

I wouldn't want to invest my money in a company which was making worse decisions to try to save money on the CEO, when the money paid to the CEO is going to have very little effect on my return on investment. That sounds like a good way to for my investment to underperform. The only winner in that scenario is online forum posters who want to feel jealous of the abstract concept of a "CEO".

jollyllama• 1 year ago

Yes, due to the power of the relative positions, but I'd like to point out

Replace Your CEO with an LLM

Lossless, as they're already constrained so tightly in their functions by regulations.

Replace your knowledge worker with an LLM

Lossy, in many cases.

coreyh144442• 1 year ago

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.

empath753• 1 year ago

I think you're putting way too much thought into what is basically a comedy bit.

charles_irl• 1 year ago

I worked on this project a bit! These are great questions.

Fine-tuning works very well for style (as opposed to factual knowledge), which is all we're trying to achieve here -- as another commenter put it, it's a "comedy bit" for a company Slack.

In fact, fine-tuning for style works well enough that we find it pretty easy to just re-train when new models come out. There's sometimes some YAML-fiddling required to get training frameworks to work with different model series (e.g. a DeepSeek series model vs a LLaMA series model), but it's not too onerous. IMO, the ideal ML pipeline looks less like the bespoke process common these days and more like a materialized view (shouts to pgML). That's easy to automate and so reduces the gap with prompting.

On the other hand, it seemed harder to craft a generic system prompt and a generic retrieval system that would work across organizations to define user communication style.

coreyh144442• 1 year ago

Thanks for the reply! Makes sense. I will definitely keep this in mind. Much appreciated.

bawana• 1 year ago

imagine the share price jump when the first corp announces this!

lenerdenator4• 1 year ago

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.

blackeyeblitzar• 1 year ago

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.

lenerdenator4• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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...

wat100002• 1 year ago

The advantages of democracy are a peaceful transition of power and non-violent outlets for political action. That is to say, you don’t have to worry about a succession war when the king dies, and if people don’t like what the government is doing they tend to advocate and vote rather than try to overthrow it.

These advantages don’t really apply to companies. Your life isn’t tied to a company the way it is to your government, so if you don’t like how they chose the leader or what they’re doing, you can leave.

glitchc• 1 year ago

You truly do get the best and the worst with dictators, as history has shown.

furyofantares• 1 year ago

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.

Sure. But also there are big differences between companies and countries/government.

Companies compete in a market. There isn't much of a marketplace for country/government. This is a check on individual power, and forces the company to perform somewhat in alignment with what we want as a society. Concentration of power (monopoly) is still an issue in a market and so we regulate the market.

The "dictator" of a company answers to both the market and to regulators, making it less dangerous as a concentration of power than an actual dictator.

Related, it is totally okay for companies to fail, and they regularly do. We are a lot less okay with governments failing.

Companies can also serve a niche. Governments need to serve their entire population. Governments are tasked with all sorts of collective action problems for diverse groups with varying opinions; companies get to pick their market. It's unclear that CEOs tell us much about a dictator trying to serve a population with a range of opinions.

number6• 1 year ago

Strange that economic power is still handed down the generations like political was in the days of kings

aylmao• 1 year ago

+1. I do think there's certain efficiency gains in concentrating decision-making in companies, but nepotism and hereditary power are strange characteristics to keep from feudalism

woah6• 1 year ago

This is called a cooperative, and it is completely legal. However, they tend not to be very successful in the marketplace, outside of a few outliers.

If you separate revenue and control (employees get to vote on decisions, but investors get the revenue), then employees will be incentivized to maintain the status quo instead making decisions to make the company successful. The employees have almost no incentive to make difficult decisions like cutting unsuccessful lines of business etc. I would be very uneasy about investing anyone's retirement savings into such an organization.

If you keep revenue and control combined (a simple share structure, where each share gets a piece of the revenue and a vote, and employees get shares when they join), then you have other paradoxes. To make this work, you need to prohibit employees from selling their shares to investors, otherwise you're back to a conventional corporation. You also need to take the shares away from employees when they leave the company, otherwise former employees become a de facto investor class that you wanted to avoid. As an employee, I would prefer to work at a company where my equity does not have these restrictions placed on it.

You may say "but if we all just tried a little harder to believe in a better world it could be possible". But it is possible now. Cooperatives work easily under existing corporate law, and are even incentivized in some places. They just aren't very successful for the reasons above. The only widespread form of cooperative is doctor's and lawyer's practices, which are legally required to be organized as cooperatives through a limited liability partnership structure.

