> cutting out menial decisions such as customer service
This is cited so often. We tried it at a large scale with some of the best engineering talent but unfortunately the humans on the other side preferred speaking to and interacting with a human by a wide margin.
We are still trying with the latest AI models but humans are still doing better at serving other humans.
In one of our studies, we observed by a large margin that our customers would hang up immediately on knowing that they are interacting with an AI system.
We contact support services to fix material problems. 'This booking is wrong.' 'I want a refund for that.' AI systems aren't empowered to solve these problems. At best they can provide information. If the answer is information - the user can likely already find it online themselves (often from a better AI model than they're going to find running your support line). If they're calling, they most often want something done.
Yeah, it's like trying to use an ORM to find data in the database that's invalid due to a bug. You can't see things in the system that break the premises of the system by using the system, and the fact that some things are "supposed to be impossible" doesn't change the reality of what's actually occurring in the data store.
So customer support needs to know how the systems works and need to understand what the data means, but also has to know when the system is factually incorrect. Customer support has to know when the second party is speaking the truth.
Do you know that to be true or are you speculating?
As we argue on the orange site, companies are paying Sierra AI to integrate voice and text agents into their systems to look up account information and process refunds. Fallbacks to human agents are built in to these systems.
We all hate phone trees because they never have the capability to handle exceptions to the most basic functions. We shout "speak to an agent!" into the phone because their website and phone trees only handle the happy path.
As someone who has an automated drive-thru Bojangle’s nearby, I would say the AI is always immediately available, understands better, feels out the conforming order screen in real time, and generally results in my order being placed correctly.
Most experienced folks would be very careful in predicting or stating something with certainty, they would be cautious about their reputation/credibility and will always add riders on the possibilities.
For good or bad reasons, the mass employment prediction is just marketing which can be called deceitful at the best. When you have so much money riding then you are not an individual anymore, you are just an human face/extension of the money which is working for itself
If you think your company is directly contributing to the cause of mass unemployment and the associated suffering inherent within, you should stop your company working in that direction or you should quit.
There is no defence of morality behind which AIbros can hide.
The only reason anthropic doesn't want the US military to have humans out of the loop is because they know their product hallucinates so often that it will have disastrous effects on their PR when it inevitably makes the wrong call and commits some war crime or atrocity.
Technology advances have inevitably produced unemployment. Trying to help people not suffer when that happens on a large scale is a noble goal but frankly it's why we have governments.
Also, the genie is well and truly out of the bottle, if anthropic shutdown tomorrow and lit everything they had produced on fire, amazon, microsoft, china, everyone would continue where they left off.
Privatise the gains and socialise the losses. How very typical. I hope you feel the same way in the bread lines alongside everyone else.
I'm suggesting your realpolitik of "others doing it too" is incompatible with a moral position. I know none of these ghouls will stop burning the world. I'm sick of them virtue signalling about how righteous they are while doing it.
At least with Altman you know the guy just wants money, with Amodei you get this grandstanding and 6 more months fear mongering every 6 months and it is insufferable. Worst person in the AI space BY FAR. Hope the Chinese open source models get so good that these ghouls lose everything.
The product is actually good though, I could pay for it if Amodei just shut up but by principle I won't now and just stick with codex.
Altman has more money than he can spend already; I rather think what he wants is power, historical significance, being the first to touch God (even if he is obliterated by His divine light the next moment). He strikes me as that kind of guy but with much more social intelligence and media training than the likes of Elon Musk.
> I mean, part of this is just math. If a government spends more, it’s literally injecting money into the economy, so of course you get more jobs and growth in the short term.
Thats not necessarily true. During Bill Clinton's presidency he cut the deficits and the debt and yet the economy saw very strong job growth.
And Clinton (mostly Gore as VP) cut the federal civilian workforce by about 20%, while following the both the letter and spirit of the law, and not causing chaos.
If you live near a community bio lab see if you can join up and take some classes to learn some basic lab techniques. And some sort of intro bio class via mooc/textbook/local college class whatever if you can but community lab is honestly a great place to start if you have one.
The main thing to keep in mind is that all the stuff that involves analogies between software and biology is almost universally a bullshit oversimplification that you can safely ignore. It's just that software is so profitable and there's so much vc money in it that there's a ton of pressure to be like "oh we can program biology like we program computers." We can't - we invented computers but didn't invent biology. Biology is the end result of 4 billion years of unchecked entropy - it's a chaos system, non deterministic in the wildest ways, impossibly complicated, and yet something we are getting astonishingly good at understanding and engineering.
Basically, all the biologists that started companies that were like "we can program biology like we can program computers" are bankrupt now.
On the other hand, the computer scientists that respected the nature of biology and pushed the limits of computing to develop Alphafold - giant models trained on the full complexity of biological data - finally created computer systems that could handle biological systems like protein folding at an extraordinary level of capability. They won a nobel.
Follow up question (Not OP), would alphafold more be used to experiment with an already-defined theory that you have, or could you also make some toy projects (e.g. how people make projects around trading engines).
I'm wondering if I could find a fun weekend project in alphafold just to see what it's like.
Possibly not what you're asking for, but I wrote a generally-accessible intro to why it can be tricky to assemble many DNA fragments with "Golden Gate Assembly", a mainstream method which relies on short sequence overhangs. The Sidewinder method discussed in this thread aims to solve that "short overhang" problem.
Sadly we are going to get more ads (Apple Maps is next). If it goes much further people will start questioning whether Apple products are worth the premium price.
I have used Apple products for over 20 years, because I felt like a customer instead of the product. Apple’s services strategy has changed this perception. I question Apple’s competitive advantage when they shift to a Google-like business model. They are actively throwing away the very thing that made them a unique and valuable player in the industry, and for what? A couple extra percent profit in the short term?
Steve Jobs always said he wanted to make insanely great products for customers. Products they’d be proud to recommend to their family. It feels like Cook lost his way, spending too much time focusing on the stock, instead of letting great products drive adoption, and letting the stock follow.
If the rumors are true that Apple is preparing for a change at the top, I how we see a dramatic change in the services strategy and Apple can get back to making great products that people actually want to use.
DuckDB is on our radar. In practice each database still needs some engine-specific work to feel good, so a fully generic plugin system is harder than it sounds. We are thinking about how to do this in a scalable way.
Is this a bad move? What should I tell them?
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