Comment by alexpotato

1 day ago

Regarding emails and "artificial intelligence":

Many years ago I worked as a SRE for hedge fund. Our alerting system was primarily email based and I had little to no control over the volume and quality of the email alerts.

I ended up writing a quick python + Win32 OLE script to:

- tokenize the email subject (basically split on space or colon)

- see if the email had an "IMPORTANT" email category label (applied by me manually)

- if "yes", use the tokens to update the weights using a simple naive Bayesian approach

- if "no", use the weights to predict if it was important or not

This worked about 95% of the time.

I actually tried using tokens in the body but realized that the subject alone was fine.

I now find it fascinating that people are using LLMs to do essentially the same thing. I find it even more fascinating that large organizations are basically "tacking on" (as the OP author suggests) these LLMs with little to no thought about how it improves user experience.