To make cooperatives work in the broader marketplace, you'd have to force employees to accept restrictions on their equity or force savers to put their money into cooperatives managed by employees who are not incentivized to invest it well.

Hasu2• 1 year ago

All of your points are premised on the idea that the only purpose of a corporation is to make as much money for its shareholders as possible. But that isn't true, especially in the case of a cooperative.

Most companies make decisions based on a list of priorities: they care about their shareholders/investors first, upper management second (upper management is usually bribed by the investors with equity, aligning their interests with the shareholders, so this is maybe a distinction without a difference), rank-and-file employees third, customers fourth, and anyone not involved with the company last.

The point of a cooperative is to flip this incentive structure on its head: the customers or workers are owners, so they get prioritized. The purpose of the company isn't to dominate the markets and become the biggest company ever, it's to make a better life for the people working for and patronizing the company, instead of just the people who own it.

As an employee, I would prefer to work at a company where my equity does not have these restrictions placed on it.

Well obviously, if you're talking about equity in a company as something you can own and profit from without ongoing labor, you are definitionally a capitalist and you will be opposed to cooperatives.

I would be very uneasy about investing anyone's retirement savings into such an organization.

The primary purpose of a cooperative is not to make profits for passive investors. This is like judging a fish on its ability to climb a tree.

BarryMilo• 1 year ago

I've been part of a few (Canadian) cooperatives. The incentive structure is completely different, it's akin to admitting you prefer great working conditions than having a chance to chance it rich. If a company is startup-sized, anything else is a sucker's bet.

zelon88• 1 year ago

then employees will be incentivized to maintain the status quo instead making decisions to make the company successful.

Therein lies the problem.

Capitalists believe these two things are exclusionary to one another. They believe that you cannot have an unsuccessful product line, or "status quo" and still be successful. They want to see comfy upward trending lines on their charts and graphs.

But nobody stopped to consider that;

1) If the business is operating with positive cashflow, and,

2) If the business is meeting it's commitment to consumers, shareholders, and employees, and,

3) If the business has no direct existential threat to it's market share, then;

That business is successful. By your own definition. Stop trying to take over the world. It's selfish, unsustainable, and pedantic. Support your workers. Well. Put value back into the economy. Stop being a greedy POS.

psychoslave2• 1 year ago

However, they tend not to be very successful in the marketplace, outside of a few outliers.

What would you consider to be successful, and what is marketplace naming here?

Cooperatives are going to be the main thriving organizational structure when the political agenda in place favors them, and the very same statement apply for resource omni-capture oligopolies. Look at who have hands on the political schedule, and that’s all nailed.

Living in France, I never worked for any structure that would provide any equity (not saying this doesn’t exist at all). But France still has a very different non-wage labour costs compared to US (or common-law in general I guess), so employment tradeoffs are very different.

Scoundreller• 1 year ago

If you keep revenue and control combined (a simple share structure, where each share gets a piece of the revenue and a vote, and employees get shares when they join), then you have other paradoxes. To make this work, you need to prohibit employees from selling their shares to investors, otherwise you're back to a conventional corporation. You also need to take the shares away from employees when they leave the company, otherwise former employees become a de facto investor class that you wanted to avoid

This describes most “partnerships” to a varying degree. Lots of professional firms operate that way, e.g. law firms, accounting firms, engineering firms, consulting

goodpoint• 1 year ago

they tend not to be very successful in the marketplace

...because other companies boycott coops.

stuaxo• 1 year ago

Have a look at what Mondragon does in the Basque country for a cooperative of coopertives.

ActionHank• 1 year ago

CEOs aren't there to serve the rank-and-file, they're put there to serve the board and investors.

lenerdenator4• 1 year ago

And therein lies the problem.

cess11• 1 year ago

It's called a union. If workers unite and refuse to suddenly supply their labour it'll cause a lot of changes fast, and sometimes the capitalists just leave and the workers can appropriate the company.

Though it is often a good idea to start small and get a little win, and then wait and recruit, and then push for another small change, and repeat. That way the union establishes credibility, solid membership and a reasonably sized war chest for things like getting rid of a CEO, which will take more time and effort than for example protective gear or longer pauses in the work.

satvikpendem8• 1 year ago

Considering the state of current democracies, I don't think I could trust my peers to make sound financial decisions at an organizational level collectively. It's different from a democracy in government because I can, without much friction, leave a company at any time if I feel that the company is not doing well, not so with a nation-state.

