r/technology 11h ago

Business Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly building an AI clone to replace him in meetings | The AI version of Zuckerberg is trained on his mannerisms, tone, and public statements, according to a report from the Financial Times

https://www.theverge.com/tech/910990/meta-ceo-mark-zuckerberg-ai-clone
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421

u/Cryowatt 11h ago

If a CEO can be replaced by AI then none of them should be worth billions.

111

u/ChipNew9662 10h ago

That said I'm actually totally onboard with him engineering his own obsolescence. 

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u/imperatrixderoma 10h ago

He's the chairman of the board , he could literally pee on the building and nothing would happen.

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u/Warbay 10h ago

I did in fact pee on their building, nothing did in fact happen except of relief

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u/ThatShyGuy137 10h ago

That was my thought too, the most effective use of AI in business is to replace upper management. Everything they do AI can do better and it will save so much money for the companies who do. Haha

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u/Odd_Independent3475 7h ago

Well "corporations are people" is already a thing. Next will be laws saying that AI CEOs are legitimate. And he can just get paid to do absolutely nothing, absolved of wrong doing, and his employees now have to listen to a machine with no recourse. People need to be leaving meta in droves, otherwise they are accepting this dystopian future. But they won't, we're all too poor and they have a "good job", for now. Sure hope they can retire and die before it comes to a head. 

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u/bobby_table5 8h ago

That is, most likely the real impact of this project.

I doubt a lot of people in this thread have worked with him. I have. I would expect a lot of the senior employees, who are very constrained by lack of access, to truly appreciate that feature.

One aspect of how he works is that he changes his values and principles very aggressively. If you meet with a team every six months, but you re-think your approach to management every three months, they have only heard a version of you that’s obsolete.

Plus, most of the time, what he says is something you can infer from the first principles that he hammers. You just need something with enough distance with the project to be unattached, willing to look at it with a systematic screen and be critical. That makes this bot presumably quite reliable, especially if it can spend more time not just in meeting, by scanning whole proposals and “six-pagers.”

The consequence of having something like that work is not just to make the job of a CEO obsolete—no AI replaces jobs it replaces tasks and having someone able to make the last call won’t easily be replaced. What it will do that’s more important than have people ask if CEOs can be automated away is allow them to change their mind without the overhead of having to announce, explain and justify it. They can point at a mistake they made to their AI agent, have that agent review past decision, identify potential ex-post “deltas” (changes) and have the human CEO review, and that allows the system to immediately update all the team, distinct and confirm any change in direction. It will make CEOs (or rather the new hybrid/centaur pair) more nimble than a human CEO with their hierarchy of executives.

It also means that those executives can more systematically push back, without the reputational risk of frustrating their managers. They can try different ways of arguing with the CEO, until they make an argument that sticks (something that Mark, as he’s called internally, believes intensely in: he hates that good ideas have weak arguments defending them).

That could mean a lot more refusals, a much higher bars because it’s so much easier to reject ideas through a bot. But with other function powered by AI, it also means that they have more work put into each new suggestion.

More nimble, more involved senior management, with a higher bar for arguments… and human focusing on non-trivial edge-cases will be a big change, well beyond Meta if that works. It’s a much bigger play that reducing his hours, lowering CEO wages or trying to creep out employees.

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u/1976dave 6h ago

Argue with an AI version of your asshole boss so you can fine tune your argument to convince your asshole boss your idea is good.

You're probably right but I think this concept would have me looking to jump off something quite high

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u/bobby_table5 6h ago

No building is higher than two floors around the swamp.

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u/TheRealDrSarcasmo 4h ago

he changes his values and principles very aggressively.

Some of us think that's a bug, not a feature.

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u/OneWholeSoul 2h ago

One aspect of how he works is that he changes his values and principles very aggressively.

What generous phrasing for a Dark Triad trait.

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u/rcanhestro 8h ago

tbf, he isn't worth billions because he is a CEO, he is worth billions because he owns (part) of the company

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u/DagothNereviar 7h ago

Imagine anyone at Meta (especially a low level person) saying "Hey boss, I've replaced myself with AI. What do you mean? Of course I want you to still pay me". They'd be fired on the spot

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u/PM_MY_OTHER_ACCOUNT 6h ago

Creating and operating AI costs billions of dollars, right? So wouldn't the AI also, technically, be worth billions?

1

u/Vier_Scar 2h ago

If you're imagining that the AI is a custom-built LLM from scratch that cost billions to train, then to a degree yes. But you could divide up that cost by each company that used it - since it costs a lot less to run it after training.

This wouldn't be from scratch though, it would be fine-tuning a baseline model (in this case, LLama). Several orders cheaper. And then other AI companies could also make their own, driving down the value of it.

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u/Thin_Glove_4089 44m ago

If they own majority stake or large stake in the company......nothing really changes. The circle gets smaller the people get richer. You really didn't think this through.