Sure. They are now out about $600. They probably already laid off 500+ customer service jobs costing conservatively 30k a year each. Not including mgmt,training,health,ect. I don't think it will make a difference to the ivory tower C levels. We will just all get used to a once again lower quality help/product. Another great "enshitification" wave of the future with "AI"

It also assumes that the customer service people dont make mistakes at a similar level anyway.

Another "new normal" How come anything that is "new normal" is never good?

If it allows them to reduce costs (and there's enough competition to force them to pass that on as reduced prices), I'm fairly happy with a new normal.

See also how air travel in general used to be a lot more glamorous, but also a lot more expensive.

i found the bug.

People love to hate eg RyanAir, but their effect on prices is felt throughout the industry; even if you never take a single RyanAir flight.

(And even without looking up any data, I find your 'record profits for the last 20 years' hard to square with my memories of covid.)

EDIT: I tried to find some indices for airlines. The closest I found was https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/JETS/performance/ which didn't exactly have a stellar performance.

So I'm not sure where you get your claim from?

Airlines are weird. I think warren buffet said something about airlines being the most complicated way to guarantee losing money as a business or something like that once.

I think your claim might be based on anecdotal testing. (I used to have that same feeling after my first implementation of RAG)... Once you get a few thousand users running RAG-based conversations, you quickly see that it's "good enough to be useful", but far from being as dreamy as promised.

this shit gets sold as a way to replace employees with, essentially, just the middle manager that was over them, who is now responsible for managing the chatbot instead of managing people

while managers are often actually not great at people management, it's at least a somewhat intuitive skill for many. interacting with and directing other humans is something that many people are able to gain experience with outside of work, since it's a necessary life skill unless you're a hermit. furthermore, as a hedge against managerial ineptitude, humans are adaptable creatures that can recognize their manager's shortcomings and determine when and how to work around them to actually get the job done

understanding the intricacies training a machine learning system is a highly specialized and technical skill that nobody is going to pick up base knowledge for in the regular course of life. the skill floor for the average person tasked with it will be much lower than that of people management, and they will probably fuck up, a lot

the onus is ostensibly on AI system vendors to make their systems idiot-proof, but how many vendors actually do so past the point of "looks good enough to close the sale in a demo"? designing such a system is _incredibly_ hard, and the unfortunate reality is that if you try, you'll lose sales to snake oil salesmen who are content to push hokum trash with a fancy coat of paint.

these systems can work as a force multiplier in the hands of the capable, but work as an incompetence magnifier in the hands of the incapable, and there are plenty of dunning-krugerites lusting to magnify their incompetence

Already we can’t manage to prosecute ex presidents in a timely manner before the next election cycle. If delays seem absurd now what will it be like when anything and everything remotely legal takes 10+ years and already sky-high costs triple?

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The bar LLMs have to clear to beat the average front line support operations isn't that high, as your own experience shows. And compared to a large force of badly paid humans with high turnover, LLMs are pretty consistent and easy to train to an adequate level.

They won't beat great costumer support agents, but most companies don't have many of those

A human will be more likely to say "I don't know" or pass you along, rather than outright lie.

However I would not expect an airline customer support to make up a completely fictional flight that has never existed. Maybe they could confuse flights or read a number wrong, but making one up?

Case in point, I asked my bank if they had any FX conversion fees or markup. Guy said no. I asked if there was any markup on the spread. Said no. Guess what? They absolutely mark up that spread. Their exchange rates are terrible. Just because there isn't a line-item with a fee listed doesn't mean there isn't a hidden fee in there. He's either incompetent or a liar.

90% of my job was undoing and compensating passengers for the incorrect information either the phone agent or gate agent gave them. The other 10% was dealing with workarounds to technical issues in our booking software.

I recently asked some LLMs "How many gallons in a mile?" and got some very verbose answers, which turned into feats of short story short stories when I refined to "How many gallons of milk in a mile?"

If part of the training was to only use knowledge sourced from a vector db and that it is allowed to use its trained knowledge only for grammar rules, phrasing or rewriting information then I think it would do a lot better.

Doesn't seem like many models are trained on prompts like "Question Q"->"[no data] I'm sorry but I don't know that" = accepted during training.

This would help immensely for not just for chatbots but for personal use too. I don't want my LLM assistant to invent a trip to Mars when I ask it "what do I have to do today" and my calendar happens to be empty.

And especially for something where it’s just pulling data from an internal system. There is absolutely no reason to invent made up information and saying “well humans do it all the time” is just an excuse.

On the phone with a customer service rep, I might understand a little wishy washy answer, slip of the tongue or slightly inaccurate statement. I've never really had a rep lie to me, usually its just I don't knows & them escalation as needed.

There is something about the written word from a company that makes it feel more like "binding statement".

They only need to increase the lawsuit/settlement amount by less than the amount the companies saves by automation.

If a company representative told me in writing (perhaps via email support) that I could claim a refund retroactively, and that turned out to not be their policy, I would still expect the company to honor what I was told in the email.

Phone calls are difficult more because there is no record of what was said. But if I had a recording of the phone call... I'm not actually sure what I would expect to happen. It's just so socially unusual to record phone calls.

Is it? I can not remember the last time I called some business where I did not get a “this call may be monitored or recorded for quality and training purposes…”. whatever perceived social hangups the company had they got over them and you don’t even need to ask in a 2PC jurisdiction, it’s already taken care of, just record the call.