Apple CEO John Ternus pressured Apple senior VP of Software Engineering Craig Federighi to “accelerate the company’s road map and move quickly beyond merely making necessary improvements to Siri,” reports Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman in today’s Power On newsletter.
Citing anonymous sources, Gurman writes that Ternus is “frustrated by what he sees as a reluctance to embrace AI with the same urgency as competitors,” and pushed Federighi for changes in a meeting behind closed doors. Federighi, Gurman points out, has been considered an AI skeptic with concerns “about the technology’s privacy, security, societal and employment implications.”
Sometimes I swear the job of CEO seems to be the easiest ever. Just follow whatever’s trending now. Seems so easy: start your day, see all headlines say “AI”, order a few people to put “AI” everywhere, sit back, relax and rack profits from investors who are just as brain dead.
Being CEO is hard.
You get so much money and you need to figure out a way to spend it.
You get a brand new super expensive car on company cost so you can’t worry about repairs or when you have to replace it.
You get invited for lunch and dinner so you can’t think about what to cook in the evenings and also you can’t waste time in the supermarket.
You have so much responsibilities that even when you do a shit job and the company fires you or goes bankrupt you get hired by the next one anyways so you don’t have to worry about your job or providing for your family.
You don’t need to track your time by the minute and you don’t have a boss looking over your shoulder all the time so you need to figure out a way on what to do with all that time.
I mean i certainly wouldn’t want all these terrible terrible burdons being loaded onto me.
Poor CEOs
That’s because your mental image of a CEO is these big dogs. You will never read a story about a CEO doing a great job, only dumb fucks like Musk make the news.
That’s a fair point.
I do think it requires some skill and sociopathy around being able to sell the biggest lies you can imagine so investors give you money.
To be fair, they can’t just sit back, they also have to have a lot of meetings that could have been emails.
Funny story. I once worked at a company where I got along very well with my boss so I’d regularly get some gossip about the higher ups. One time my boss had a meeting (or rather multiple meeting) with the higher ups to go over the quarterly goals for the department. They had created the goals, had a presentation and all they needed was for the higher ups to give the okay to continue. Fairly simple thing, except every meeting was completely derailed by the CEO and his incessant need to discuss fishing. And because the higher ups were all buddies they all started discussing fishing and boating etc. After 4 failed meeting to get a simple Yes my boss sent everything in email and got a near instant confirmation to go ahead.
Sometimes the meeting has to be an email.
They’re not smart or visionary. They’re just rich. They sell us a myth that they’re titans but it’s a lie.