An e-commerce CEO is getting absolutely roasted online for laying off 90% of his support staff after an AI chatbot outperformed them
www.businessinsider.com
Suumit Shah, the CEO of Bengaluru-based Dukaan, said the chatbot answered customer queries in 2 minutes — a task that took the humans over 2 hours.

In similar case, US National Eating Disorder Association laid off entire helpline staff. Soon after, chatbot disabled for giving out harmful information.

  • deong@lemmy.worldEnglish
    102·
    1 year ago

    The current AI/LLM hype may or may not be overpromising what they can really deliver, but it’s different than blockchain in that at least what they’re promising to deliver is valuable. Blockchain still has no actual use outside of organized crime and financial speculation. No one actually needs decentralized currencies or NFTs or whatever. It’s all speculators hyping why I should care so that maybe I’ll buy Bitcoin and continue to prop up their investment.

    LLMs actually solve real problems. Answering customer support requests is a thing nearly every company absolutely has to do today, and AI promises to make that faster and cheaper. They promise to make software development more efficient and cheaper. They promise to make communications better. Those are all incredibly valuable promises to be making. It’s a reasonable argument to say it’s all smoke and mirrors and they’ll fail to deliver on that promise, but that’s a different failure mode than NFTs or blockchain stuff where the technology works as advertised, but there’s no actual problem of any value being solved by it.

    • lemmyvore@feddit.nlEnglish
      22·
      1 year ago

      Blockchain still has no actual use outside of organized crime and financial speculation.

      Blockchain is excellent for maintaining distributed, unfalsifiable and independently verifiable ledgers. It’s a really useful tool for any industry that needs to maintain standards, procedures and certifications.

      • deong@lemmy.worldEnglish
        6·
        1 year ago

        But the fact that virtually none of those organizations use it tells us a lot. Companies that actually need to maintain standards and procedures do it by putting “Important Procedure v3.1-FINAL-FINAL.docx” in Sharepoint. Could they build something on a blockchain that would have nice properties? Sure. But they don’t actually care about those properties really.

        • lemmyvore@feddit.nlEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          They do care but it’s difficult to switch. The smaller companies who have smaller processes could switch easier but they don’t have the resources. The larger companies have the resources but they have complex processes that take time to digitize and unify.

          Assuming you reach a blockchain solution, it needs to pass complex certifications, usually done by state organizations, which move very slowly.

          It’s a very lucrative niche and those that put together turn-key solutions and manage to obtain the relevant certifications make a ton of money off it.

          • Aceticon@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            1 year ago

            I’ve worked in some pretty massive companies, as well as tiny ones and all in between.

            They don’t need the “distributed” part at all because you don’t want every ignorant Jane and Joe working on it, you want just people who actually know about that domain and who have been selected exactly for that knowledge and responsabilities, which is a small group that can organise themselves, the “independent” part is done by those that make the things not being the same people as those who check the things (and companies that don’t segregate creation from validation don’t have the will for true “independent” review, hence won’t care about that feature) and the unfalsifiable thing can be handled much more easilly by cryptographic hashes with timestamps or, way more common, simply automatic backups of documents whenever they’re changed or people pulling out docs from old e-mails and pointing out the part that was different in the old one.

            To make Standards participants have to be chosen, because if any rando gets to participate in it the whole thing will be WAY more noise than genuine quality content, and with that comes organisation and all sorts of mechanisms in which the actual contents are validated (not the “who did it and when” which blockchain provides - because it’s a select group and that’s easy to find out - but actually “is it any good” and “does it make sense”, which blockchain does NOT provide or help with at all).

            I’ve worked in Tech for 2 decades an what you wrote reeks of “solution looking for a problem” since it doesn’t solve the genuine bottlenecks in that process, it just covers minor or irrelevant features that might or not be used in it.

            Also I got the impression you have no idea how people actually work at creating standards in large enough companies that the number of people involved is more than just 1 or 2.

          • magic_lobster_party@kbin.social
            3·
            1 year ago

            I don’t see what blockchain could help here. Blockchain might be useful for data that strictly needs to be chronological in one true way, like monetary transactions. This was the final key blockchain solved to allow the creation of Bitcoin. All the other parts of blockchain had been solved before.

            Let’s go through all ALCOA points one by one.

            • Attributable: can be solved with public key cryptography without blockchain
            • Legible: as long the record follows some accepted standard it’s readable. Blockchain is optional.
            • Contemporaneously Recorded: a time stamp authority can sign the document (blockchain was originally called a time stamp server by Satoshi).
            • Original or a True Copy: not sure what constitutes a true copy, but this can probably be ensured with cryptography along with a time stamp authority (just like blockchain).
            • Accurate: blockchain cannot assure the accuracy of a record more than any other digital system. This is the oracle problem.
            • Permanent: maybe this is a point for blockchain, but how permanent is a blockchain really? Many blockchains have died, so there’s no guarantee for it being permanent.
      • ooboontoo@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        I hear you, but I can’t help but feel like blockchain is a solution looking for a problem most of the time. Is it super helpful in some very narrow niches… Sure. But go back a few years and people were saying it was going to be everywhere and clearly it’s not. I think LLMs will have many more uses than blockchain ever will.