AI can make tech CEOs’ lives easier. What about everyone else?

Dazzle AI CEO Marissa Mayer recently became the latest tech CEO to face criticism over seemingly out-of-touch comments extolling the usefulness of AI.

In Mayer’s case, that involved asking an AI tool for help with a school-assigned description of her daughter. For OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, that’s included suggesting that parents create personalized podcasts for their kids’ drive to school and also declaring that he could not imagine parenting without ChatGPT. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has even suggested that it will become increasingly acceptable to meet your social and romantic needs through AI.

This all led TechCrunch’s Amanda Silberling to wonder if AI executives are simply too out-of-touch to build products for normal people — a crucial question with Anthropic set to go public just as Wall Street begins losing its appetite for heavy AI spending.

On the latest episode of the Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I chatted with Amanda about why industry leaders can sometimes seem so tone deaf. Kirsten wondered if this is more of a marketing problem or a product problem. 

Amanda’s answer: “A little bit of both.” She also argued that the tech industry is increasingly pushing a future “where basic human interaction gets more and more optimized out of actually occurring,” adding, “And call me old school, but I think that humans being able to talk to each other is probably a net positive for society.”