> To be more direct on the point: Anthropic has nailed that Opus > Sonnet > Haiku.
Holy cow I never realized and I had to keep checking which model was which, I never had managed to remember which model was which size before because I never realized there was a theme with the names!
When I worked at Microsoft, it cost over $20 to have a human customer support agent pick up the phone when someone called in for help. That was greater than our product margin. Every time someone called for help, we basically lost the entire profit on that sale, and then some.
Most common support calls where for things that were explained in the manual, the out of box experience, tutorial documents, FAQ pages, and so on and so forth.
Did we have actual support issues that needed fixing, yes of course. And the insanely high cost of customer support drove us to improve our first use experience. But holy cow people don't realize how expensive support calls are.
Edit: To explain some of the costs - This was back when people worked in physical call centers, so first off we were paying for physical office space. Next up training, each CSR had to be trained on our product. This took time and we had to pay for that training time. We also had to write support material, and update that support material for each new version that came out. All of this gets amortized into the cost of support. Because workers tend not to stay long, you pay for a lot of training.
Add in all the other costs associated with running a call center and the cost per call, even for off shore call centers, is not cheap.
In a reasonable world we'd just raise the price of the product by $x based on what % of people we expect to call in for support (ignore for a minute that estimating that number is hard), but the world isn't reasonable. Downwards price pressure comes from all sides, primarily VC backed competitors who are OK burning $$ to gain market share, and competitors at other FAANGs that are OK burning money to gain market share.
The result is that everyone is going to try and reduce support costs because holy cow per user margins are low now days for huge swaths of product categories (Apple's iPhone being a notable exception...)
> Most common support calls where for things that were explained in the manual, the out of box experience, tutorial documents, FAQ pages, and so on and so forth.
My brother used to work at tech support for XBox Live.
He said that 80% of his calls were for password resets, something users can easily self-service. There's literally an option on the login form for "Forgot Password", and people would rather spend time calling up support, waiting on hold, and verifying their identity to a support agent than click a button.
And it's not like the password reset flow was any easier going through support. He'd just trigger a password reset e-mail to be sent, exactly like the user hitting Forgot Password.
And this is after the phone tree tells them "If you forgot your password, click the Forgot Password link".
I always think about this when people demand they should be able to talk to a human. The overwhelming number of callers to tech support don't need a human. Giving everybody the ability to speak to a human just isn't feasible.
I have an uncle that works tech support for XFinity. Half his calls are resolved by just power cycling the modem/router. People shouldn't need a human to tell them to do that.
Power cycling is not a solution. It's a crappy workaround, and you still had downtime because of it. The device should never get stuck in the first place, and the solution for that is fixing whatever bug is in the firmware.
If they want to reduce support calls, then have more reliable gear.
> Power cycling is not a solution. It's a crappy workaround, and you still had downtime because of it. The device should never get stuck in the first place, and the solution for that is fixing whatever bug is in the firmware.
I'm sympathetic to the argument that companies should make support calls less necessary by providing better products and services, but "just write bug-free software" is not a solution.
This isn't a case where you need bug free software. This is a case where the frequency of fatal bugs is directly proportional to the support cost. Fix the common bugs, then write off the support for rare ones as a cost of doing business.
The effect of cheap robo support is not reducing the cost of support. It is reducing the cost of development by enabling a more buggy product while maintaining the previous support costs.
Giving the device enough RAM to survive memory leaks during heavy usage would also be a valid option, as is automatic rebooting to get the device back into a clean state before the user experiences a persistent loss of connectivity. There are a wealth of available workarounds when you control everything about the device's hardware and software and almost everything about the network environments it'll be operating in. Fixing all the tricky, subtle software bugs is not necessary.
For a community full of engineers, I'm always surprised that people always take absolutionist views on minor technical decisions, rather than thinking of the tradeoffs made that got there.
The obvious trade off here is engineering effort vs. development cost, and when the tech support solution is "have you tried turning it off, then on again?" We know which path was chosen
You can't just throw RAM at embedded devices that you make millions of and have extremely thin margins on. Have you bothered to look at the price of RAM today? At high numbers and low margins you can barely afford to throw capacitors at them, let alone precious rare expensive RAM.
