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Operator research preview

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221–230 of 448 posts

Re: Operator research preview

#221

What is fascinating about this announcement is if you look into future after considerable improvements in product and the model, we will be just chatting with ChatGPT to book dinner tables, flights, buy groceries and do all sort of mundane and hugely boring things we do on the web, just by talking to the agents. I'd definitely love that.

Not until ChatGPT can do these things as reliably as concierge service, and provide full refund for any situation it messes up.

I am not looking forward to a trip booked for wrong dates with the hotel name confused/hallucinated for a different one.

Re: Operator research preview

#222
post #49
post #31

I don't know why, but the approach where "agents" accomplish things by using a mouse and keyboard and looking at pixels always seemed off to me. I understand that in theory it's more flexible, but I always imagined some sort of standard, where apps and services can expose a set of pre-approved actions on the user's behalf. And the user can add/revoke privileges from agents at any point. Kind of like OAuth scopes. Ima…

The mouse and keyboard are definitely dying (very slowly) for everyday computing use. And this kind of seems like an assistant for those. ChatGPT voice and real-time video is really a beautiful computing experience. Same with Meta Ray Bans AI (if it could level up the real-time). I'd like just a bulleted list of chats that I can ask it to do stuff and come back to vs watching it click things. E.g.: Setup my Whole Foo…

> The mouse and keyboard are definitely dying (very slowly) for everyday computing use.

Not to be that guy, but where's the evidence for this? People have been telling us that voice interaction is the future for many, many years, and we're in the future now and it's not. When I look around -- comparing today to ten years ago -- I see more people typing and tapping, not fewer, and voice interactions are still relatively rare. Is it all happening in private? Are there any public metrics for this?

Re: Operator research preview

#224
“Available to pro users in the US”—another win for the EU bureaucrats. I’m kind of amused by how big tech companies in the US seem to have given up on complying with this legislative nonsense and instead just nerf their products in the EU or stop offering them there altogether.

Re: Operator research preview

#225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's less a problem of cost for the average person and more a problem of setting the market price for them at a fraction of the current one. This has such a deflationary impact that it's unlikely captured or even conceivable by the current economic models. There's a problem of "target fixation" about the capabilities and it captures most conversation, when in fact most public focus should be on public policy…

Exactly, every country should urgently have a public debate on how best to use that technology and make sure it's beneficial to society as a whole. Social media are a good example that a technology can have a net negative impact if we don't deploy it carefully.

Ok, this conversation about social media has cropped up time and time again and things haven't improved but got even worse. I don't expect we'll be able solve this problem with discussions only, so much money is being poured in that any discussion is likely to be completely neglected. Not saying that we shouldn't discuss this but more action is needed. I think the tech sector needs to be stripped of political power as it got way too powerful and is interfering with everything else.

Re: Operator research preview

#226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems unreasonably pessimistic (or unreasonably optimistic in OpenAI's moat?). There are so, so many companies competing in this space. The cost will reflect the price of the hardware needed to run it: if it doesn't, they'll just lose to one of their many competitors who offer something similar for cheaper, e.g. whatever DeepSeek or Meta releases in the same space, with the cost driven to the bottom by commoditi…

And none of the competitors can make this technology profitable, either.

Isn't there every reason to believe the cost will come down?

Re: Operator research preview

#227

What is fascinating about this announcement is if you look into future after considerable improvements in product and the model, we will be just chatting with ChatGPT to book dinner tables, flights, buy groceries and do all sort of mundane and hugely boring things we do on the web, just by talking to the agents. I'd definitely love that.

After many years of dealing with chat bots, I think we can all agree that we don't want chat-based interfaces to order our pizza (clicking buttons and scrolling through lists of options is way way faster). I can't think of many other things I'd like to accomplish by chat that I wouldn't want to do through a website or an app. My eyes bleed watching the AI crawl tediously slow to place a pizza order for me.

But… what if I told you that AI could generate an context-specific user interface on the fly to accomplish the specific task at hand. This way we don't have to deal with the random (and often hostile) user interfaces from random websites but still enjoy the convenience of it. I think this will be the future.

Re: Operator research preview

#228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't. Chat interface sucks; for most of these things, a more direct interface could be much more ergonomic, and easier to operate and integrate. The only reason we don't have those interfaces is because neither restaurants, nor airlines, nor online stores, nor any other businesses actually want us to have them. To a business, the user interface isn't there to help the user achieve their goals - it's a platform for…

I think the chat interface is bad, but for certain things it could honestly streamline a lot of mundane things as the poster you're replying two stated. For example, McDonald's has heavily shifted away from cashiers taking orders and instead is using the kiosks to have customers order. The downside of this is 1) it's incredibly unsanitary and 2) customers are so goddamn slow at tapping on that god awful screen. An AI…

I've never used a McDonalds kiosk for the reason you gave. Actually, I think no matter how much you streamlined it with cutting edge AI assistants it would still be faster and more natural to just say "A big mac and a diet coke please" to the cashier. I don't see any end-user benefit to these assistants, the only ones who benefit are the bean counters and executives who will use them to do more layoffs and keep the money that saves to themselves.

Re: Operator research preview

#229

A lot of people here seem to think this is somehow for their benefit, or that OpenAI and friends are trying to make something useful for the average person. They aren't spending billions of dollars to give everyone a personal assistant. They are spending billions now to save even more in wages later, and we are paying for the privilege of training their AI to do it. By the time this thing is useful enough to actually…

>we are paying for the privilege of training their AI

this was, is and is going to be a constant thing with every AI company

Re: Operator research preview

#230
Can this help people cut through UX dark patterns? Like for example, "unsubscribe from all communications and I mean all" or "turn on the strongest privacy settings even the ones they try very hard to hide" or "order this on amazon and make sure to choose free delivery even if it's not the default"
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