221–230 of 248 posts
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They used the word in an irregular way. They meant a decline in software company revenue, not an economic recession. You might well see more software profits if costs go down but less revenue. Depends on Jevon's paradox really
No this doesn’t make sense either. Why would Amazon‘s profits go down if their engineers are cheaper?
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Except AI support agents are only using content that is already available in support knowledge bases, making the entire exercise futile and redundant. But sure, they're eloquent while wasting your time.
AI has all sorts of technical knowledge, plus massive working memory, and high IQ-ish. It's vastly, vastly superior to most IT support agents.
I love a good AI to help search through large documentation basis for the particular issue I'm experiencing. But it is clear when the problem I am having is outside of the AI's sometimes infantile ability to understand, and I need the ability to bypass it.
The actual report (which this article doesn't link to; bad Axios): https://nanda.media.mit.edu/ai_report_2025.pdf
They interviewed 52 people, and some of them said yes to "Have you reduced headcount due to GenAI?" - which may indicate that those people believe this to be true.
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Do you think you could do a better job than a CEO of public company [x] from a technical standpoint - in other words, omitting the connections and public-facing charisma that they typically bring as part of the package? I genuinely do, but kind of paradoxically also suspect I'm wrong. It's simply that it's something so far outside my domain that I just can't really appreciate their skills honed over many years of pra…
I think there is confusion because coding is easy, software engineering is hard.
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I have tried to digest why this is done. It is not because they believe they are 10x faster. It is because they think it will 10x their chances of getting a really good engineer for 1/10th as cheap. At least that is my theory. maybe i am wrong. i try to be charitable.
No engineer is smart and overall capable enough to be called a 10x one and yet doesn't realize their price in western value. And we still talk about corporate cogs, the truly brilliant simply start their own gigs
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 ra…
If Amazon wanted to give you the ability to get a refund for unused Prime benefits, it would allow the AI to do it, or even give you a button to do it yourself.
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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 ra…
This occurrence has nothing to do with AI? The reason AI doesn't want to grant you the refund is because it's not been given the ability to do so. It would be no different with a human. If Amazon wanted to give you the ability to get a refund for unused Prime benefits, it would allow the AI to do it, or even give you a button to do it yourself.
They don't trust the LLM so they cripple what it can do, would be the generous interpretation. I actually think they're intentionally crippling the LLMs' access to accounts, though, to reduce their spend not on CSRs, but on CSR actions for, for example, refunds, where the LLM becomes an excuse for the change; they can hide behind what they'll call technical issues or teething pains.
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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…
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…
Improves brand reputation? I don't think I've seen a single case where someone is glad to talk to an LLM/chat bot instead of an actual person. Personally, I think less of any company that uses them. I've never seen one be actually useful, and they seem to only really regurgitate links to FAQ pages or give the most generic answers possible while I fight to get a customer service number so I can actually solve the prob…
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I don't want AI customer support. I want open documentation so I can ask AI if I want or ask human support if it's not resolvable with available documentation All my interactions with any AI support so far is repeatedly saying "call human" until it calls human
This is such a HN comment lol. Customer support is when all the documentation already failed and you need a human.
At $dayjob our customers are nontechnical so they don't always know what to search for, so the LLM/RAG approach can be quite handy.
It answers about 2/3 of incoming questions, can escalate to the humans as needed, and scales great.