No, XFinity are the ones who decided their routers “““need””” to have unwanted RAM-hungry extra functionality beyond just serving their residential customers' needs. Their routers participate in an entire access-sharing system so they can greedily double-dip by reselling access to your own connection that you already pay them for:
We're talking about devices where the retail price is approximately one month of revenue from one customer, and that's if there isn't an extra fee specifically for the equipment rental. Yes, consumer electronics tend to have very thin margins, but residential ISPs are playing a very different game.
The thing is a YOU don't get to decide this. Maybe the PW reset flow is significantly more complex for some people who don't have an actual human walk them though it; maybe Xfinity routers shouldn't need to be power cycled to fix problems. Maybe corporations should make their products better to avoid do many support calls or price that into the purchase price. At least let's be honest that the entire exercise is an attempt to externalize costs on their customers.
I've called for password resets before. Sometimes the email doesn't come in or can take like an hour (fuck "Magic links" and email OTPs...). I've even had support reset it and a day later get the half dozen reset requests I made.
Just because something appears simple and obvious doesn't mean it is. There's a lot of ways for those systems to fail. Might be the user's connection or might be the server the user is connecting to and the customer support is sending through a different one.
Big lesson I've learned is that if a lot of people are struggling with something that seems obvious then it probably isn't.
I just remembered my password reset battle with an online store. Yes, the email or the SMS took too long to arrive and when the code came, it was already expired. And I knew the password, by the way; it was just a "new browser" and they wanted a second authentication. Marvelous.
I once had a credit card company not let me add my card to my Google wallet because I didn't have the physical card, even though they sent me the virtual one... it had been 3 weeks and for their rewards I needed to spend X amount in 3 months. I had to call to verify my identity. Though I think that friction was on purpose
The problem is consumers are the ones who decided this. I used to only buy web hosting from companies with 24/7 US based phone tech support. Today this basically doesn't exist, because cheaper options not offering it ate their lunch.
> Half his calls are resolved by just power cycling the modem/router. People shouldn't need a human to tell them to do that.
Comcast deserves every penny of customer service expenses they're incurring if their own purpose-built modem/routers are so flaky they're responsible for half the problems people experience with their service. Customers should not be expected to endure shitty products without even seeking help from the service provider that owes them better.
By contrast, I've seen Google Fiber proactively issue a partial refund in response to a service outage that was so short I didn't even notice it.
"Hi, thank you for your message, please take a look at our following FAQ guides:
- I forgot my password
Was this answer useful to you, or would you like more links to our FAQ? Before we give you a link to what used to be a talk to a human line, but which has been replaced by another chatbot in a sort of Matryoshka"
Password reset emails are a real bane. Because email is unreliable, they often don't work, so I end up with customers contacting me wondering why it's not working for them.
One of our software suppliers has particularly bad software for password resets, so there's a steady stream of people needing help for one reason or another. This company seems unable to fix these problems, unfortunately. Ughh.
I had a friend who worked for a company that built AI call centres. I naively thought that customers would use it to do "password reset" type workflows and have an escape hatch for customers to talk to a human if the AI couldnt handle what they needed.
Surprisingly few of them wanted that. If the AI couldnt handle their issue they mostly wanted customers to just fuck off.
It takes less brainpower to talk to a person. I often just call companies instead of trying to fight through their stupid FAQs and websites and all that crap. No I'm not going to install your stupid app just to do one thing once ever. I don't want to learn anything or remember anything. We're at a stage in technology where there's no excuse for crap software in simple devices.
Recently the ventilation fan in my house wasn't measuring temperature correctly so I called the company. Their tech came round, got me to enter my wifi password, updated the firmware, and viola - it started working properly. I'm sure they had a FAQ or manual explaining that but I'm not wasting my mental energy on such rubbish.
This seems like an AI chatbot would work just as well for you then, since it achieves the same end goal of not having to personally wade through FAQs and such.