I personally have started and run a coop, but that worked because we were all friends who wanted to collectively pool our resources to get new clients as a software agency, if it were a larger cooperative, I would agree with the sibling commenter that they generally do not work as well as top down corporations.

renewiltord• 1 year ago

One of my favorite attributes about left-wing activism is that the solution to everything is to overthrow the system. It's like the whole "we have tech debt; we need to rewrite everything". Zero threat.

Hasnep• 1 year ago

You don't need to overthrow anything to have worker owned companies, they exist right now.

gmerc2• 1 year ago

You want to take control away from the board and give it to employees? https://ai-ceo.org has a plugin for that!

alexvitkov• 1 year ago

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.

xyzzy_plugh• 1 year ago

I have gained respect for your CEO. Good for them.

bigfishrunning• 1 year ago

Yup, no reason to sully yourself communicating with the rabble

throwaway314155• 1 year ago

It would be one thing if their employees didn't have to use it...

kerblang• 1 year ago

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"

kibwen• 1 year ago

I'm unclear what the contradiction is? When was the last time a CEO was held accountable, for any value of "accountable" that doesn't involve repeatedly taking golden parachutes and failing upward?

dvngnt_• 1 year ago

usa could do better but they get sentenced regularly https://search.brave.com/search?q=ceo+convicted+site%3Ajusti...

wy35• 1 year ago

I mean, this is clearly an unserious post. This is more of a fun tech demo than anything.

e12e• 1 year ago

Ridiculous. No CEO worth replacing is on slack - this needs to be trained on, and run on teams.

extr• 1 year ago

The OP is clearly just a fun tech demo to show off their platform, they're not seriously advocating to replace CEOs with LLMs.

fellowniusmonk• 1 year ago

In my past I was the technical co-founder for a successful startup and eventual exit. I had a background in marketing automation and analytics.

At different points I acted as CTO, CEO and COO and ended up at a CTO but with a cutout that I ran the "renevue" team.

Except for glad handing VCs in the early stages the first thing that should be automated away is most roles in the C-Suite.

You'll still need a flesh and blood figurehead for external meetings as well.

Many software engineers seem to be extremely blind to practical concerns around positioning, market fit, pricing, etc. and may bring certain idealogical biases and "purities" into their decision making that sabotage their success, just put yourself in the hands of AI and trust it.

The simple fact is most C-suite teams don't perform better than the macro environment they exist in, so getting "decent" AI decisions in place and then energetically executing you'll beat most teams, and in early stage startups.

If some people say we can replace the bottom 20% of devs right now, we can probably safely replace the bottom 40% of c-suite roles.

bastardoperator• 1 year ago

Are they blind or do others get paid to do these jobs? I've seen it too many times, no good deed goes unpunished.

codr7• 1 year ago

Right, except who's going to be held accountable?

jb1991• 1 year ago

Or your government. See the TV show Travelers for an example.

StarterPro• 1 year ago

Unrelated, but I wonder if there is a test to see how many of the commenters are bots vs actual humans

Franzi4• 1 year ago

Could we use it to replace our CTO when the sales team asks feasibility questions ?

newsclues• 1 year ago

Rather than CEOs, why not mid level managers?

UncleEntity• 1 year ago

I think they're burying the lede here, they released a DoppleBot you can train on Linus's messages from the lkml as the ultimate arbitrator of coding disputes.

machomaster• 1 year ago

Surely, it simply accuses everyone (including old and well-known contributors) of being a Russian bot and, as an explanation for this wild accusation, merely states that he is a Finn and knows history?

johnea• 1 year ago

Maybe some good will come from this tech afterall...

gmerc2• 1 year ago

Please https://ai-ceo.org is the only real deal in that field.

nico• 1 year ago

All the components—scraping, fine-tuning, inference and slack event handlers run on Modal, and the code itself is open-source and available here.

Does anyone know how much it would cost to put this together? How much does it cost to fine tune Lama 3.1 on someone's Slack messages?

I'm guessing it depends on the number of messages, but roughly for 10k-100k messages, at 200 characters each (guessing about 50 tokens each, so 500k-5M tokens)?

satisfice• 1 year ago

So, all this effort to enact a joke about the emptiness of bad leadership?

We are in the golden age of pointless AI!

DoppelBot: Replace Your CEO with an LLM

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