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Half of companies planning to replace customer service with AI are reversing course

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  • Tell me you know nothing about contract law without telling me you know nothing about contract law.

    It was a joke, mate. A simple jest. A jape, if you will

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

    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 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 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

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

    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.

  • 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.

    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."

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

    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.

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

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

  • 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.

    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.

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

    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.

  • ...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

    What I’m saying is the ONLY viable business model

  • 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.

    Defining contextual relationship between words sounds like predicting the next word in a set, mate.

  • 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.

    That's part of the problem isn't it? "AI" is a blanket term that has recently been used to cover everything from LLMs to machine learning to RPA (robotic process automation). An algorithm isn't AI, even if it was written by another algorithm.

    And at the end of the day none of it is artificial intelligence. Not to the original meaning of the word. Now we have had to rebrand AI as AGI to avoid the association with this new trend.

  • 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.

    It was an expression, online is the only way you can submit tickets.

  • 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

    We don't have any way of knowing what makes human consciousness, the best we've got is to just call it an emergent phenomenon, which is as close to a Science version of "God of the Gaps" as you can get.

    And you think we can make ChatGPT a real person with good intentions and duct tape?

    Naw, sorry but I'll believe AGI when I see it.

  • What I’m saying is the ONLY viable business model

    not at the current cost or environmental damage

  • 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.

    people that are in charge of them are usually the dumbest people ever.

    I think that's actively encouraged by management in some areas: put the dumbest people in charge to make the most irritating frustrating system possible. It's a feature of the system.

    Some of the most irritating systems I have interacted with (government disability benefits administration) actually require "press 1 for X, press 2 for y" and if you have your phone on speaker, the system won't recognize the touch tones, you have to do them without speakerphone.

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

    They're unpredictable. Every employee is a potential future lawsuit, they can get injured, sexually harassed, all kinds of things - AI doesn't press lawsuits against the company, yet.

  • 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.

    A good systems analyst can effectively translate user requirements into accurate statements, does not need to be a programmer. Good systems analysts are generally more adept in asking clarifying questions, challenging assumptions and sussing out needs. Good programmers will still be needed but their time is wasted gathering requirements.

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    vanth@reddthat.comV
    I only vacation in countries that have trained their LLMs to use line breaks.
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    Communicate securely with WhatsApp? That's an oxymoron.
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    semperverus@lemmy.worldS
    You want abliterated models, not distilled.
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    hollownaught@lemmy.worldH
    Bit misleading. Tumour-associated antigens can very easily be detected very early. Problem is, these are only associated with cancer, and provide a very high rate of false positives They're better used as a stepping stone for further testing, or just seeing how advanced a cancer is That is to say, I'm assuming that's what this is about, as i didnt rwad the article. It's the first thing I thought of when I heard "cancer in bloodstream", as the other options tend to be a bit more bleak Edit: they're talking about cancer "shedding genetic material", which I hate how general they're being. Probably talking about proto oncogenes from dead tumour debris, but seems different to what I was expecting
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  • Microsoft Bans Employees From Using DeepSeek App

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    L
    (Premise - suppose I accept that there is such a definable thing as capitalism) I'm not sure why you feel the need to state this in a discussion that already assumes it as a necessary precondition of, but, uh, you do you. People blaming capitalism for everything then build a country that imports grain, while before them and after them it’s among the largest exporters on the planet (if we combine Russia and Ukraine for the “after” metric, no pun intended). ...what? What does this have to do with literally anything, much less my comment about innovation/competition? Even setting aside the wild-assed assumptions you're making about me criticizing capitalism means I 'blame [it] for everything', this tirade you've launched into, presumably about Ukraine and the USSR, has no bearing on anything even tangentially related to this conversation. People praising capitalism create conditions in which there’s no reason to praise it. Like, it’s competitive - they kill competitiveness with patents, IP, very complex legal systems. It’s self-regulating and self-optimizing - they make regulations and do bailouts preventing sick companies from dying, make laws after their interests, then reactively make regulations to make conditions with them existing bearable, which have a side effect of killing smaller companies. Please allow me to reiterate: ...what? Capitalists didn't build literally any of those things, governments did, and capitalists have been trying to escape, subvert, or dismantle those systems at every turn, so this... vain, confusing attempt to pin a medal on capitalism's chest for restraining itself is not only wrong, it fails to understand basic facts about history. It's the opposite of self-regulating because it actively seeks to dismantle regulations (environmental, labor, wage, etc), and the only thing it optimizes for is the wealth of oligarchs, and maybe if they're lucky, there will be a few crumbs left over for their simps. That’s the problem, both “socialist” and “capitalist” ideal systems ignore ape power dynamics. I'm going to go ahead an assume that 'the problem' has more to do with assuming that complex interacting systems can be simplified to 'ape (or any other animal's) power dynamics' than with failing to let the richest people just do whatever they want. Such systems should be designed on top of the fact that jungle law is always allowed So we should just be cool with everybody being poor so Jeff Bezos or whoever can upgrade his megayacht to a gigayacht or whatever? Let me say this in the politest way I know how: LOL no. Also, do you remember when I said this? ‘Won’t someone please think of the billionaires’ is wearing kinda thin You know, right before you went on this very long-winded, surreal, barely-coherent ramble? Did you imagine I would be convinced by literally any of it when all it amounts to is one giant, extraneous, tedious equivalent of 'Won't someone please think of the billionaires?' Simp harder and I bet maybe you can get a crumb or two yourself.