I find LLMs are excellent at finding relevant documentation and giving advice, as long as the issue isn’t overly niche, but humans tend to fail there as well.
Yes, I use AI all the time to work out how to operate complicated things. But not the chatbot provided by the company because that will be so crippled, it's no more used than a FAQ.
For the ventilation fan, I wasn't even going to try working it out myself with AI. The company sold be a defective product, then they fixed it, as is their obligation.
Microsoft is a company that has very little right to complain about support costs. They'd save themselves a fortune if they stopped releasing bad software and updates that required support in the first place. Nobody wants to call Microsoft for support. They do it because they've been forced to, usually by Microsoft. This kind of support can hardly be called "free" because even when Microsoft isn't charging customers to speak with the person on the other end of the line the customer has already paid in time and suffering (and sometimes lost data)
Users are "dumb", and it's a dumb _system_ and dumb business that doesn't plan for that in terms of FTUE, business model, support model, and product flows.
We product makers get to think about our one little product all day, and it's our job to make our product work for the "dumb" users. It's not their job to adapt to us.
- I forgot my password and Microsoft is sending reset emails to the account that that password bars.
- I remember my password but now it says I need a passkey and I don't know what that is.
- I forgot my password and in the process of resetting it, Microsoft created a duplicate account.
All of the above are real problems that I have seen in the wild. I could list many more.
Given that Microsoft knows--and has always known--user limitations, it behooves them to design idiot-proof software, not continually release poorly-designed changes.
Very easy solution to users forgetting their passwords. It's to not need a password for your software. Something that once upon a time, Microsoft did not require with their operating systems.
Okay — but did they try to address that, eg, via easy to remember pass phrases? Or were they hacks pushing that complexity nonsense that XKCD called out as midwit math?
Passwords are the ultimate example of technologists turning in substandard bullshit and then blaming users for “holding it wrong”. If that’s Microsoft’s largest problem, they’ve deserved every call.
If someone pays for a product, and then gets support for it, that's not FREE support. That's paid support. It's not their fault if the company they're a customer of loses money when they support those they've sold a product to.
Amazon, for example, charges us for cloud resources and then charges us again (handsomely) for the privilege of submitting bug reports to them. And then sometimes, even with a clear, deterministic repro for a bug with no plausible workaround (besides "stop using the feature"), where the fix is probably as simple as "pull a fix from upstream open source repo" or "sic Claude on it for 10 minutes", the bug remains open for literally years.
This is very different from "I didn't read the instructions on the screen and now I'm calling support". Both scenarios exist. I have some sympathy for businesses facing the latter, and much less for businesses facing the former.
When people talk about wanting "free support", they mean that they want support included with the price of the product (no extra charges), but you're still going to get what you paid for, and expecting too much might not get you what you want.
If you pay $20/month for a software subscription for your small business, you're going to get a different kind of support than the enterprise customer paying $100k/month. The small business customer will get support via email with multi-day SLAs, and the enterprise customer will get priority support via screen-share with same-day SLAs.
And there are free-tier services that offer limited support, where users that don't pay anything expect to be treated like they're full-fledged customers.
There a limited scenario here, where a paying customer has so many problems with the product that the cost of support exceeds the revenue the customer provides, and when one can confidently say that this is not the result of an overly-needy customer, you spend the money figuring out the problem and making sure that the solution is available to help any customer that follows. The cost of support my exceed revenue for one customer, but once the solution is in the knowledge base, you don't have to repeat those costs again for the next customer.
But there are also small customers who fumble the product and put too much strain on support until a decision is made not to prioritize them over other customers. I have seen small customers with unreasonable expectations get "fired" simply because their revenue wasn't worth it.
If a company routinely sees support costs exceed revenue, that's usually the company's fault for having a faulty and/or hard-to-support product. If a single customer's support costs exceed the revenue they provide, that's usually the customer's fault for leaning too heavily on support to be their personal I.T. provider.
