I don't entirely disagree with you, but "what products do people want" is overly conservative. Pre-ChatGPT, very few people wanted a (more or less) general purpose chatbot.
But this is like companies forcing self-checkout at retail. Companies get to cheap out on their customer support by paying a monthly fee instead of paying a person to do it. It doesn't matter if it's worse for you, as every business is getting sold on using this technology.
You misery and wasted time is their improved stock price and bonus package.
Some of these are just text matchers with hardcoded options, no ML involved. Essentially phone trees, except worse because they don't tell you your options.
There are some more advanced ones using ChatGPT now. I'm guessing they simply pre-prompt it. Can lead to funny results like a customer making the Chevy bot implement an algo in Python.
Who cares. I literally use ChatGPT 30 times a day. It answers incredibly complex queries along with citations I can verify. Isn’t “this not good enough yet” line getting old? There nothing else that can estimate the number of cinder blocks I need to use for a project and account for the volume of concrete required for it (while taking into consideration the actual available volume available in a cinder block and settling) with a few quick sentences I speak to it. I can think of literally thousands of things I have asked that would have taken hours of googling that I can get an answer for in minutes.
I think the problem is you haven’t shifted your mindset to using AI correctly yet.
Edit: More everyday examples from just the last 3 days
- Use carbide bits to drill into rocks. Googling “best bits for drilling rocks” doesn’t bring up anything obvious about carbide but it was the main thing chatGPT suggested.
- gave it dimensions for a barn I’m building and asked it how many gallons of paint I would need of a particular type. I could probably work that out myself but it’s a bunch of lookups (what’s the total sq footage, how many sq ft per gallon, what type of paint stands up to a lot of scuffing etc.)
- coarse threaded inserts for softwood when I asked it for threaded insert recommendations. I would have probably ended up not caring and fine threaded slips right out of pine.
- lookup ingredients in a face cream and list out any harms (with citations) for any of them.
- speeds and feeds for acrylic cutting for my particular CNC. Don’t use a downcut bit because it might cause a fire, something I didn’t consider.
- an explanation of relevant NEMA outlets. Something that’s very hard to figure out if you’re just dropped into it via googling.
I don't think so, people have been wanting a general chatbot for a long time. It's useful for plenty of things, just not useful when embedded in random places.
I kind of remember the Turing Test was a big deal for some 70+ years.
We should have known that once we pass the Turing Test it would almost instantly become as passe as Deep Blue beating Kasparov on the road to general intelligence.
I am taking a break from my LLM subscriptions right now for the first time to gain some perspective and all I miss it for is as a code assistant. I would also miss it for learning another human language. It seems unsurprising that large language models use cases are with automated language. What is really surprising is how very limited the use cases for automated language seems to be.
To be fair, the overwhelming feedback appears to be that people dont want a general purpose chatbot in every product and website, especially when it's labelled 'AI'.
So... certainly there's a space for new products.
...but perhaps for existing products, it's not as simple as 'slap some random AI on it and hope you ride the wave of AI'.
And they hugely sucked, and basically were a sign you were dealing with either a fly by night company or a corporation so faceless and shitty you'd never willingly do business with them.
It was literally replacing a hierarchical link tree and that almost always was easier to use.
>very few people wanted a (more or less) general purpose chatbot.
I mean, I still don't. But from a cynical business point of view, cutting customer servce costs (something virtually every company of scale has) of 99% of customer calls is a very obvious application of a genera purpose chatbot.
expand that to "better search engine" and "better autocomplete" and you already have very efficient, practical, and valuable tools to sell. but of course companies took the angle of "this can replace all labor" instead of offering these as assistive productivity tools.
AdieuToLogic|1 year ago
And post-ChatGPT, very few people want to have to deal with "a (more or less) general purpose chatbot."
dragontamer|1 year ago
It's awful and a complete waste of time. I'm not sure if LLMs are getting good use yet / general chatbots are good or ready for business use.
lancesells|1 year ago
You misery and wasted time is their improved stock price and bonus package.
honestjohn|1 year ago
There are some more advanced ones using ChatGPT now. I'm guessing they simply pre-prompt it. Can lead to funny results like a customer making the Chevy bot implement an algo in Python.
dyauspitr|1 year ago
I think the problem is you haven’t shifted your mindset to using AI correctly yet.
Edit: More everyday examples from just the last 3 days
- Use carbide bits to drill into rocks. Googling “best bits for drilling rocks” doesn’t bring up anything obvious about carbide but it was the main thing chatGPT suggested.
- gave it dimensions for a barn I’m building and asked it how many gallons of paint I would need of a particular type. I could probably work that out myself but it’s a bunch of lookups (what’s the total sq footage, how many sq ft per gallon, what type of paint stands up to a lot of scuffing etc.)
- coarse threaded inserts for softwood when I asked it for threaded insert recommendations. I would have probably ended up not caring and fine threaded slips right out of pine.
- lookup ingredients in a face cream and list out any harms (with citations) for any of them.
- speeds and feeds for acrylic cutting for my particular CNC. Don’t use a downcut bit because it might cause a fire, something I didn’t consider.
- an explanation of relevant NEMA outlets. Something that’s very hard to figure out if you’re just dropped into it via googling.
honestjohn|1 year ago
paretoer|1 year ago
We should have known that once we pass the Turing Test it would almost instantly become as passe as Deep Blue beating Kasparov on the road to general intelligence.
I am taking a break from my LLM subscriptions right now for the first time to gain some perspective and all I miss it for is as a code assistant. I would also miss it for learning another human language. It seems unsurprising that large language models use cases are with automated language. What is really surprising is how very limited the use cases for automated language seems to be.
wokwokwok|1 year ago
So... certainly there's a space for new products.
...but perhaps for existing products, it's not as simple as 'slap some random AI on it and hope you ride the wave of AI'.
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
nunez|1 year ago
hobs|1 year ago
It was literally replacing a hierarchical link tree and that almost always was easier to use.
johnnyanmac|1 year ago
I mean, I still don't. But from a cynical business point of view, cutting customer servce costs (something virtually every company of scale has) of 99% of customer calls is a very obvious application of a genera purpose chatbot.
expand that to "better search engine" and "better autocomplete" and you already have very efficient, practical, and valuable tools to sell. but of course companies took the angle of "this can replace all labor" instead of offering these as assistive productivity tools.