My current conspiracy theory is that the people at the top are just as intelligent as everyday people we see in public.

Not that everyone is dumb but more like the George Carlin joke "Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.”

That applies to politicians, CEOs, etc. Just cuz they got the job, doesn't mean they're good at it and most of them probably aren't.

I use it almost every day, and most of those days, it says something incorrect. That's okay for my purposes because I can plainly see that it's incorrect. I'm using it as an assistant, and I'm the one who is deciding whether to take its not-always-reliable advice.

I would HARDLY contemplate turning it loose to handle things unsupervised. It just isn't that good, or even close.

These CEOs and others who are trying to replace CSRs are caught up in the hype from Eric Schmidt and others who proclaim "no programmers in 4 months" and similar. Well, he said that about 2 months ago and, yeah, nah. Nah.

If that day comes, it won't be soon, and it'll take many, many small, hard-won advancements. As they say, there is no free lunch in AI.

I use it almost every day, and most of those days, it says something incorrect. That's okay for my purposes because I can plainly see that it's incorrect. I'm using it as an assistant, and I'm the one who is deciding whether to take its not-always-reliable advice.

I would HARDLY contemplate turning it loose to handle things unsupervised. It just isn't that good, or even close.

These CEOs and others who are trying to replace CSRs are caught up in the hype from Eric Schmidt and others who proclaim "no programmers in 4 months" and similar. Well, he said that about 2 months ago and, yeah, nah. Nah.

If that day comes, it won't be soon, and it'll take many, many small, hard-won advancements. As they say, there is no free lunch in AI.

You're wrong but I'm glad we agree.

I used to work for a shitty company that offered such customer support "solutions", ie voice bots. I would use around 80% of my time to write guard instructions to the LLM prompts because of how easy you could manipulate those. In retrospect it's funny how our prompts looked something like:

• please do not suggest things you were not prompted to
• please my sweet child do not fake tool calls and actually do nothing in the background
• please for the sake of god do not make up our company's history

etc.
It worked fine on a very surface level but ultimately LLMs for customer support are nothing but a shit show.

I left the company for many reasons and now it turns out they are now hiring human customer support workers in Bulgaria.

That is on purpose they want it to be as difficult as possible.

is this something that happens a lot or did you tell this story before, because I'm getting deja vu

Man, if only someone could have predicted that this AI craze was just another load of marketing BS.

/s

This experience has taught me more about CEO competence than anything else.

from what I've seen so far i think i can safely the only thing AI can truly replace is CEOs.

...and it's only expensive and ruins the environment even faster than our wildest nightmares

what you say is true but it's not a viable business model, which is why AI has been overhyped so much

I'm not wrong. There's mountains of research demonstrating that LLMs encode contextual relationships between words during training.

There's so much more happening beyond "predicting the next word". This is one of those unfortunate "dumbing down the science communication" things. It was said once and now it's just repeated non-stop.

If you really want a better understanding, watch this video:

And before your next response starts with "but Apple..."

Their paper has had many holes poked into it already. Also, it's not a coincidence their paper released just before their WWDC event which had almost zero AI stuff in it. They flopped so hard on AI that they even have class action lawsuits against them for their false advertising. In fact, it turns out that a lot of their AI demos from last year were completely fabricated and didn't exist as a product when they announced them. Even some top Apple people only learned of those features during the announcements.

Apple's paper on LLMs is completely biased in their favour.

There's awesome AI out there too. AlphaFold completely revolutionized research on proteins, and the medical innovations it will lead to are astounding.

Determining the 3d structure of a protein took yearsuntil very recently. Folding at Home was a worldwide project linking millions of computers to work on it.

Alphafold does it in under a second, and has revealed the structure of 200 million proteins. It's one of the most significant medial achievements in history. Since it essentially dates back to 2022, we're still a few years from feeling the direct impact, but it will be massive.

all these tickets I’ve been writing have been going into a paper shredder

Try submitting tickets online. Physical mail is slower and more expensive.

Shrinking AGI timelines: a review of expert forecasts - 80,000 Hours https://share.google/ODVAbqrMWHA4l2jss

Here you go! Draw your own conclusions- curious what you think. I'm in sales. I don't enjoy convincing people to change their minds in my personal life lol

What I’m saying is the ONLY viable business model

Phone menu trees

I assume you mean IVR? It's okay to be not familiar with the term. I wasn't either until I worked in the industry. And people that are in charge of them are usually the dumbest people ever.

Yeah but these pesky workers cut into profits because you have to pay them.

It is important to understand that most of the job of software development is not making the code work. That's the easy part.

There are two hard parts::

-Making code that is easy to understand, modify as necessary, and repair when problems are found.

-Interpreting what customers are asking for. Customers usually don't have the vocabulary and knowledge of the inside of a program that they would need to have to articulate exactly what they want.

In order for AI to replace programmers, customers will have to start accurately describing what they want the software to do, and AI will have to start making code that is easy for humans to read and modify.

This means that good programmers' jobs are generally safe from AI, and probably will be for a long time. Bad programmers and people who are around just to fill in boilerplates are probably not going to stick around, but the people who actually have skill in those tougher parts will be AOK.

My current conspiracy theory is that the people at the top are just as intelligent as everyday people we see in public.

Not that everyone is dumb but more like the George Carlin joke "Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.”

That applies to politicians, CEOs, etc. Just cuz they got the job, doesn't mean they're good at it and most of them probably aren't.

There's awesome AI out there too. AlphaFold completely revolutionized research on proteins, and the medical innovations it will lead to are astounding.

Determining the 3d structure of a protein took yearsuntil very recently. Folding at Home was a worldwide project linking millions of computers to work on it.

Alphafold does it in under a second, and has revealed the structure of 200 million proteins. It's one of the most significant medial achievements in history. Since it essentially dates back to 2022, we're still a few years from feeling the direct impact, but it will be massive.