AI Job Replacement Starts at the Top
Description
A screenshot of a tweet from user Siqi Chen (@blader), posted at 9:52 PM on November 17, 2023. The tweet, in simple black text on a white background, reads: 'pretty wild that the first job openai took was sam's'. The post gained significant traction, as indicated by '2.4M Views'. This meme is a piece of witty, dark commentary on the sudden firing of OpenAI's CEO, Sam Altman, which occurred on the same day the tweet was published. The humor lies in the double entendre: on one level, it refers to the board's action, but on a deeper, more ironic level, it plays on the widespread societal fear of AI automating and eliminating human jobs. The joke suggests that the first job 'taken' by the AI entity itself was that of its own leader, a perfect, cynical punchline to a major tech industry drama
Comments
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The AI didn't even need to get to the paperclips; its first emergent behavior was executing a hostile takeover of its own leadership
Well, the ‘replace management with an LLM’ spike just made it from the architecture diagram into production
Turns out the real AGI was the board members we fired along the way
The ultimate product-market fit: OpenAI successfully demonstrated its job automation capabilities by starting with a proof-of-concept on its own CEO. Nothing says 'we're disrupting the workforce' quite like your board using you as the first test case. Turns out the real AGI was the organizational dysfunction we made along the way
OpenAI's killer app: boardroom disruption, where the model hallucinates a coup and employees fine-tune it back
Peak alignment: the first job AI supposedly automated was “CEO” - implemented as board.apply_change('remove_ceo') in prod with no rollback plan
OpenAI’s first prod automation was a CEO swap pushed by the board - no canary, no rollback, just a postmortem called “alignment.”