Could Microsoft replace its CEO with ChatGPT?

Practically, it's far easier to simply ask this at your next all-hands when they are source for questions about AI. To make this a meta: use ChatGPT to ask this as a pointlessly-long-worded question to evade HR/marketing from filtering the question until it's too late ;)

It's still not good enough to manage a vending machine: https://www.anthropic.com/research/project-vend-1

Yes. AI is actually perfectly suited for the CEO role, as it's a big generalizer. The biggest generalist in a company is the CEO.

I have no idea why so many companies are focusing on replacing entry level work with AI; the real alpha is at the top of the org chart.

To even ask this question shows no understanding of what a CEO of a large corporation does.

1) Investor relations: Yes an AI could answer questions about the financials on the quarterly earnings call. With a lot of careful handling you might maybe even get it to do this in a way that it wouldn’t hallucinate and lead to shareholder lawsuits and SEC enforcement action. But would it go out for lunch with a bunch of fund managers and convince them to keep their investment when you’ve had a bad quarter? No. Would it take a 3-hour meeting with investment bankers to talk through how to recapitalize or refinance debt? No. If you’re talking a startup CEO is it going to convince a16z, SVF, etc to invest? Nope. If you think it will you’ve never done any of those things. It’s trying to capture lightning in a bottle- not a process you can automate. For example, how did Adam Neumann convince Steve Cohen to invest in WeWork? (I have this on the authority of a friend who was one of about 10 people there) He showed up late, and drunk for a small dinner at Steve Cohen’s apartment and got everyone there doing tequila shots. This is not something an AI is capable of.

2) Corporate strategy. Yes you can get it to generate meaningless gibberish on powerpoint, so you might think corporate strategy would be covered, but consider just a few of the big calls Satya Nadella has made (off the top of my head) in the last couple of years. 1) betting big on OpenAI 2) Intervening to save Sam Altman’s ass after he was fired 3) basically giving up on the “console wars”, ceding the hardware victory to Sony, shutting down a bunch of game studios telling the world how tough the climate is even though you’ve just had the most profitable years in your history, betting big on gamePass etc? Gonna do that? No it won’t.

3) Managing the top executive team. Is it going to do this? Of course not.

Not saying an AI couldn’t possibly do a much better job than current CEOs in some hypothetical world where CEOs do different things from what they do now, but in our world, there is literally none of the black magic bs that CEOs pull to get corporations to be worth obscene bucks that an AI could do.

You have been marketed. Congrats.

I remember reading an article that concluded "if someone were to be replaced, it would be the shot callers"

So yes, in theory.

My first thought was"but an AI is not responsible", but how responsible is a CEO? They seem to get away with a lot. I could be wrong though

Sure, they could. Would it be effective, probably not.

This might be a less popular opinion on a site like HN, but I'm of the opinion that CEO's don't do a whole lot.

Maybe at small startups they are more involved, but the larger the company, the less I think that CEOs or other C-Suite types actually do.

While I also think ChatGPT is over-hyped and largeley incorrect in what it says, I would answer your question with a "yes". ChatGPT is perfectly capable of writing/delivering speeches at MS Build or whatever.

Clippy for CEO!

"I can replace desk meat like you with an Eliza helix and a white noise generator." (Quoted from memory from Howard Taylor's wonderful Schlock Mercenary web comic.)