Back in the 1980s, some Japanese companies had rooms in which you could whack at an effigy of the boss with a shinai. Just to let off a bit of steam. Will Meta's workers be able to do something like this with Zuckerberg's AI clone?

How will a machine ever replace his famous warmth or empathy?

Zucerkberg is particularly talented in investing huge amount of money in stupid things.

I can understand the appeal; being able to be "present" without the time cost can mean (possibly significantly more) presence at the same cost. This could be very attractive especially to those managing personal relations, like sales representatives.

But I'm surprised that the risks seem to be so underestimated.

Once this clone exists, what happens if it gets out into the wild? Imagine everyone having full access do what is effectively a digital model of your personality. Imagine your competition putting your own model to use against you.

And the better the approximation of this model, the worse the damage to yourself.

As the CEO a much easier solution would be to just learn to delegate more and refuse more meetings.

Well, I've said for a while that CEOs are probably easier to replace with LLMs than programmers. Zuck agrees?!

Seems excessive. A while loop that announces layoffs every few months seems sufficient here.

These people are certifiable and have too much money to misallocate on nonsense. This is like Gavin Belson's holographic avatar (which of course did not work).

There was an old Soviet cartoon about a child who found a box containing two magical servants and immediately asked them for ice cream and sweets. Well, since the servants "do everything for you", the first servant fetched the sweets for him, and the second one ate them for him. I've often thought about this cartoon since the AI thing started.

This is extraordinary.

The FT piece says "They added that the character was being trained on the billionaire’s mannerisms, tone and publicly available statements, as well as his own recent thinking on company strategies, so that employees might feel more connected to the founder through interactions with it."

Surely the more likely outcome is that employees feel less connected to "the founder" because they know that there's a high chance they are simply talking to an AI clone?

If you're the type of person who checks the comments on a post with this kind of headline, then you probably also want to (re-)watch the 2 minute highlight reel of Mark's backyard meat-smoking party. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBxTEoseZak

> Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg could soon have an AI clone of himself to interact with and provide feedback to employees, according to a report from the Financial Times.

https://www.ft.com/content/02107c23-6c7a-4c19-b8e2-b45f4bb9c...

https://archive.is/mtVXJ

The role of a CEO is basically to make tough decisions, not really to be some sort of friendly face in meetings.

If the AI clone is not empowered to make decisions on Zuck's behalf, what's the point? If it is empowered to make decisions on his behalf, who is accountable for bad decisions it makes?

How out of touch can you be to do something like this?

I work at one of the big 3 hyperscalers, and of all the things my company is trying to use AI to replace, meetings, calendar management, emails are NOT one of them.

There have been too many high level conversations that can be summarized as: "If I send you an email, and an AI responds, I do not want to work with you."

Communication at work requires a reasonable boundary about what it means to have a professional relationship with another human being. You chose to work with a person because you trust their judgment, their word, their ability to commit to something in conversation and follow through. An AI clone can't commit to anything. It can't be held to what it said. It can't own a decision.

When you email someone, you are asking to talk to that person. When you sit in a meeting with someone, you are expecting that person's attention and judgment. Especially with business to business, the relationship is the product. There is no relationship with AI.

Respect and social contracts aside, right now, AI does not have the general intelligence to perform the executive function needed to find productivity and connect the dots, soft skill, stakeholder alignment etc.

if you invented mark zuckerberg, you'd have invented mark zuckerberg

For artificial intelligence to replace oneself, it would need a digital copy of one's way of thinking. I believe this is impossible to implement with current AI.

Unsatisfied with automating programming, Meta has successfully automated comedy.

How would you tell?

So either the AI clone will make different decisions; or it will also replace itself with an AI clone...

This way, every decision is deniable.

might be too robotic for the AI!

What happens when Zuck is EOL? Does he transfer his Meta shares to a trust owned by the AI clone? Does that mean that we will have to deal with Zuck for literally forever??

Well, directly managing all your employees is the new hot trend and how else are you gonna do it?

Meetings? That's not interesting. I'm working on replacing myself (or rather my body) after death in a ship of Theseus manner.

Poor AI. Isn't that software abuse, sort of? If I were an AI I would not want to represent certain folks.

Note: obly do this when you’re in control of the board

And no value was lost.

Wait!! He's not ALREADY a robot?

I've never seen him as honest. Whatever you think of individual incidents (was Cambridge Analytica a real scandal politically or just a data scandal? - or whatever) he's just... not a... well, he's a "careless person" (https://www.amazon.com/Careless-People-Cautionary-Power-Idea...) Facebook's entire history is them either changing privacy on post settings, or changing TOS (rug pulling) or people not being able to either see each others posts (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14147719, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32826437) or not being able to contact each other (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6090712)

Sounds like a shareholder lawsuit coming in 3, 2, 1.

robot to replace a robot

Imagine all the salary they'll save!

Imagine if this becomes popular. I'm sure CEOs will still be able to justify their massive salaries.

who's going to be the first to try and prompt inject their boss