Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Simulate the CEO, published by robotelvis on August 13, 2023 on LessWrong.

Humans can organize themselves into remarkably large groups. Google has over a hundred thousand employees, the worldwide Scouting movement has over fifty million scouts, and the Catholic Church has over a billion believers.

So how do large numbers of people coordinate to work towards a common mission?

Most organizations are headed by some kind of "CEO" figure. They may use a title like President, Executive Director, or Pope, and their power is likely constrained by some kind of board or parliament, but the basic idea is the same - there is a single person who directs the behavior of everyone else.

If you have a small group of people then the CEO can just tell each individual person what to do, but that doesn't scale to large organizations. Thus most organizations have layers of middle managers (vicars, moderators, regional coordinators, etc) between the CEO and regular members.

In this post I want to argue that one important thing those middle managers do is that they "simulate the CEO". If someone wants to know what they should be doing, the middle manager can respond with an approximation of the answer the CEO would have given, and thus allow a large number of people to act as if the CEO was telling them what to do.

This isn't a perfect explanation of how a large organization works. In particular, it ignores the messy human politics and game playing that makes up an important part of how companies work and what middle managers do. But I think CEO-simulation is a large enough part of what middle managers do that it's worth taking a blog post to explore the concept further.

In particular, if simulating the CEO is a large part of what middle managers do, then it's interesting to think about what could happen if large language models like GPT get good at simulating the CEO

A common role in tech companies is the Product Manager (PM). The job of the a PM

Is to cause the company to do something (eg launch a product) that requires work from multiple teams. Crucially, the PM does not manage any of these teams and has no power to tell any of them what to do.

So why does anyone do what the PM asks?

Mostly, it's because people trust that the PM is an accurate simulation of the CEO. If the PM says something is important, then the CEO thinks it is important. If the PM says the team should do things a particular way then the CEO would want them to do it that way. If you do what the PM says then the CEO will be happy with you and your status in the company will improve.

Part of the reason Sundar Pichai rose to being CEO of Google is that he got a reputation for being able to explain Larry Page's thinking better than Larry could - he was a better simulation of Larry than Larry was.

Of course the ability to simulate the CEO is important for any employee. A people manager will gain power if people believe they accurately simulate the CEO, and so will a designer or an engineer. But the importance of simulating the CEO is most visible with a PM since they have no other source of power.

Of course, the CEO can't possibly understand every detail of what a large company does. The CEO of Intel might have a high level understanding of how their processors are designed, manufactured, and sold, but they definitely don't understand any of these areas with enough depth to be able to directly manage people working on those things. Similarly the Pope knows little about how a particular Catholic School is run.

In practice, a CEO will usually defer to the judgment of people they trust on a particular topic. For example, the CEO of a company might defer to the head of sales for decisions about sales. You can think of the combination of the CEO and the people they defer to as making up an "Extended CEO" - a super-intelligence m...