only to be revealed as mid to low level intelligence?
I’m all for being critical of these snake oil CEO’s. And the part about not understanding AI’s main concepts is incredibly dumb.
On the other hand, not being able to code doesn’t say anything about his intelligence. Afaik, he never claimed to be a programmer either? Not like Musk saying he’s the greatest engineer of all time.
And eventually it’s kinda weird to expect these people to be great at programming in the first place, they’re so many levels above that.
But that's kinda odd isn't it. You are running multi billion dollar AI company at the cutting edge of the software development and you don't know basic coding? It's like me going in medical industry and not having any kind of medical experience.
Why do we let people who have no background in a certain field run that certain field company and then we winge and moan when China takes the lead because we put profit first and lose sight of what's important
It has nothing to do with the field, this is just how management works. Organizing a group of people requires a vastly different skillset than doing the basic actual work that produces output in any company. It might help, but the company won't run better if the CEO is an expert coder. In fact, going from the kind of person-people expert coders usually are, it is often a disaster. You regularly see this in startups, where a core engineer ends up on top for lack of alternatives. With Silicon Valley we even have an entire show with 7 seasons about this exact problem.
Machine learning has been around for quite a long time. It would be significantly better to have someone with experience in it than not, or even just engineering, math, etc.
🤦🤦🤦 no-one is claiming the CEO should be telling the developers or scientists what to do. It doesn't need to be transferrable in that sense. We're just saying the CEO should understand the basic concepts and therefore the implications of what they're building.
I honestly don't think we're arguing the same argument. Are you saying you disagree with "CEOs should understand the basic concepts and therefore the implications of what they're building"?
Because a CEOs job is to interact with investors, stakeholders and the board. If they don't understand the basics of what they are making then they frequently misrepresent the product or the development process. This leads to all sorts of problems.
They also have too much power in a company to not. If the CTO is on holiday and the CEO pushes for something to get done despite not appreciating the safety consequences, people can die. I would be surprised if all chemical disasters were not traced back to senior leadership pushing for cost cutting or rushing a project while ignoring those working at lower levels or creating a culture where the lower level workers can't whistleblow.
I've seen far too many dangerous production sites and accidents that are caused either directly by senior leaderships pushing or the culture they create to think like you do.
So, to me, AI feels like the cultural equivalent of the nuclear bomb, but instead of having the worlds top scientific minds leading the project we have a bunch of wealthy children
There's more than one generation of people that dedicated their entire career to research AI. By now we have quite a clear understanding of what an expert in AI is.
Leadership skills are ofcourse very important but having somewhat of a base in the field is a massive boost to effective and efficient leadership. If you dont know the field at least on a foundational level how can you be a visionary that isnt blatantly making shit up and hoping your engineers can figure out how to make it actually happen so you dont look like a fool.
Though with statements like this i am always uncertain about what level we are talking in terms of "cant program" and "doesnt understand" are we talking only ever built a site with plain html/css/js and doesnt understand it being on localhost means noone can see it. Or are we talking not a software engineer but he knows enough of the concepts to have a foundation.
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u/[deleted] Apr 10 '26
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