Corporations have really hammered in the propaganda haven't they? They idea that a trillion dollar corporation can't have good support because they're just greedy and don't want to hire workers needs to be reinstated every moment.
And all these replies spilled ink over an argument that had..... absolutely nothing to do with the article. So wild to see how many people refuse to read something they want to discuss.
Support chatbots are pretty much the only scenario where "don't make me talk to your chatbot" is a problem in practice. If someone tries to use a chatbot to engage with me in a personal or professional discussion, I don't lose anything of value by simply ignoring them permanently. It's only when the party using the chatbot has something I want that I have any incentive to even consider playing along.
My last experience with a support chatbot was actually pretty decent. It collected all the information, asked followup details, and then fired that whole thing off to a human to deal with. It was perfectly fine.
"smart answering machine" seems like a very apt use case for LLMs, provided the rest of the system works - that a human actually received and acts on the feedback.
This is the thing that drives me crazy. Most of these phone calls should just be emails; I can usually stand to wait a week or two for the company to get back to me. General support funnels like support@example.com have been dead for most consumer-facing technologies for close to a decade at this point. I’m not installing an app for every company I’m forced to interact with when there are already existing, universal technologies available that they could implement if they just priced their products appropriately.
It would be nice if more businesses embraced email instead of requiring phone calls for basic tasks. Imagine how much more productive we could be if we could just send off a quick email with the information and questions.
Instead, what we're likely going to get are "voice agents" calling each other when we could have just used email instead...
Businesses likely don't know a better way because the person selling them software doesn't want them to use an open and federated technology. They want the business to use Slack, with a SalesForce CRM, and then add a JIRA workflow to top it off.
Most of the time it's simply not being aware of what's out there or just showing them a different work flow.
Yeah. I recently had to deal with Amazon's robot. Definitely bird-brained but close enough that the right objective was accomplished even though I don't think it ever understood what happened (but woe to the non-native speaker!) The problem is not chatbot customer support, the problem is bird-brained managers that think a system that solves 99% of issues doesn't need a fallback for that 1%.
my only experiences with chatbots so far have been as instruments for companies to avoid their contractual obligations and just not provide the options that I would have asked a person directly for
obviously not a problem with the technology itself, it was like that with more primitive answering machines as well, often there only to either answer the obvious things, or stonewall people with real problems with the product or service hoping they'd just give up and take the loss
I mean that is also the job of existing call handlers.
"We are experiencing an greater than usual call volume, please wait while an agent becomes available" only to be randomly disconnected has been a thing for most of my life.
Everyone seems to be hyping open claw at the moment soon its just going to be LLMs talking to LLMs.... I wonder if they will develop a short hand and start talking in wingdings.
Whenever I interact with them I get asked to describe my issue then regardless of what I write I get asked a battery of questions you would expect are getting fed into a form and then on the off-chance I get connected to a human operator (which was my goal to begin with) they end up asking me for all the same information again.
Isn't part of why Apple's iPhone can be so expensive is because it's very easy to get actual human support for it when something goes wrong? You probably didn't make the mistake at Microsoft, but I've seen people look at the localized spreadsheet and miss the long term company wide spreadsheet completely. Often because the sales and support departments are so far from each other that they're basically two different companies working in different directions. Maybe Microsoft customer support is a bad place to measure these things because of the size, but around here quite a few banks have tried outsourcing their phone support to everything available and have come back because it cost them customers. Even customers who never phoned them.
That being said. Your example of customers calling for support on things they shpuld be capable of figuring out themselves in is probably where AI is going to shine as first line support. Once (if?) AI voice chat is good enough to replace chatbots we may not even realize we're talking with an AI unless it tells us.
>customers calling for support on things they shpuld be capable of figuring out themselves in is probably where AI is going to shine as first line support.
It certainly won't be cheap to run real-time AI voice chat, or any real-time AI chat. The AI costs that you currently see are heavily subsidized, just like OP's example of "VC backed competitors who are OK burning $$ to gain market share", it's the same. These AI companies are far from profitable, burning billions to insert themselves into customer support pipelines and everywhere else they can, and then the other foot will drop. Uber and Lyft are far more expensive today than when they started, and the price to run "AI" will also inflate when these companies have to pay off all the billions they've spent but didn't earn. I doubt it will end up costing much less if less at all than human support, with worse results.
