OpenAI’s new boss claims “majority” of CEO tasks can be automated

Emmett Shear has claimed that a majority of the tasks carried out by most CEOs can be automated, days before becoming the new interim CEO at OpenAI.

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As spotted by Shannon Liao, Shear took to social media late last week to comment on a recent article that said “CEOs are hugely expensive, why not automate them?”.

“Unironically. Most of the CEO job (and the majority of most executive jobs) are very automatable,” he wrote. “There are of course the occasional key decisions you can’t replace. Of course that means you can’t really truly ‘replace’ the CEO, but I think we will see management get widely automated, leading to flatter and more dynamic organizations,” he continued.

“Humans with AI assistance will continue to lead companies, but they’ll have a fanout of 40 instead of 10,” he wrote, adding that he’d automate “communication, problem and opportunity detection, talent identification, constructive feedback.

“I think a 4x speedup is definitely possible,” he said.

Of course that means you can’t really truly “replace” the CEO, but I think we will see management get widely automated, leading to flatter and more dynamic organizations.

— Emmett Shear (@eshear) November 16, 2023

Days later, Shear was appointed as interim CEO at OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT and advanced image generation model DALL-E 2, following the sudden removal of Sam Altman on Friday (November 17).

“I took this job because I believe that OpenAI is one of the most important companies currently in existence,” said Shear who called the role “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity”. He went on to say one of his first targets was to “reform the management and leadership team in light of recent departures into an effective force to drive results for our customers.” He added that he became interim CEO “rapidly and unexpectedly”.

Altman has since been hired by Microsoft (who previously invested billions in OpenAI) alongside OpenAI’s former president Greg Brockman, to lead a new advanced AI team at the company.

In other news, a new The Walking Dead game allowing players to change the timeline of the hit AMC show has gone viral over the weekend but for all the wrong reasons.

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