I’m not an AI techie and I’m not well educated on LLMs/AI in general. The issue I’m having is the dichotomy between how people talk about it. I’ve heard completely opposite ends of the spectrum. From AI is quickly becoming advanced enough to threaten human society, all the way to its a glorified dictionary/search engine that can’t really do much of anything. I know Lemmy has a steep anti-AI slant. But, can someone talk about this in a way I can wrap my head around why the divide seems so big?
This feels like the kind of narrative that OP is asking about. Everything that you’ve said sounds kind of sane and plausible, but it’s not really borne out by the reality.
That’s just not what I’ve seen. I’d love to be able to automate the work of my white-collar team, but everything that we have seen thus far just seems incapable of providing any significant improvement. Software providers in our industry have implemented some gen AI tools, and even the sales reps for those providers are very wary of them. They’ve been able to reliably automate some elements of jobs, but it’s an incremental improvement over the previous automation and it didn’t consume a significant amount of time anyway.
There’s absolutely no evidence that gen AI will have a significant impact on my white-collar industry. In fact, the evidence presently available indicates that this generation of AI does not have the capability to impact our industry.
This is really the same story. Factories have been being automated since the industrial revolution. Self driving tech has been a year away for the last 10 years.
I guess the difference is that it I have actually seen it do legitimate work now. We have implemented outbound SDR and inbound tech support agents that do the right things. Our SDRs generate new leads for our (currently all-human) sales team to go after. They are boosting the numbers of closed deals. Our inbound tech support agents are closing a significant fraction of tickets. My last metrics call was yesterday, it was 12% of inbound tech support chats that never got escalated to a human. These are both first-draft tools, they’ll improve. They cost pennies per session to run. And client NPS scores show that they’re happy with the results. I don’t think we’ll see either of these tasks become 100% automated, but at even 25% or 50% that’s a lot of formerly-human work not being done by humans anymore. And we’re deploying more agents to handle more of the sales pipeline, development pipeline, HR and accounting. I don’t work for a huge company, there are a few hundred people total. This isn’t something that’s coming, it’s here already.
What I have seen is that AI tools make software development significantly easier, faster, cheaper - pick two, and as long as you aren’t picking cheaper we’re going to get better software coming out faster over the coming years.
Better software translates to easier, more automatic processes for a lot of white and blue collar work. It doesn’t do everything, but it does a lot.