The thing about this though, is that it’s not a new problem at all. LLMs didn’t start to get good enough in the early 20’s and only then did they come up with this idea. I worked for a company out near Seattle back in ~2014 that was already well into trying to tackle this problem.
They ran callcenters with a variety of contracts for different companies and took calls, chats, and emails. The main business model wasn’t the centers themselves but the information gathered by the ticketing system to help build tools like this.
Personally, with that insight and assuming surely there must’ve been other companies moving along that path, I find it quite telling that they still haven’t sufficiently stepped up to the role. There are some hard limits on cost and hallucinations that I think will ultimately fail to deliver a truly long-term, viable product. When you see they can’t maintain the veneer on even that use case, you’ll know the bubble has to be close to popping.
Of course no one can really say for sure, we’ve all been predicting it for some time and when there’s this much money invested they’ll protect that reality ferociously, so who really fucking knows. But still …
The thing about this though, is that it’s not a new problem at all. LLMs didn’t start to get good enough in the early 20’s and only then did they come up with this idea. I worked for a company out near Seattle back in ~2014 that was already well into trying to tackle this problem.
They ran callcenters with a variety of contracts for different companies and took calls, chats, and emails. The main business model wasn’t the centers themselves but the information gathered by the ticketing system to help build tools like this.
Personally, with that insight and assuming surely there must’ve been other companies moving along that path, I find it quite telling that they still haven’t sufficiently stepped up to the role. There are some hard limits on cost and hallucinations that I think will ultimately fail to deliver a truly long-term, viable product. When you see they can’t maintain the veneer on even that use case, you’ll know the bubble has to be close to popping.
Of course no one can really say for sure, we’ve all been predicting it for some time and when there’s this much money invested they’ll protect that reality ferociously, so who really fucking knows. But still …