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The AI Replaces Services Myth

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Re: The AI Replaces Services Myth

#51

Post by kelseyfrog »

harwoodjp wrote: post #45
kelseyfrog wrote: post #22

> You have to start from how the reality works and then derive your work. Every philosopher eventually came to the same realization: We don't have access to the world as it is. We have access to a model of the world as it predicts and is predicted by our senses. In so far as there is a correlation between the two in whatever fidelity we can muster, we are fated to direct access to a simulacrum. For the most part they…

Your dualism between model and world is nearly Cartesian. The model itself isn't separate from the world but produced materially (by ideology, sociality, naturally, etc.).

> The model itself isn't separate from the world but produced materially

To me this is like drawing a circuit diagram on a piece of paper and trying to convince someone that, "Really there is electricity flowing through it."

Models are relations between signifiers. There exists a transformation between the signified relations and the relations of the signifiers, but they are, in fact, two separate categories and the transformation isn't bijective. ie it doesn't form an isomorphism.

Re: The AI Replaces Services Myth

#52

Post by satisfice »

The article is about how AI does replace services while also substantially devaluing them.

I see no evidence that it replaces anything interesting, because AI injects random slop into whatever it does. This is a largely delusional article.

Re: The AI Replaces Services Myth

#53

Post by pjmlp »

sublinear wrote: post #43
outworlder wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't disagree, but your comment is puzzling. You start talking about a game (which probably lacks a lot of training data) and then extrapolate that to mean AI won't replace engineering teams. What? We do not need AGI to cause massive damage to software engineering jobs. A lot of existing work is glue code, which AI can do pretty well. You don't need 'novel' solutions to problems to have useful AI. They don't need…

Can you give an example of a non-trivial project that is pure glue code?

Current fashion in enterprise projects, getting SaaS products talking to each other.

You get a CMS piece, talking to a DAM piece, talking to a ecommerce piece, talking to a payment piece, talking to analytics piece.

Currently, the integrations are done via a bunch of serverless functions in providers like Vercel, Nelify, Cloudflare Workers, maybe AWS Lambda or Azure Functions.

As of now, some of those SaaS vendors are bringing integrations into house, where you describe, via prompts naturally, how the integration should look like.

Example,

https://www.sitecore.com/products/sitecore-stream

So less need for as many devs as usual in such integrations.

Re: The AI Replaces Services Myth

#54

Post by bigfatkitten »

crinkly wrote: post #30
pjmlp wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently not, given that it is the bread and butter of Fortune 500 consulting.

The consultancies are successful. The customers aren’t usually quite as fortunate from experience. A great example is the current Tata disaster in the UK with M&S.

> A great example is the current Tata disaster in the UK with M&S.

Their customers know they are awful, and they don’t care because at least in the short term, they are cheap.

At least one major financial institution has a team within their security org dedicated to responding to TCS and HCL’s fuckups.

Re: The AI Replaces Services Myth

#55

Post by i_niks_86 »

VCs forget that pricing power follows perceived category. If customers bucket AI into SaaS, they’ll price it like Slack or Zoom, not like payroll. You might replace $50K in labor, but you’ll only ever capture 10% of that unless your AI walks into meetings and shakes hands.

Re: The AI Replaces Services Myth

#56

Post by mathw »

Revisional_Sin wrote: post #16
tuatoru wrote: post #2

The title is slightly misleading. What the article is really about is the idea that all of the money that is now paid in wages will somehow be paid to AI companies as AI replaces humans. That idea being muddle-headed. It points out that businesses think of AI as software, and will pay software-level money for AI, not wage-level money. It finishes with the rhetorical question, are you paying $100k/year to an AI compan…

> What the article is really about is the idea that all of the money that is now paid in wages will somehow be paid to AI companies as AI replaces humans. Is anyone actually claiming this?

The author claims so, but there don't seem to be any sources.

Given how the AI hype has been going though I wouldn't be at all surprised. And the article's following conclusions are also unsurprising (other than the bit where it claims AI can actually replace your software engineers)

Re: The AI Replaces Services Myth

#58

Post by neuroelectron »

XenophileJKO wrote: post #38
neuroelectron wrote: post #37

I have yet to see LLMs solve any new problems. I think it's pretty clear a lot of the bouncing ball programming demos are specifically trained on to be demoed at a marketing/advertising thing. Asking AI the most basic logical question about a random video game like, what element synergies with ice spike shield in Dragon Cave Masters and it will make up some nonsense despite it being something you can look up on gamef…

I don't know, I've had O3 create some surprisingly effective Magic the Gathering decks based on newly released cards it has never seen. It just has to look up what cards are available.

I think it's an illusion. It pretends not to know things after what some cut off date in 2024 but then if you actually ask it about new things it does a "search" and then it's reiterating things it just read.

Re: The AI Replaces Services Myth

#59

Post by flashgordon »

neuroelectron wrote: post #37

I have yet to see LLMs solve any new problems. I think it's pretty clear a lot of the bouncing ball programming demos are specifically trained on to be demoed at a marketing/advertising thing. Asking AI the most basic logical question about a random video game like, what element synergies with ice spike shield in Dragon Cave Masters and it will make up some nonsense despite it being something you can look up on gamef…

But what if you could re-solve all of today's problems (solutions) with GenAI. Ie if there was an app or game that you like and just want to clone it, that itself today is quite achievable (there was a game -weewar from about 20 years ago that I loved but went out of business. I was able to "clone" it in about 3 weeks).

Even if AI is not solving P=NP even doing the repetetive boring bits feels like a huge boost no?

Re: The AI Replaces Services Myth

#60

Post by rafaepta »

This article misses the point. It is not about AI replacing workers, but about AI bringing more ROI. Can an AI convert twice as many customers as a $4k salesperson? It is reasonable to say that in a B2C setting, YES. I've seen that. Better SLA, fast responses during weekends, better adherence to existing playbooks, mapping out objections that are not in the playbook, and suggesting updates for the same prompt. In one week, the playbook evolved, and today we are converting more customers than the sales team. Does it capture the value of the $4k usd sales person ? If the ROI is superior, yes. Will I pay for it? That is a different story (we developed this ourselves).
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