I really hate when companies hide behind chatbots. Like, NOOOO, your "AI" chatbot didn't help me - get me an actual person.
Chatbots are really hot in customer service and internal helpdesk applications, because there is that belief that they will offload interactions from hitting a real agent.
I'm skeptical, because the chatbots built to do that are often so bad that people just spam "agent" or "operator" or whatever they have discovered is the magic word to shortcut the bot, the same way that they do with voice phone trees.
You could probably build some decent chatbots if you had strong domain knowledge to draw on and skilled developers building them. But that's not usually the case; it's most often farmed out to a team attached to the Cognizant or TCS or Cap Gemini type outfit that is already handling that function, who are not terribly skilled, don't care, and are viewed as a cost center. So it is usually a poor result.
I think a problem is the tighter cycle between academic discoveries and business people trying to monetize them. Large language models were developed, objectively a great achievement, and immediately someone nontechnical wants to apply their own interpretation and imagine that we can build a chatbot that you won't have to pay, and before you know it, people are selling and even deploying them. Anyone who questions or…
That's a good thing. The market is very good at empirically validating research. It helps filter out the chaff and ensure research is useful. Better than academia wasting years on concepts like the "semantic web" where nobody can even agree on what it means. Academia is under attack from many political directions right now, being able to show useful output will help it thrive in the long run.
Capital is far too short-sighted to look beyond this year or this quarter. Many of the important groundbreaking ideas or projects take years, even decades to formulate. As I've said elsewhere, capital will just take the easiest road it is allowed to take, which currently is stifling innovation, buying competitors, maintaining monopolies, relying on economies of scale to shut out competitors when they can't be acquired, and using lobbyists to ensure regulations that affect the status quo never pass. In the past the big tech corporations maintained huge corporate labs and actually did groundbreaking research with 15+ year projects. Now everything is short term. We can't even compel capital to see the long term value of preventing climate change, when Exon was aware this was going to happen as far back as the 1970s in excruciating detail. No, capital will innovate only if there are sufficient regulations in place, incentives, and guardrails, that there is no other choice than for them other than to innovate (which they will do begrudgingly). Capital is by no means a vehicle for innovation. When was the last time you saw innovation from Google in the search space, their bread and butter?
Recently with the covid I got the idea that chatbots are not there to help people but to bend the curve, and keep customers busy while an operator is able to get to you, they're just a cuscion
That's a good thing. The market is very good at empirically validating research. It helps filter out the chaff and ensure research is useful. Better than academia wasting years on concepts like the "semantic web" where nobody can even agree on what it means. Academia is under attack from many political directions right now, being able to show useful output will help it thrive in the long run.
I can understand your reason for saying this, (useful things often sell well) but a market only validates that people are willing to pay for something, not that it is ‘valid’ empirically.
Right. By that same token, directly selling fentanyl or oxy to consumers without any regulations would surely sell well, as does nicotine, etc., but this doesn't mean it's good for society.
I'm not trying to be mean or break any HN rules, but did you read the article? It basically covers what you asked and was quite a revelation to me. Others in here point out that GPT-3 is not a chatbot which is good info, but I also wonder if there is anything out there that can even "remember" the context of a conversation it's supposed to be having. Particularly interesting is the question from the article, "who is…
>who is the current president? I wonder what happened to IBM Watson's technology that was good at answering trivia -- it actually won a game of Jeopardy! a decade ago (although of course it answered things with a question as per the rules). I know that they weren't that successful at applying it to biomedical research as they had hoped, but it would seem it would be better at chatbots than GPT-3 and other deep-learni…
The problems with chatbots have nothing to do with tech.
You implement chatbots to bend the demand curve to higher cost channels. Period.
If you can get 5% of the user base to wait 15 minutes by sending them to a chatbot tarpit, you will have eliminated the need for a dozen call center agents at peak times.
Providing good service with a chatbot is possible, but the work and organization required is extensive, and it’s cheaper to throw semi-skilled humans at it!
It was more than 10 years ... People reacted the same way to SHRDLU 40+ years ago, and 20 years ago when I encountered it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU There's definitely an illusion where we anthropomorphize very simple software, ascribe intention to it, etc.
I'm not 100% sure, but I think in 2012 chatbots still used handcoded rules. So we switched from handcoded rules to trainable neural networks in just a few years. Models like GPT-3 are interesting because they are conceptually simple, and are able to do (previously) complicated tasks without any explicit training (e.g. simply by processing lots of text and trying to predict the next word). This is a huge advancement i…
I remember chatbots in 2000 using hidden markov models (and sometimes even neural nets), so from that standpoint, they aren't exactly new.
Chatbots are simply another mechanism for pushing costs on to your customers. When something I pay for forces me to waste my time, I tend to switch to a vendor who treat customers like people.
Because shoving a shitty robot that saves you some money at the cost of annoying people who are paying you is disrespectful, and I've learned to avoid people who act that way.
As but one example, I finally got annoyed enough with Capital One's aggressively annoying automated bullshit to switch that card to a credit union that's actually made of humans. I don't really use the much lower interest rate, but that was a nice bonus.