South Africa’s top CEOs – according to ChatGPT

Daily Investor • 9 May 2023

ChatGPT’s list of South Africa’s most successful chief executive offers (CEOs) includes Adrian Gore, Ivan Glasenberg, Brian Joffe, Alan Knott-Craig, and Whitey Basson.

ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot released for public use by its developer, OpenAI, in November 2022.

The AI chatbot used OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 foundational large language models and has been fine-tuned using supervised and reinforcement learning techniques.

When Daily Investor asked ChatGPT who South Africa’s best-ever CEOs are, it highlighted that, as an AI language model, it does not have opinions or rank individuals.

However, it provided the names of some of the most successful CEOs in South Africa’s history, who are widely recognised for their achievements.

These names included many chief executives who are widely regarded as the best of the best, showing the platform’s exceptional abilities.

Notably, most of the people selected by ChatGPT were not only CEOs but also the founders of their companies.

It is unsurprising as founder-CEOs often outperform normal CEOs because of their strong connection to the company.

A previous Daily Investor analysis revealed that companies with the founder as CEO and a strong board presence performed much better than the JSE Top 40.

For R100 invested, the founder-led index returned R809 in the ten years, translating into an annual return of 23.25%.

The Top 40 index, in comparison, returned R365 with an annualised return of 13.81%.

Here is the list of the 10 CEOs which ChatGPT selected as exceptional.