I’m not an AI techie and I’m not well educated on LLMs/AI in general. The issue I’m having is the dichotomy between how people talk about it. I’ve heard completely opposite ends of the spectrum. From AI is quickly becoming advanced enough to threaten human society, all the way to its a glorified dictionary/search engine that can’t really do much of anything. I know Lemmy has a steep anti-AI slant. But, can someone talk about this in a way I can wrap my head around why the divide seems so big?
This feels like the kind of narrative that OP is asking about. Everything that you’ve said sounds kind of sane and plausible, but it’s not really borne out by the reality.
That’s just not what I’ve seen. I’d love to be able to automate the work of my white-collar team, but everything that we have seen thus far just seems incapable of providing any significant improvement. Software providers in our industry have implemented some gen AI tools, and even the sales reps for those providers are very wary of them. They’ve been able to reliably automate some elements of jobs, but it’s an incremental improvement over the previous automation and it didn’t consume a significant amount of time anyway.
There’s absolutely no evidence that gen AI will have a significant impact on my white-collar industry. In fact, the evidence presently available indicates that this generation of AI does not have the capability to impact our industry.
This is really the same story. Factories have been being automated since the industrial revolution. Self driving tech has been a year away for the last 10 years.
You’re a real fucking piece of shit, you know that?
Settle down mate. I didn’t say I’d like to replace my team with bots. I’m saying that we will embrace whatever tools we can to make our work easier.
Whatever helps you sleep at night.
I guess the difference is that it I have actually seen it do legitimate work now. We have implemented outbound SDR and inbound tech support agents that do the right things. Our SDRs generate new leads for our (currently all-human) sales team to go after. They are boosting the numbers of closed deals. Our inbound tech support agents are closing a significant fraction of tickets. My last metrics call was yesterday, it was 12% of inbound tech support chats that never got escalated to a human. These are both first-draft tools, they’ll improve. They cost pennies per session to run. And client NPS scores show that they’re happy with the results. I don’t think we’ll see either of these tasks become 100% automated, but at even 25% or 50% that’s a lot of formerly-human work not being done by humans anymore. And we’re deploying more agents to handle more of the sales pipeline, development pipeline, HR and accounting. I don’t work for a huge company, there are a few hundred people total. This isn’t something that’s coming, it’s here already.
Do you mean you have a chatbot that formulates responses to tickets? Can it actually do anything or just tell customers what to do? 12% is a pretty underwhelming number. Obviously those tickets would not have consumed 12% of tech support operators time.
Sorry boss your answer is just the usual hype.
“I made a spreadsheet that does my job for me so now I just hang out on reddit”.
To put it into context, it’s doing about one full-time support engineer’s job currently, which is the maximum we’ve permitted it to do so far.
This is so tedious.
If agents were actually capable of doing any work that produced any value this wouldn’t even be a conversation. The evidence would be so overwhelming it would speak for itself. Instead we’re stuck with this “it searches the help docs for you” silliness.
What I have seen is that AI tools make software development significantly easier, faster, cheaper - pick two, and as long as you aren’t picking cheaper we’re going to get better software coming out faster over the coming years.
Better software translates to easier, more automatic processes for a lot of white and blue collar work. It doesn’t do everything, but it does a lot.
Hard disagree.
The surge in unmaintainable vibe coded AI slop open source projects is well discussed. More isn’t better.
This is what I’m getting at. I’m yet to observe any of this.
Hard disagree. Internet discussion glosses over little things like: quality control, discarding of garbage, reverting to better solutions when they are available. Some irresponsible morons will indeed muck up their production code base with slop and be unable to let go of it when they realize their mistakes, but the majority will be able to try again and replace the bad with better.
Agree: a lot of slop has been produced in the last year, that doesn’t mean anybody is using it.
I’m living it, but then, for the past 30 years I’ve been building systems that make existing processes more automatic, repeatable, less labor and less mistakes. I’m just building those systems faster and easier than ever before now. This isn’t the only advancement in productivity I’ve seen since I started programming in the 1980s - just one in a long history of significant advancements.
I can’t roll my eyes any harder.
This conversation has been had n billion times. If you could do anything worth doing it wouldn’t even be a conversation - if you really could automate away even a portion of human work the evidence would be so compelling the dawning new age would be undeniable.
It’s almost comical that you think claude writing your sql schemas represents the dawn of a new era in productivity.
https://itif.org/publications/2022/09/19/how-the-it-sector-powers-the-us-economy/
Don’t worry, ai has allowed his brain to atrophy.
I’m the same commenter you called a piece of shit.
Congratulations! Pieces of shit can be right sometimes!