alt Hacker NewsBetween the lines, you highlight a tangental issue: execs like Zuckerberg think easy/automatable stuff is 90%. People with skin in the game know it is much less (40% per your estimate).This isn't unique to LLMs. Overestimating the benefit of automation is a time-honored pastime.
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This reminds me how Klarna fired their a large part of their customer support department to replace it with ai, only to eventually realize they couldn't do the job primarily using ai and had to rehire a ton of people.
I never call a customer service line unless the website doesn't work, but customer service robots try very hard to get me to hang up and go to the website.
It's super frustrating. These robots need to have an option like "I am technically savvy and I tried the website and it's broken."
Yeah I think I do already see this happening in my work. It's clearly very beneficial, but its benefit is also overestimated. This can lead to some disenchantment and even backlash where people conclude it's all useless.
But it isn't! It's very useful. Even if it isn't eliminating 90% of work, eliminating 40% is a huge benefit!
Perhaps the value of believing in the 90% is the motivation it provides.
If you don’t believe in an exaggerated potential, you might never start exploiting it.
I’ve noticed this when trying to book a flight with American Airlines earlier this year. Their website booking was essentially broken, insisting that one of my flight segments was fully booked but giving no indication of which one and attempting alternate bookings which replaced each of the segments in turn still failed. They’d replaced most of their phone booking people with an AI system that also was nonfunctional and wanted to direct me to the website to book. After a great deal of effort, I managed to finally reach a human being who was able to place the booking in a couple minutes (and, it turned out, at a lower price than the website had been quoting).