Comment by mjr00
7 months ago
> But even if it remained, I can see businesses adopting these to cut their expenses in all possible ways.
Adopting what to do what exactly?
Businesses automated order fulfillment and price adjustments long ago; what is an LLM bringing to the table?
It's not about just fulfillment or price-setting. This is just a narrow-scope experiment that tries to prove wider viability by juggling lots of business-related roles. Of course, the more number-crunching aspects of businesses are thoroughly automated. But this could show that lots of roles that traditionally require lots of people to do the job could be on the chopping block at some point, depending on how well companies can bring LLMs to their vision of a "perfect businessman". Customer interaction and support, marketing, HR, internal documentation, middle management in general - think broadly.
I'm not debating the usefulness of LLMs, because they are extremely useful, but "think broadly" in this instance sounds like "I can't think of anything specific so I'm going to gloss over everything."
Marketing, HR, and middle management are not specific tasks. What specific task do you envision LLMs doing here?
Indeed, it is such a "narrow-scope experiment" that it is basically a business role-playing game, and it did pretty poorly at that. It's pretty hard to imagine giving this thing a real budget and responsibilities anytime soon, no matter how cheap it is.
llms mostly can help at customer support/chat if done well.
also embeddings for similarity search
> if done well.
And that's a big if. Half an hour ago, I used Amazon's chatbot, and it was an infuriating experience. I got an email saying my payment was declined, but I couldn't find any evidence of that. The following is paraphrased, not verbatim.
"Check payment status for order XXXXXX."
"Certainly. Which order would you like to check?"
"Order #XXXXXX."
"Your order is scheduled to arrive tomorrow."
"Check payment status."
"I can do that. Would you like to check payment status?"
"Yes."
"I can't check the payment status, but I can connect you to someone who can."
-> At this point, it offered two options: "Yes, connect me" and "No thanks".
"Yes, connect me."
"Would you like me to connect you to a support agent?"
Amazon used to have best-in-class support. If my experience was indicative of their direction, that's unfortunate.