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If AI chatbots are the future, I hate it

jeffgeerling.com

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Re: If AI chatbots are the future, I hate it

#191

Post by spywaregorilla »

geerlingguy wrote: post #185
spywaregorilla wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate on why you refer to this as an AI chatbot?

Because the industry currently refers to machine learning as AI, so rather than fight that battle, I classify decision tree ML as AI since it's pretty closely related to LLMs and other 'AI' things that suddenly converted from ML to AI once enough money was pumped in.

I would argue that's pretty misleading. Especially if you're saying "AI chatbots are the future". The tech you're discussing here has been commonplace for the past decade and has nothing to do with current trends or the future.

Folks here are talking about _dialogue_ trees not ML _decision_ trees. These are very likely manually coded. It's conceivable but not very likely that there's a simple classifier model behind the scenes here predicting which line of pre written dialogue to serve at each junction. If you write AI chatbots your readers are going to expect that it's a chatbot that actually generates the text, LLM or otherwise.

idk man. feels clickbaity.

Re: If AI chatbots are the future, I hate it

#192

Post by yencabulator »

mike_hearn wrote: post #156
ryandrake wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your desire to handle that all in-house by organic, corn-fed, English-as-their-first-language meat-bags is lovely but you'd be bankrupt in a week. Or, the ISP/shareholders would have to accept slightly lower profits. I know, I know, this is totally unspeakable here, but might as well at least list the option for completeness.

You aren't getting it. The difference isn't between "high profits" and "slightly lower profits". For most businesses it's between small profits and large losses.

Oh won't anyone think of the small profits of the large corporations!

AT&T 2023 revenue was $122.4 billion.

https://about.att.com/story/2024/q4-earnings-2023.html

Re: If AI chatbots are the future, I hate it

#193

Post by yencabulator »

UrineSqueegee wrote: post #104

He is not talking to an AI chatbot, that's a decision tree program. Is this a joke? Why does this have so many upvotes in a technical website. This is embarrassing.

Computers using decision trees have been under the "AI" umbrella term for a very long time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expert_system

Re: If AI chatbots are the future, I hate it

#194

Post by satvikpendem »

jdbernard wrote: post #189
satvikpendem wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> when you start with the core concept that the _only_ purpose of a company is to earn capital. ...Yes? That's literally what a corporation is for. That some might have good customer service is simply a marketing method to get people to continue using that company to, in the end, earn capital. If you want to run a service whose primary motive is not earning capital, create a non profit.

No, it's not, or at least, it doesn't have to be, and it wasn't always. It's amazing how our modern society has so completely lionized and internalized greed. Maybe the core concept of a corporation could be, for example: - to make an excellent product in a sustainable manner, - to provide gainful employment, - to steward a natural resource, - to push the boundaries of human knowledge, - to organize a portion of soci…

Not sure what you mean "it wasn't always," because it literally started off as a way to divide trade proceeds, you could buy shares in an entity that entitled you to shares of the profits. Again, you could just as easily start a non-profit to achieve all of those things, corporations have always been for earning capital as their primary motive, it's not a value judgment, it's simply the definition of a corporation. It is actually you who is making a value judgment, that corporations should do X, Y, and Z unrelated to earning capital as a primary objective.

Re: If AI chatbots are the future, I hate it

#195

Post by jdbernard »

satvikpendem wrote: post #194
jdbernard wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's not, or at least, it doesn't have to be, and it wasn't always. It's amazing how our modern society has so completely lionized and internalized greed. Maybe the core concept of a corporation could be, for example: - to make an excellent product in a sustainable manner, - to provide gainful employment, - to steward a natural resource, - to push the boundaries of human knowledge, - to organize a portion of soci…

Not sure what you mean "it wasn't always," because it literally started off as a way to divide trade proceeds, you could buy shares in an entity that entitled you to shares of the profits. Again, you could just as easily start a non-profit to achieve all of those things, corporations have always been for earning capital as their primary motive, it's not a value judgment, it's simply the definition of a corporation. I…

At this point we're going to need to provide sources if we want to get further value out of this discussion because I disagree with your definition and don't believe your characterization of the history of incorporation. Profit sharing and ownership interest have always been a motivating aspect of incorporation, yes, but historically the main goal of the corporation has not been earning capital as their primary motive. The first US corporations, for example, where chartered by the government with specific goals in mind. The question of scope/goal is still part of the incorporation process. If the purpose of all corporations was profit, by definition, why ask? I that is vestigial: we used to care more about the charter and goal because profit was a concern, but not the primary concern.

