The Humans Hiding Behind the Chatbots
bloomberg.com
The Humans Hiding Behind the Chatbots
1–10 of 55 posts
Re: The Humans Hiding Behind the Chatbots
#2I suppose on its face it's not a bad idea: pay some people to train an AI agent. It's a bit annoying that any information about how it's working out so far is unavailable, but on the other hand, it's also rather revealing that it is. If it was working that well we'd probably have heard a lot about their tech by now.
Re: The Humans Hiding Behind the Chatbots
#3Is there any indication that there is actually light at the end of this tunnel, and not just a lot more tunnel? How much of this is just smoke and mirrors for the sake of product development, and how much is just to bilk investors? I read the entire article, and I don't get the sense that the author is totally sure either.
Re: The Humans Hiding Behind the Chatbots
#4I am actually shocked to learn that x.ai has human beings reading the emails.
X.AI's marketing materials state it's "An AI personal assistant who schedules meetings for you."
Their default tagline in every email sent says "x.ai – artificial intelligence that schedules meetings "
You have to dig into their press kit to get any mention of human "Supervised Learning".
My typical interaction with Amy has been a 3rd party suddenly CC'ing her (it) into an existing thread.
In many of those cases those threads contain information that I would consider to be confidential.
In some cases the people on the other end work for public companies that I am POSITIVE would not allow for a non-approved human to have access to that information.
I understand the counter argument that x.ai's warehousing this info regardless, but introducing a human under the guise of a blind-AI is unsettling.
It's a disingenuous pitch and should have repercussions if they don't improve their disclosures of what the service is actually doing.
Re: The Humans Hiding Behind the Chatbots
#5SV has learned a lot from Hollywood: It's not what behind the scenes that counts.
Re: The Humans Hiding Behind the Chatbots
#6I am actually shocked to learn that x.ai has human beings reading the emails. X.AI's marketing materials state it's "An AI personal assistant who schedules meetings for you." Their default tagline in every email sent says "x.ai – artificial intelligence that schedules meetings " You have to dig into their press kit to get any mention of human "Supervised Learning". My typical interaction with Amy has been a 3rd party…
Isn't this typical of the "Fake it until you have product/market fit, then automate" ethos?
Re: The Humans Hiding Behind the Chatbots
#7Sounds like some of these companies aren't even implementing the automation part.
> But she and another former employee, Alex Gioiella, said the only automated part of the service they saw was the occasional marketing text message.
You'd think that the human workers would at least get served up suggestions by the system if it were actually learning, to make sure the algorithm got "gold-standard" feedback on its dataset.
Especially requests like those for delivery food could be standardized pretty quickly, so that workers would only be handed situations where the "AI" (if there even was any machine learning involved) was uncertain as to what needed to be done.
> But usually, the Hero said, the requests were for pizza or Chipotle delivery.
Re: The Humans Hiding Behind the Chatbots
#8I am actually shocked to learn that x.ai has human beings reading the emails. X.AI's marketing materials state it's "An AI personal assistant who schedules meetings for you." Their default tagline in every email sent says "x.ai – artificial intelligence that schedules meetings " You have to dig into their press kit to get any mention of human "Supervised Learning". My typical interaction with Amy has been a 3rd party…
Isn't this typical of the "Fake it until you have product/market fit, then automate" ethos?
Pitch:
"x.ai – artificial intelligence that schedules meetings"
Reality:
"A group of low-paid humans (that may-or-may not have been background checked) will read your emails to help you schedule meetings. They will probably not use this information in any way other than intended."
Those feel like two different products that I would make fundamentally different decisions about.
Re: The Humans Hiding Behind the Chatbots
#9I am actually shocked to learn that x.ai has human beings reading the emails. X.AI's marketing materials state it's "An AI personal assistant who schedules meetings for you." Their default tagline in every email sent says "x.ai – artificial intelligence that schedules meetings " You have to dig into their press kit to get any mention of human "Supervised Learning". My typical interaction with Amy has been a 3rd party…
Isn't this typical of the "Fake it until you have product/market fit, then automate" ethos?
Yes and I think that works with many areas and in many products.
But when you have confidential information in the mix - especially stuff that might have SEC implications - it changes the game.
A few years ago, I did a contract with a company that had a system that deleted all email greater than a year old. While the official answer was that it was "to save space and improve network performance" I suspect the unstated reason was to prevent fishing expeditions.
If your email is being cc'd outside the org and read by actual humans, that introduces some awkward problems.. and may force people to admit the actual reason for the policy. ;)
Re: The Humans Hiding Behind the Chatbots
#10I get that they are trying to use the human responses as a training set.
But the scope of these general purpose concierge services mean that what they are going after is damn near Artificial General Intelligence. At least in terms of capability, after-all ordering a burrito and locating an antique skull is a pretty broad capability range.
And at what point of accuracy are they aiming for for the systems to run on their own?
I guess they're thinking they can get pretty good at identifying the easy requests the system can fulfill at 99.9999% accuracy and then shift the harder requests to a human.
At that point it seems like they're just building a system that can distinguish hard requests from easy requests. Sure fulfilling the easy requests with AI is a feat in itself, but how many of those easy requests does it make sense to go through a third party? Why doesn't the burrito shop just set up it's own ordering bot?
Am I missing something?
The edge cases seem so broad that to sufficiently fulfill them would require something like AGI and the more approachable tasks of ordering pizza or burritos seem unnecessary of a third party.