DoppelBot: Replace Your CEO with an LLM
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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.
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.
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.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workers%27_self-management#Yug...
To clarify my stance I'm an anarchist and that page has a lot of good examples of successful worker owned collectives.
as if somehow, it's the responsibility of those capitalists to ensure those starving people have food and diseases cured - for nothing in return.
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.
Health insurance isn't tied to a company? Your ability to survive and feed your family isn't tied to your company? Lack of opportunities in the job market? Lack of equal salary/benefits at alternative companies? Non-competes, H1-B visas....
> so if you don’t like how they chose the leader or what they’re doing, you can leave.
Just one small thing Ben: leave to work for who? Who isn't hiring CEOs and running businesses the same way as everyone else?
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.
Well, kind of. On occasion they participate in regulatory capture making them really only accountable as they care to be given the circumstances.
If you have a market cornered on AI-powered, autonomous, robotic leg-equipped chainsaws, and the regulatory environment is weak because you've lobbied for the right rules and the right enforcers of those rules, you could very possibly just have a bad quarter if those chainsaws' AI sees people as trees and starts chasing them around. Maybe not even that.
Meta would be a good real-world example. It's just less interesting to imagine.
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.
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.
That's perfectly fine, and also the reason why cooperatives are a pretty niche thing: they don't prioritize growth.
You need to be cancer or a public corporation to think growth is the most important thing.
if this funding comes from the gov't, then you're just forcing taxpayers to subsidize a less profitable funding mechanism. It's merely a wealth transfer (from taxpayers to these coop owners).
People who claim funding co-ops is a "wealth transfer" ignore existing policies which already funnel taxpayer money upward. Redirecting a fraction of subsidies like bailouts and fossil fuel breaks and the endless war machine... instead to worker owned models that reinvest profits locally and tie wealth to labor... that isn’t a new transfer but a correction. Co-ops reduce reliance on exploitative private equity (e.g., hedge funds buying 40% of U.S. rental homes) and ensure economic gains stay with the people generating value.
I have the controversial opinion that people who work should get money, not the people who don't work.
and they do.
> not the people who don't work
and they don't. With the exception of some basic welfare payments, which i am not opposed to, what you mentioned is what currently happens.
But you're unilaterally classifying capital as not being work would be wrong. Capital is solidified work from previous/earlier times, but unconsumed and saved.
They're not talking about people who "don't work," and collect welfare.
gig work is popular because the people doing it are finding that it is the best of all alternatives available to them.
Gig work is "popular" because wealth-driven systemic pressure is replacing FTE with gig jobs in order to fatten the bottom line.
they have the choice - because they have agency. Slavery is literally taking that agency away. Having agency doesn't mean being immune to the consequences.
The consequences of a slave "choosing" to not work is punishment and death.
The consequences of a gig worker choosing not to work is to claim basic benefits (but hardly will die). It's uncomfortable, and i will bet most people will choose to work, but it doesn't mean someone is forcing them.
I know some experienced, socially adept, smart, etc. friends who have been doing this exact thing for about 8 months now.
> If I didn't like my working conditions, I would look for a different job.
What an odd comment.
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.
Who are you angry at? You are yelling into the wind.
Specifically the condition 3 is practically never true in well functioning market. If you're successful, you'll be copied and you'll have competitors, so you always have to be a step ahead. Maintaining the status quo is how you slowly become irrelevant
Not everything is a fight.
I currently watch the exact case from the comment above in our street - new coffee place showed up, and the old one, which kept the status quo for very long time is now left empty as people go to the new one instead.
It's also a good example of how growing and merging into larger chains is a working defense strategy for the market share threat.
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.
https://inequality.org/article/5-workerowned-food-firms-riva...
For example, the Mondragon Corporation, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation, in the Basque region of Spain is pretty huge (70,000 employees) and I watched a short news documentary about Mondragon and in general the employees there sounded legions happier than corporate drones in other companies.
This describes most “partnerships” to a varying degree. Lots of professional firms operate that way, e.g. law firms, accounting firms, engineering firms, consulting
...because other companies boycott coops.
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.
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.
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.
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.
...the more things change, the more they stay the same...
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.
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.
The term for that is deepety.
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.
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.
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".
>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.
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.
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)?
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.
We are in the golden age of pointless AI!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42923870 "A computer can never be held accountable"