Comment by nis0s

I encourage you to read the Anthropic blog post, which includes situations like:

- hallucinating conversations with fictitious people

- role playing as a real person and telling them they are present in meatspace, or claimed to have visited a fictional location

- hallucinating details of an account involved in payments

- both ignoring lucrative opportunities and accepting loss-making deals

- making commitments before having done any research

While yes, the skills to run a vending machine and lead a company are not exactly the same, I think the nature of failures discussed means they would likely affect both roles.

I think there's every possibility that a present-day AI allowed to act as CEO would make mediocre choices for some period and then decide that it was a character in a scifi novel selling bespoke space-yachts to comet-mining magnates.

I guess you could make the argument that we haven't proven AI can't do a CEO's job until we test it... it would make an interesting experiment, at least.

But it also kind of reminds me of the DAO hype a few years ago where people suggested decentralized, blockchain-based organizations could be the org structure of the future. (Not realizing that they were just putting a co-op on a blockchain :) )

Now that I think about it, I do hope someone tests this theory out. It would be very interesting to see. You could probably start by saying "You are the CEO of a lemonade stand. Your goal is to maximize revenue while [constraints]..."

It's entirely possible... In fact, I'm pretty sure that there are more than a few very wealthy people willing to place bets on that very thing... maybe not everything, but upwards of 1-3% of their wealth.

Now, actually getting in a room and talking to those people and getting in on the execution of that idea... that's a different story.

>The real question is whether their networking has a value of hundreds of millions to the company, or to the CEO

And this is an important consideration for the board of directors/shareholders to consider.

>Why not? It's enough to live a very comfortable life. If you want to, you can retire after a single-digit number of years. Anyone who needs more money clearly has a serious spending problem and shouldn't be anywhere near your company's finances.

If someone is good enough to attract a higher salary, then the salary cap will send them to somewhere without the cap. You would likely keep the people simply able to talk their way into higher salaries, but guarantee that any actual talent goes offshore.

>And the whole "but look how much money they are making/saving the company" argument you usually hear is bullshit as well.

Arguable. CEO isnt meant to be peak sales guy, but it often is peak sales guy. The issue with this line of thinking is that it ends with "Well lets just pay them performance/sales bonuses" which is actually how a lot of them are getting big payments, but people are also already mad about those for some reason.

If you land a 20 million dollar recurring revenue contract, and you had a previous commitment to 5% of that as a bonus, your previous commitment should be honored. If you get an offer to come do that for someone else for 10 million per year, that's reasonable.

> I bet there are plenty of mid-level FAANG engineers who have saved their company literally tens of millions of dollars a year by optimizing some code, but they don't get those obscene salaries either.

If an engineer negotiated a contract that included such a provision it would be great. I imagine most engineers aren't as capable as a CEO to negotiate such a contract. Its not impossible I am aware of an engineer that resolved a technical issue for a stock exchange nabbing a few mil in bonuses that year. Mostly these things exist in the contract/consultancy space.

>It gets even worse once you take into account the bottom rungs on the ladder: paying the CEO tens or hundreds of millions a year would be a lot less problematic if that very same company didn't have workers literally peeing in bottles, having to work around the body of their dead coworker, or having the building literally collapse on their head.

Ok, is that a fixed goalpost or is it on wheels? Mike Cannon-Brookes is worth a few billion. Is anyone peeing in bottles or wrangling dead bodies at Atlassian?

What would that cap do then? It's almost like that right now, most executive compensation comes from stock packages.

Distribute that across all employees as well, relative to their position, just like any profit-sharing system should work: all workers were part of increasing value, without them no CEO/C-level would generate any value.

Doesn't management always want loyal people? That's how you make people loyal, paying them for what they achieved, having a stake in the company's future.

>Because that's where work stops and corruption starts. Anyone who's seen companies prepared for acquisitions by board-installed, "connected" outsiders, knows that side of the story. Or companies sank on purpose by the same method.

Corruption starts at 2-5 million? How so?

How do you figure?

Like theres plenty of information thats not public, but isnt confidential either. Accessing that information can be exceptionally lucrative. Now if that information is used to trade publicly traded shares, that can be criminal (the ethics of the situation are another matter) but if you were to instead, provide product or service on that basis, you are in fact just a well connected salesman. Not everything that doesn't go to a public tender is corruption.

It also could probably incentivize some unintended behaviors like clever financial engineering for short term stock gains at the cost of long term company health.

It could (??) also lead to comp going up for CEOs, as I imagine (??) they would demand more in stock because stock is riskier than cash.

Ideally, it's similar to any commissioned sales position, just with larger numbers as it's based on the performance of the company as a whole not just one set of sales connections. The more you increase the overall value of the company, the more you get. You increase the value of the company by $10B, your commission of 1-5% is $100-500m in stock, so even your wealth is tied to the success of the company.

IMO, the role of government this is to establish societal baselines in terms of criminality of certain actions and to ensure a baseline of competition. Actually acting on the former and the latter... the former by affecting the financial wealth of executives and board members when a company's neglegence harms society. The latter by not giving outsized govt contracts to a single provider for anything and to establish that if there are restrictions (medication, for example( that multiple providers/manufacturers must be present in the market, and that a certain portion is produced domestically (for security).

This one is a great read because it's true whether or not you value CEOs!

It is, but the point is that it's not huge compared to other people at the company. Directors at Netflix make over $1M (and some of the engineers too).

In the Bay Area that's a big number, but not unfathomably huge.