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AI is predominantly replacing outsourced, offshore workers

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Re: AI is predominantly replacing outsourced, offshore workers

#211

Post by franktankbank »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #92
grues-dinner wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are probably the same people who are "surprised" when 100 offshore agency dredgings don't magically do the app 10x faster than 10 expensive onshore workers. To be fair, the PowerPoint they were shown at that AI Synergies retreat probably was very slick.

It's almost like the people in charge of these businesses have no goddamn clue what they're actually selling, how it works or why it's good (or isn't). It's almost like, and stay with me here, but it's almost like the vast majority of tech companies are now run by business graduates who do not understand tech AT ALL, have never written a single line of code in their lives, and only know how to optimize businesses by…

Cough cough kickbacks

Re: AI is predominantly replacing outsourced, offshore workers

#212

Post by mensetmanusman »

nradov wrote: post #126
datavirtue wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are very much devaluing their currency. This is all the rage and I expect a currency devaluation race as the US tries to deal with crushing government liabilities.

It's not just China and the USA. Pretty much all countries want to devalue their currency to improve their balance of trade in a race to the bottom. Logically not everyone can win the race.

Someone needs to figure out the best hack for what to do with high value currency.

Re: AI is predominantly replacing outsourced, offshore workers

#213

Post by kldg »

hereme888 wrote: post #63

AI is already so much better than 99% of customer support employees. It also improves brand reputation by actually paying attention to what customers are saying and responding in a timely manner, with expert-level knowledge, unlike typical customer service reps. I've used LLMs to help me fix Windows issues using pretty advanced methods, that MS employees would have just told me to either re-install Windows or send th…

As someone who was recently screwed over by LLM CSR, I'd respectfully disagree. Amazon replaced their offshore humans with LLMs recently. They put the "subscribe to Prime" button on the right-hand side of the screen when you go to checkout. It's a one-click subscription. I accidentally clicked it a few days ago.

I immediately hop on customer service chat to ask for a refund. I was surprised to be talking to an LLM rather than a human, but go ahead and explain what happened and state I want the transaction for the subscription canceled. It offers to cancel the subscription at the end of the 30-day subscription. I decline, noting I want a refund for the subscription I didn't intend to take. It repeats it can cancel the subscription at the end of 30-day subscription. I ask for human. It repeats. I ask for human again. It repeats. I disconnect.

Amazon knows what it's doing.

Re: AI is predominantly replacing outsourced, offshore workers

#214

Post by chowchowchow »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #212
nradov wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just China and the USA. Pretty much all countries want to devalue their currency to improve their balance of trade in a race to the bottom. Logically not everyone can win the race.

Someone needs to figure out the best hack for what to do with high value currency.

Isn’t it to sell home currency denominated debt…?

Re: AI is predominantly replacing outsourced, offshore workers

#215

Post by pluc »

hereme888 wrote: post #208
pluc wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how this is any different than enriching knowledge bases from feedback and experience. You just find yourself duplicating all the information, locking yourself in your AI vendor and investing in a technology that doesn't add anything to what you had before. It's utterly nonsensical.

You're going to browse through a manual every time you need to fix something in some app in some particular OS version? I want: > Respond with terminal command to do X >> `complex terminal command code block` > oh we need to run that on all such and such files >> script.py

> You're going to browse through a manual every time you need to fix something in some app in some particular OS version?

Yes, that's literally how you learn things. I can't understand how anyone on this forum thinks otherwise. Hackers are supposed to be people who thrive in unknown contexts, who thirst for knowledge of how things work. What you are suggesting is brain atrophy. It's the death of knowledge for profit and productivity. Fuck all of that.

Re: AI is predominantly replacing outsourced, offshore workers

#216

Post by another-dave »

esafak wrote: post #150
another-dave wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking of which, could we apply vector embeddings to search engines (where crawled pages get indexed by their vector embeddings rather than raw text) and use that for better fuzzy search results even without an LLM in the mix? (Might be a naïve question, I'm at the edge of my understanding)

Why stop there? The LLM can synthesize the results and spare you the work.