I'm also intentionally not making a value judgement on what a corporation should do, rather pointing out that there exist many possibilities beyond a pure profit motive.

Re: If AI chatbots are the future, I hate it

#196

Post by Guvante »

kasey_junk wrote: post #188
Guvante wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AT&T is not making $60 off a $1,200 line. Their costs are mostly per line after all and so their cheaper offerings bring down their margins a lot.

Their consumer wireline business is mostly regulated and has strict margin caps. Do you have a source that contradicts the number I provided? Because AT&T is getting wrecked right now by every publicly available number which contradicts both the spirit of your comment and explains why they might cut costs for customer support. Their business wire line just wrote down nearly half of their previous year numbers. By no…

I didn't say they had a high margin business.

I said their $100/month line was high margin.

I am saying it is bullshit to refuse to do any better for your profitable customers.

Again their cheapest offering is very low margin but their high end one doesn't have much more costs associated with it.

Re: If AI chatbots are the future, I hate it

#197

Post by jerf »

g00gler wrote: post #170
sabbaticaldev wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Look at the profit margin for some given company. And you need to look at the profit, not the revenue they get from you this makes zero sense. Fat paychecks and bonuses are part of this calculation.

You’re both right! Nuance is important :). This is an interesting thought, assuming a call center employee is paid $35k, total cost of employment being $70k, you could hire 14.25 employees for every million dollars. If every Concast exec got paid a paltry $5M (lowest paid exec salary), they’d be able to hire around 975 more CS reps. They have 13.6 million subscribers, so they’d increase the number of support reps by…

Most people who just knee-jerk that the problem is excessive executive pay have not worked the math. This math is typical of all the businesses I've ever worked the math for. It may sound good to say "take all the executive pay" and "turn it into customer support"/"pay it to all the employees"/"drop the price of the service"/etc., but if you actually work the math typically it turns out you're trying to put out a forest fire with a cup of water. Such high pay may be problems for other reasons but it is not the root problem for very many large companies, if it is for any.

Re: If AI chatbots are the future, I hate it

#198

Post by kasey_junk »

Guvante wrote: post #196
kasey_junk wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their consumer wireline business is mostly regulated and has strict margin caps. Do you have a source that contradicts the number I provided? Because AT&T is getting wrecked right now by every publicly available number which contradicts both the spirit of your comment and explains why they might cut costs for customer support. Their business wire line just wrote down nearly half of their previous year numbers. By no…

I didn't say they had a high margin business. I said their $100/month line was high margin. I am saying it is bullshit to refuse to do any better for your profitable customers. Again their cheapest offering is very low margin but their high end one doesn't have much more costs associated with it.

You didn’t offer any evidence to back up your claim one way or another

Re: If AI chatbots are the future, I hate it

#199

Post by mike_hearn »

yencabulator wrote: post #192
mike_hearn wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You aren't getting it. The difference isn't between "high profits" and "slightly lower profits". For most businesses it's between small profits and large losses.

Oh won't anyone think of the small profits of the large corporations! AT&T 2023 revenue was $122.4 billion. https://about.att.com/story/2024/q4-earnings-2023.html

Why are you quoting a revenue figure but talking about profits?

AT&T has a profit margin currently of about 11%, which is around the average profit margin across all industries. It isn't a particularly profitable business. Not the worst, but also far from the best. In a company like that profitability can be very volatile. Small changes in the per-user cost can wipe out all profits overnight, which is why it's common for companies with billions in revenue to suddenly flip from net profit to net loss. That happened to AT&T in Q4 2022 when they went from a +17% margin to -7% in the space of a single quarter. They didn't start making profits again until a year later.

Re: If AI chatbots are the future, I hate it

#200

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