It comes as the AI firm's boss has called for the technology's development to be slowed down, citing "serious" risks.

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?

  • im_fine_sandy@nord.pubEnglish
    116·
    2 months ago

    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.

    I think a realistic case for that is that the AI tools that come out in the next few years will be good enough to do a fair amount of white-collar work

    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.

    other types of AI are already enabling robotic automation of factories and in the near-ish future might make self-driving truck fleets practical.

    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.

    • artifex@piefed.zipEnglish
      4·
      2 months ago

      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.

      • im_fine_sandy@nord.pubEnglish
        22·
        2 months ago

        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”.

        • artifex@piefed.zipEnglish
          4·
          2 months ago

          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.

          • im_fine_sandy@nord.pubEnglish
            23·
            2 months ago

            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.

      • im_fine_sandy@nord.pubEnglish
        53·
        2 months ago

        we’re going to get better software

        Hard disagree.

        The surge in unmaintainable vibe coded AI slop open source projects is well discussed. More isn’t better.

        Better software translates to easier, more automatic processes for a lot of white and blue collar work.

        This is what I’m getting at. I’m yet to observe any of this.

          • im_fine_sandy@nord.pubEnglish
            43·
            2 months ago

            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.

    • Nonconfrontational@lemmy.mlEnglish
      12·
      2 months ago

      I’d love to be able to automate the work of my white-collar team

      You’re a real fucking piece of shit, you know that?

      • im_fine_sandy@nord.pubEnglish
        21·
        2 months ago

        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.