site banner

Friday Fun Thread for July 3, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

1
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Direct quote from the Reuters Weekend Briefing newsletter for today:

I'm in your base and I'm taking your chips
  • Parts and labor: Defense startups are raiding the automotive and fracking industries for parts to accelerate weapons development. The US stopped Polestar, majority owned by China's Geely Holding, from selling new models domestically. Owners want to know who's going to service their cars.

  • AI: Argentina's president announced a congressional bill to create non-human corporations run by artificial intelligence. Look behind the curtain and you'll find they would need humans anyway, experts say.

The heading is a reference to a 20-year-old meme.

A corporation is already a profit-maximizer with decision-making so distributed it’s practically an egregore. Why not see if LLMs trained on management books can do management better than humans?

The idea of stock ownership of an LLM corporation is interesting, and the CEO-bot won’t need a salary or golden parachute.

Anthropic tried this: they tasked Claude with running a vending machine in their office twice (#1, #2). In #1 it operated at a net loss, in #2 it eventually managed a small profit, until it was introduced to employees outside Anthropic, then it went bankrupt (suspiciously, Anthropic doesn’t include that on their blog).

I predict a bigger issue is that today’s LLMs are too suggestible: if an LLM were “officially” put in charge of a real company with real money, it would be a human or group unofficially running it. LLMs are still getting jailbroken, even Fable was allegedly 24 days ago when Anthropic universally suspended access. I also believe LLMs also struggle with high-level open-ended tasks, evidenced by their creative writing and software architecture.

But as LLMs get smarter and less easy to jailbreak, I’m interested to see more an LLM-run experiments, and I do think they have the potential to be much better leaders than humans.