When VC and PE call a company or industry "mature" it means they don't see increasing revenue, only something to be sucked dry and sold for parts. To them, consistent revenue is worthless, it must be skyrocketing or nothing. If you want to see this in action right now, look what Broadcom is doing to VMWare. They also saw VMWare as a "mature company".

Could the Big Four be in danger?

Seems like they may be hurting themselves in the long run, I hope it fails miserably

Sure. But in the meantime, calls will get worse.

They don't care about the long run.

How easy will it be to fool the AI into getting the company in legal trouble? Oh well.

call centers got worse after outsourcing them overseas and we still have them.

Isn't the MO for venture capitalists to run businesses into the ground, make them owe debt to themselves, cannibalise businesses from the inside and then run away with a profit while they bankrupt?

Not surprising to make a decision that kills a business because the entire point is to kill the golden goose

The idea of AI accounting is so fucking funny to me. The problem is right in the name. They account for stuff. Accountants account for where stuff came from and where stuff went.

Machine learning algorithms are black boxes that can't show their work. They can absolutely do things like detect fraud and waste by detecting abnormalities in the data, but they absolutely can't do things like prove an absence of fraud and waste.

This is because auto regressive LLMs work on high level "Tokens". There are LLM experiments which can access byte information, to correctly answer such questions.

Also, they don't want to support you omegalul do you really think call centers are hired to give a fuck about you? this is intentional

For usage like that you'd wire an LLM into a tool use workflow with whatever accounting software you have. The LLM would make queries to the rigid, non-hallucinating accounting system.

I still don't think it would be anywhere close to a good idea because you'd need a lot of safeguards and also fuck your accounting and you'll have some unpleasant meetings with the local equivalent of the IRS.

Yep, just gut one business after another for the quarterly returns. Same logic as the thieves stripping copper from street lights, just at a bigger scale

I don’t think that’s the full explanation though, because there are examples of models that will correctly spell out the word first (ie, it knows the component letter tokens) and still miscount the letters after doing so.

No, this literally is the explanation. The model understands the concept of "Strawberry", It can output from the model (and that itself is very complicated) in English as Strawberry, jn Persian as توت فرنگی and so on.

But the model does not understand how many Rs exist in Strawberry or how many ت exist in توت فرنگی

I’m talking about models printing out the component letters first not just printing out the full word. As in “S - T - R - A - W - B - E - R - R - Y” then getting the answer wrong. You’re absolutely right that it reads in words at a time encoded to vectors, but if it’s holding a relationship from that coding to the component spelling, which it seems it must be given it is outputting the letters individually, then something else is wrong. I’m not saying all models fail this way, and I’m sure many fail in exactly the way you describe, but I have seen this failure mode (which is what I was trying to describe) and in that case an alternate explanation would be necessary.

Hey boss. Think they're using chatgpt for that?

I don't think this is as dramatic as a lot of you are saying it is. It works or it doesn't. This is what VC should do

The model ISN'T outputing the letters individually, binary models (as I mentioned) do; not transformers.

The model output is more like
Strawberry
<S-T-R><A-W-B>

<S-T-R-A-W-B><E-R-R>

<S-T-R-A-W-B-E-R-R-Y>

Tokens can be a letter, part of a word, any single lexeme, any word, or even multiple words ("let be")

Okay I did a shit job demonstrating the time axis. The model doesn't know the underlying letters of the previous tokens and this processes is going forward in time

Have you ever used a chatbot for technical support? It's infuriating. Yet the industry is barreling in that direction before the tech is ready, customers be damned. This is not what VC should do.

Have you ever had to use an indifferent college student that barely speaks English for technical support