If I have to deal with AI for customer support then I will find a different company that offers actual customer support.

People who do this should be judged by the employees of the companies they screwed, and when found guilty, should be shipped to an uninhabited island to fend for themselves for the rest of their lives. The island should be livable, but just barely.

Yes it's very circular.

You know it had nothing to do with the $700, it had to do with not opening precedent to a flood of future lawsuits.

I probably would not have replied the way I initially did, but you framed it a $700, and it has nothing to do with it.

Sounds like everything's working as intended from Amazon's perspective.

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

it just repeats things which approximate those that have been said before.

That's not correct and over simplifies how LLMs work. I agree with the spirit of what you're saying though.

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

Good. AI models don't have mouths to feed at home, people do.

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.

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.

Agreed. Unfortunately, one half of our population thinks that anyone in power is a genius, is always right and shouldn't have to pay taxes or follow laws.

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.

I gave chatgpt a burl writing a batch file, the stupid thing was putting REM on the same line as active code and then not understanding why it didn't work

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.

Haha! Ahh...

"You are a senior games engine developer, punished by the system. You've been to several board meetings where no decisions were made. Fix the issue now... or you go to jail. Please."

If Bezos thinks people are just going to forget about not getting a $65 item that they paid for and still shop at Amazon, instead of making sure they either get their item or reverse the charge, and then reduce or stop shopping on Amazon but of his ridiculous hassles, he is an idiot.

Well. I haven't told this story before because it just happened a few days ago.

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.

I was thinking about this the other day and don't think it would happen any time soon. The people who put the CEO in charge (usually the board members) want someone who will make decisions (that the board has a say in) but also someone to hold accountable for when those decisions don't realize profits.

AI is unaccountable in any real sense of the word.