I'm talking about the scenario the GP referenced — where if you search for say "holiday" but get no results because the pages only use the word "vacation" which AFAIK is still a problem in regular search.

LLMs inherently would introduce the possibility of hallucinations, but just using the vectors to match documents wouldn't, right?

Re: AI is predominantly replacing outsourced, offshore workers

#217

Post by Jensson »

ponector wrote: post #195
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI is already so much better than 99% of customer support employees. 99% seems like a pulled-out-of-your-butt number and hyperbolic, but, yes, there's clearly a non-trivial percentage of customer support that's absolutely terrible. Please keep in mind, though, that a lot of customer support by monopolies is intended to be terrible. AI seems like a dream for some of these companies to offer even worse customer servi…

>> 99% seems like a pulled-out-of-your-butt number I don't agree. AI support is as useless as real customer support. But it is more polite, calm, with clear voice, etc. Much better, isn't it?

AI support never solves your issue, its just there to try to make you go away, but human support sometimes do even if they mostly just try to go away they can help now and then.

Re: AI is predominantly replacing outsourced, offshore workers

#218

Post by com2kid »

ipython wrote: post #173
gruez wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Change their last name? - that would overwhelm our software, let’s have our operator do that after they call in. That doesn't make much sense. Either your system can handle it or it can't. Putting a support agent in front isn't going to change that.

The backend can. But what’s exposed to customers will be a very very small subset of that capability. Hence why only the csrs can perform that function. The business undoubtedly did a crude cost/benefit analysis where the cost to expose and maintain that public interface vastly outstrips the cost for the few people that have to call in and change their name.

> The business undoubtedly did a crude cost/benefit analysis where the cost to expose and maintain that public interface vastly outstrips the cost for the few people that have to call in and change their name.

Haha, not likely.

In reality the org is so drowned in technical debt that changing the last name involves manually running 3 different scripts that hit three different DBs directly and the estimate from the 3rd party dev consultancy that maintains the mess for how long it'd take to make a safe publicly usable endpoint is somewhere between 2 years and forever.

Re: AI is predominantly replacing outsourced, offshore workers

#219

Post by com2kid »

another-dave wrote: post #130
somenameforme wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Only" kind of misses the benefit though. I'm very bearish on "AI", but this is an absolutely perfect use case for LLMs. The issue is that if you describe a problem in natural language on any search engine, your results are going to be garbage unless you randomly luckboxed into somebody asking, with near identical verbiage, the question on some Q&A site. That is because search is still mostly stuck in ~2003. But now…

Speaking of which, could we apply vector embeddings to search engines (where crawled pages get indexed by their vector embeddings rather than raw text) and use that for better fuzzy search results even without an LLM in the mix? (Might be a naïve question, I'm at the edge of my understanding)

> Speaking of which, could we apply vector embeddings to search engines (where crawled pages get indexed by their vector embeddings rather than raw text) and use that for better fuzzy search results even without an LLM in the mix?

Yes, this is how all the new dev documentation sites work now days, with their much improved searches. :-D

Re: AI is predominantly replacing outsourced, offshore workers

#220

Post by ipython »

com2kid wrote: post #218
ipython wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The backend can. But what’s exposed to customers will be a very very small subset of that capability. Hence why only the csrs can perform that function. The business undoubtedly did a crude cost/benefit analysis where the cost to expose and maintain that public interface vastly outstrips the cost for the few people that have to call in and change their name.

> The business undoubtedly did a crude cost/benefit analysis where the cost to expose and maintain that public interface vastly outstrips the cost for the few people that have to call in and change their name. Haha, not likely. In reality the org is so drowned in technical debt that changing the last name involves manually running 3 different scripts that hit three different DBs directly and the estimate from the 3rd…

Sounds like a crude cost/benefit analysis to me :-p
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