Technology

Can we prove AI can do the job of the CEO?

Former shopify employee here. Tobi is scum, and surrounds himself with scum. He looks up to Elon and genuinely admires him.

thats a golden opportunity for some sweet malicious compliance.

let ai fuck their codebase then get paid for the long time you'd need to fix it. punish their money for being dumb, and do it by giving them exactly what they want.

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.

Dear Tobi Lütke - AI can do your job too. Care to comment?

I cannot wait for Shopify to go away. Yet another company that feels like an infestation.

Should ask the AI model if a CEO is required

What these CEOs don't understand is that even an error rate as low as 1% for LLMs is unacceptable at scale. Fully automating without humans somewhere in the loop will lead to major legal liabilities down the line, esp if mistakes can't be fixed fast.

CEOs are obsolete

Dev: “Boss, we need additional storage on the database cluster to handle the latest clients we signed up.”

Boss: “First see if AI can do it.”

Dystopian.

Also:

I develop AI agents rn as part time for my work 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. Which is very useful but in an entirely different context.

No agent can create features or even reliably fix bugs on their own yet and probably not for next few years at least. This is because having a dude at 50$ hour is much more reliable than any AI agent long term. If you need to roll back a regression bug introduced by an AI agent it'll cost you 10-20 developer hours as minimum which negates any value you've gained already. Now you spent 1,000$ fix for your 50$ agent run where a person could have done that for 200$. Not to mention regression bugs are so incredibly expensive to fix and maintain so it'll all scale exponentially. Not to mention liability of not having human oversight - what if the agent stops working? You'll have to onboarding someone on an entire code base which would take days as very minimum.

So his take on ai agents doing work is pretty dumb for the time being.

That being said, 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.

ask why there is a need for CEO, a job that can be done by AI.

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: https://lucianonooijen.com/blog/why-i-stopped-using-ai-code-editors/

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.

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.

If you work there, run away fast.

Hard to imagine a CEO doing something that would make me less likely to apply or use their service.

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.

“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?

So it Latke going to fund the resources needed to validate whether AI will work or not?

Let's all just make new companies that are unionized-cooperatives bringing all our coworkers into them

In this example that CEO isn't needed

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.

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.

Company that made an AI its chief executive sees stocks climb

Uhm...but like...at the moment you cant really trust ai to do ANYTHING alone