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- Hacker News
- Maybe if marketing people stopped using the incredibly generic term "AI", and started actually saying what something is, it might work better. When you say "this app is powered by AI", do you mean Skynet, an LLM, or a basic machine learning system?by voidUpdate
- Literally always LLM. AI is now synonym for LLM, regardless of what it meant before. Just like crypto is now synonym for e-currency and does not mean cryptography anymore.
People are not confused about these.
by watwut - What's a "basic machine learning system?" is this a question of the size of the model or the algorithm? Which algorithms are basic? If you've got an ensemble of models that includes multiple transformers not all of which are LLMs as well as CNNs, how do you think the marketing people should express that?
- AI categorisation is second nature to us software engineers, it's easy to forget that the average person probably only knows the architecture for a transformer and one or two CNNs.by ben_w
- I had the pleasure of communicating with the AI bot of FedEx (in Germany) today:
Of course nothing was sorted out (several mails and a call to the distribution center did sort things out).> Everything is sorted out! > Everything is now sorted out, and I hope this solution works well for you.by lqet - I hate how chatbots call it a day after providing an unhelpful solutionby rschiavone
- Reminiscent of when coding agents fail to fix a bug and keep digging themselves deeper into a hole.
> I understand the problem now, I just need to... > I was wrong before but the issue is now clear, let me... > I have complete clarity now! I'm going to...
by phainopepla2 - I've also had a customer support chat bot give me completely wrong information. I could guess what was actually true and knew that there'd very likely be a workaround - involving actual people - to do what I need to do (which turned out correct), but it pissed me off anyway.by ahartmetz
- I’m sure there are some good AI products but the vast majority seem to be garbage. The exception is coding agents and simple web text/image interfaces.
So yeah, as a signal the AI brand is about as bad as it gets. Crypto tier. But just like crypto, the investors want to see that signal regardless of any underlying substance.
by AaronAPU - The exception is translation. Translation is what transformers were originally developed for. LLMs shine in translation, and creating code is, after all, a translation from natural language into a programming language.
A lot of what current LLMs are good at seems to boil down to translation:
* Translate some prompt into a planning list of individual TODOs
* Treat each TODO as a new translation (e.g. from TODO to code), or call some external tool (lookup something on the internet, static code analysis, database request)
* Translate the result(s) of these TODOs into a final text, or into a new TODO list
To me, this is interesting, because maybe the Homo Sapiens intelligence simply developed as a side effect of communication (translating words into actions).
by lqet - Imagine the dotcom boom but most consumers have a negative sentiment towards internet stuff, it's mostly just CEOs measuring their internet dicks against each other.by ahartmetz
- I have yet to see AI being successfully onboarded in brands where I feel it actually benefits me.
QuickBooks has annoying suggestions that shift the whole UI and cannot be disabled. Misclicks now happen.
The AI in my robot vacuum is... just a label? I don't want to talk to it. I want it to deterministically clean my stuff.
My TV got an upgrade to Gemini. Why? I don't talk to the TV, and it's in my face. (I'm think about getting a device that can do Plex->Atmos streaming).
by OptionOfT - How do you use gemini on your TV? Type questions with the remote, 3 words per hour?by LtWorf
- Funny, because my LG TV had Google Assistant (whatever that is) when I bought it, but it was removed. It was never in your face though, just a button on the remote.
It still has Alexa (it has both) but I never use it. I barely use the Echo that's next to the TV!
by scoot - "Why is that? How could that be? The answer is because customers don't form their opinions on quality from marketing. They form their opinions on quality from their own experience with the products or services."
- Steve Jobs
by sinaatalay - "Just avoid holding it in that way."
- Steve Jobs
by blitzar - Oh no. It can't really be because "AI" frequently means "we fire employees to make more money. And by the way, we don't actually care about quality". Right?by zx8080
- That mentality existed well before AI. See out-sourcing.by cpburns2009
- AI feels like “quick and cheap at the cost of quality” so I completely get why consumers would dislike it while business people love it.by Waterluvian
- +1 I think you've hit the nail on the head here.by amelius
- It's the definition of cutting corners. Using statistical inference to guess at what's right as fast as possible.by adamddev1
- I think this is the real issue. Consumers love shiny cool stuff, but they don't like Clippy the paperclip. They like Siri when it helps but they don't like Siri when it impedes them.
What a conundrum! Why oh why are consumers reacting this way?
by nyeah - Hand-crafted has always been the gold-standard of high-status. AI content is inherently low-status.
To the extent that AI adds value, it is being captured, rather than going back to the consumer.
by jollyllama - The companies that use AI the best will be those for which you don't have to tell someone they're using AI. That will be the sign of it being a quality product.
If you have to scream, shout, and beg your consumers to use your AI product, you're simply doing it wrong.
by Jcampuzano2 - The biggest one that jumps out at me is Amazon replacing their review search box with "Rufus", which searching the entire context of an item on Amazon, including descriptions, reviews, everything. It then wants me to ask it a question instead of doing a boring search for keywords.
If I'm looking at a product and want to search the reviews for the keyword "battery life" and see what real, actual people are experiencing, I can't do that anymore. A search for "battery life" in Rufus always returns some nonsense like "Many customers report good battery life, while others say it's runtime is shorter than expected". I want human experience! I want specifics! Why is everything sanded down to "good or bad"?
by fckgw - For most consumers AI will be a net negative. Already I can tell more and more companies use it in their call centers and support workflows, often just to stonewall customers: they reply very politely and with great attention to detail but will not solve your issue as they don’t have any decision power.
I really don’t look forward to this new world, AI is a powerful and useful too for creators but it will and already is used for all the wrong reasons, apparently even to pick which targets to destroy in war, essentially making life or death decisions in some areas with little to no oversight. And then people here think that any kind of regulation around this tech is useless and unwarranted…
Don’t get me wrong I use AI all the time but I fear it will be the most disruptive technological development in both positive and negative ways that we have ever dealt with.
- The frontier companies are building agents to automate work end to end (i.e. with decision power)
The tech takes a while to diffuse like any other but I think call centers don't have a great outlook
by vanuatu - What call center have you reached where the agent had any decision power? What are you talking about?
Why would anyone need to make a call in such a LLM intermediated scenario? Your llm should talk to their llm. You really yearn for call centers just so the person stonewalling you can be a human paid minimum wage? Call centers are miserable, what satisfaction do you get from wanting humans involved in such a dystopian enterprise?
- Statistically, customer service bots save a lot of time that humans spend on the customer service side. A lot of them are gathering basic form information that would take up more labor time. If you want more humans in customer service then you'll have to pay a lot more for it, one way or the other.by smcg
- The problem is a problem of choice I believe.
When we use AI ourselves via tools like chatbots, harnesses etc. we are mostly actively choosing to do so, and have some control. We can always just decide to stop and do the work ourselves if its not working out.
In the call center/situation of companies embedding it in their products, often its not in a way that gives users the choice. They are forcing it onto their users with no other option, or at the very least they are always forced to play along with the LLM until it finally gives up.
Its user hostile since we can't decide to break out of the LLM loop when we want to.
Add on top of that most of these companies are actually forcing the use of the AI related features simply to fulfill someones KPI's/internal metrics.
by Jcampuzano2