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Sierra Raises $950M at $15B Valuation

sierra.ai

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Re: Sierra Raises $950M at $15B Valuation

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As Graham would say, "Woah wait a minute!" . Unfortunately Sierra hasn't been around for 18 years at this point and is now currently owned by Microsoft Activision. I'd also love to see another point-and-click KQ game in the style of KQ 5/6 - as they are two of my favorite games of all time.

I loved the Hero's Quest saga (later renamed Quest for Glory), specially the first HQ. I played it on an Hercules display, later a monochrome VGA monitor. I remember going to Erana's peace to have a good sleep for the night.

I played the original Sierra games on a green CGA monitor. Erana's peace... Good times.

I don't think these games are better than the modern ones. But I wonder if the next generation's memories will be as strong.

Re: Sierra Raises $950M at $15B Valuation

#162
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1&2 are already happening, these startups take on brand liability and trust to do so 3 depends on how companies want to measure it, but lack of user submitting satisfaction score is not a good thing you can use a model w/o reasoning, + use various tricks to simulate low latency

At the end of the day the company is going to audit what the agent has done. If the agent issues too many refunds that's a major red flag for the company providing the agent and likely results in the contract being terminated. I don't see how anyone can underwrite what agents are going to do today given that they're still so susceptible to prompt injection. You didn't address my concern, non-reasoning models are so,…

1. part of the moat is their guardrails and obviously they are audited and tracked. there are agents issuing refunds and more at scale right now so not sure where the skepticism comes from.. you're free to try and jailbreak them

2. another part of the value prop of these companies is figuring out how to construct the proper harness to take advantage of the lower latency of faster models while shoring up the weaker intelligence, how you blend deterministic and non-deterministic behaviors, compliance etc.

its a hard problem which is why f500 is willing to pay up

Re: Sierra Raises $950M at $15B Valuation

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had to go to an xfinity store the other day, and seeing the things people come in for made me realize why AI is attractive to companies. The four or five people in front of me did not need a human in the loop for their issue. If these people could go to xfinity.com and ask some bot where they can find their bill, how much they owe, or if their internet is down, xfinity employees could focus on actually selling thin…

> If these people could go to xfinity.com and ask some bot… if their internet is down… See, this is how we get such useless chatbots.

I do this with cox all the time… because I also have cellular data plan

Though cox will perpetually try to gaslight me so it doesn’t help anyways

Re: Sierra Raises $950M at $15B Valuation

#164
post #69

Yet another AI company where the logo follows the butthole convergence rule [0] ? As an aside, my favorite Sierra Entertainment logo version is probably the 1983-1993 version [1]. I think the design still holds up even today. [0] https://velvetshark.com/ai-company-logos-that-look-like-butt... [1] https://logos-world.net/sierra-entertainment-logo/

This made me laugh, than you!

Re: Sierra Raises $950M at $15B Valuation

#165
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How much money are you really going to save this way? A lot of money. Managing a large group of people needs structure. It comes with tons of headaches and cost. In terms of the investment: It's Bret Taylor who has one of the most impressive background in tech. He can raise any amount he wants. VC bets on the person, not the business. If Bret Taylor allowed me to invest, I would have invested too.

If 40% of the F50 are already using this, and others too, why aren't we already seeing a huge drops in the employment numbers ?

A lot of those jobs are offshore.

Re: Sierra Raises $950M at $15B Valuation

#166
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the end of the day the company is going to audit what the agent has done. If the agent issues too many refunds that's a major red flag for the company providing the agent and likely results in the contract being terminated. I don't see how anyone can underwrite what agents are going to do today given that they're still so susceptible to prompt injection. You didn't address my concern, non-reasoning models are so,…

1. part of the moat is their guardrails and obviously they are audited and tracked. there are agents issuing refunds and more at scale right now so not sure where the skepticism comes from.. you're free to try and jailbreak them 2. another part of the value prop of these companies is figuring out how to construct the proper harness to take advantage of the lower latency of faster models while shoring up the weaker in…

I’m curious where you see models like Codex-Spark in this problem? I know they’re too expensive and availability is too limited right now, but in a few years…

Re: Sierra Raises $950M at $15B Valuation

#167
post #43

It's always interesting seeing how HN reacts to AI CX (as someone who works in this space). Yes, the tech savvy crowd loves to say how they always ask for a human and love old school phone trees in reality 50-80% of callers come in with easily answerable questions because they don't know how to nav the website and prefer to ask in natural language The vast majority of callers call in to resolve their issue, and most…

There has never ever been a case that AI has resolved my query, except the simple decision tree for things like refund. Have you got any positive experience with gen AI in any of the site?

Re: Sierra Raises $950M at $15B Valuation

#168
post #43

It's always interesting seeing how HN reacts to AI CX (as someone who works in this space). Yes, the tech savvy crowd loves to say how they always ask for a human and love old school phone trees in reality 50-80% of callers come in with easily answerable questions because they don't know how to nav the website and prefer to ask in natural language The vast majority of callers call in to resolve their issue, and most…

I think this is going to be wonderful. I'll have my offensive AI call their support AI and prompt-inject my way to a rebate tier that nobody knew existed and nobody can cancel it because all the remaining humans have been reduced to phone-to-screen input machinery.

right? its practically begging for it to be tried -_-. i wonder if someone somewhere will turn a sim farm on such companies to try and mass inject them to do weird shit or say nasty things to other customers etc. - ofc youd hope its set up in a way u cant, but then again we learn yesterday all ur stored passwords in edge are in plaintext mem... i would not be surprised if some of these companies get totally crapped on by some adversaries or malicious parties.
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