They created an AI to replace their boss, the crazy idea of Uber engineers

The public generally perceives Uber as a simple transportation and meal delivery app. The internal reality is quite different. For the CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, the company is above all a massive database of computer code where engineers serve as the true builders of the system.

This highly advanced technological culture has recently crossed a particularly amusing and revealing milestone.

A conversational robot to face the management

During a long interview with the podcast The Diary of a CEO, the CEO revealed an unexpected initiative from his teams. Developers have created an artificial intelligence affectionately named Dara AI. This conversational robot mimics the CEO's thought patterns and serves as a training partner. Employees submit their presentations in advance to refine their arguments and anticipate management's remarks.

This revolution in coding indeed echoes recent alerts issued by other tech giants.

The Microsoft AI leader anticipates the full automation of many intellectual tasks within just eighteen months, pointing out that machines already generate a massive portion of internal computer code.

Leaders facing the threat of machines

Faced with these spectacular gains in efficiency, the question of employment inevitably arises. Dara Khosrowshahi admits that if his engineers become faster, his first instinct will be to hire more of them to speed up the company's development. However, he acknowledges that in the long term, he might decide to freeze human hiring to massively purchase Nvidia graphics processors.

A technological restructuring that inevitably reminds one of Jack Dorsey's shocking decision, recently firing half of his workforce while fully assuming that a smaller team supported by artificial intelligence would work much better.

The podcast host has also joked about the situation by asking if this AI would ever be presented to the board of directors. Dara Khosrowshahi remains calm about his own position for now. He believes he is safe as long as the algorithms are not able to learn instantly in real time. A confidence that strongly contrasts with Sam Altman's recent statements, where he claimed that a superintelligence would make a much better CEO than himself. Same tune for the CEO of Alphabet (Google), Sundar Pichai, who stated last year that « the role of a CEO may be one of the easiest things to accomplish one day by an AI ».

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Source : TechCrunch