>Isn't part of why Apple's iPhone can be so expensive is because it's very easy to get actual human support for it when something goes wrong?
Yeah, Apple has best in class support. They tried monetising it through Applecare but thats largely broken down.
I cant stand Apple for a lot of reasons, but their phone support, and everything behind that like training, is about as good as you can possibly hope to achieve.
> People demand free support.
> When I worked at Microsoft
Last I checked windows was a paid product...
Last I checked the common nicknames were "Microslop" and "Winblows"
Maybe if Microslop spent more time improving their product they'd spend less money and time on support.
Sorry, I have no empathy for a multi trillion dollar company that's shoving things down our throats. I'm sorry you had a frustrating experience as an employee but my feelings about a mega corp are very different. It's like watching someone wipe away their tears with hundred dollar bills
If I'm contacting a company for help from a human, it's because I haven't found the solution in the manual, the out of box experience, tutorial documents, FAQ pages, and so on and so forth. More often than not, I'm calling to do the company the favor of reporting an unaddressed failure mode in their service, often with technical details that would help them quickly identify and fix the cause (and reduce their support call volume)... if only that information could be delivered to the right people.
I don't have infinite time or patience, though. When blocked by a moat of hold times, chat bots, first level support scripts, etc, I will give up.
Yes, calls like mine are in the minority. But they are especially valuable, and I think well worth their share of the costs you describe.
Maybe companies should be identifying customers with above average tech skills, and routing them to better support channels next time they call.
Maybe we need shibboleet.
I don't know what the best solution is, but there must be a better way to do triage than funneling everyone into a flowchart of counterproductive misery, as is widespread today.
> If I'm contacting a company for help from a human, it's because I haven't found the solution in the manual, the out of box experience, tutorial documents, FAQ pages, and so on and so forth.
You'd be amazed at how not normal that is though. The number of people willing to throw up their hands to ask for help rather than researching anything is pretty damn high.
> When I worked at Microsoft, it cost over $20 to have a human customer support agent pick up the phone when someone called in for help. That was greater than our product margin. Every time someone called for help, we basically lost the entire profit on that sale, and then some.
This doesn't seem like a bad thing when it comes to aligning incentives (assuming customers actually want a product they don't need help to use).
I can't believe how far down I had to scroll before someone called the OP out for not having actually read the article and just decided to make up their own topic.
They need a place to be, they need to get hired, trained, managed and all the associated general costs of employment (hr, payroll, etc). They need equipment, there's monitoring, evaluations etc.
Then you also have to pay them regardless of whether someone calls.
In that case, wouldn't you be happy to get more calls, so that the up-front "training" cost is worth it? Naïvely I'd expect that every additional call would _decrease_ the amortized price per call.
While I agree with TFA's point that forcing a chatbot isn't a substitute for just having the info available, organized and searchable, the answer to your specific question is that the fully burdened cost of a trained support center human includes a lot more than their gross hourly wage. There's recruiting, interviewing, hiring, training plus space, desk, computer, phone, IT, HR, health care, vacation, sick days, insurance, employer's share of employment taxes.
A rough rule of thumb is the full burdened cost of an hourly office knowledge worker is two to three times the gross hourly wage.
And if it turns out to be your mistake (faulty product or missing documentation) as opposed to something the user could have reasonably solved by themselves, refund the charge and possibly provide compensation for the inconvenience.
Because if you charge for support but refund it if it's the company's fault, the company now has a big financial incentive to never admit it's their fault.
The support cost is why I email support to unsubscribe me from newsletters I haven't signed up for, instead of clicking the unsubscribe link. I then mark the email as spam anyway in gmail.
It's petty, but I haven't found a better disincentive.
People prefer a pricing model in which support appears free. Free support (that is good) creates the sense that the company stands behind the product and service, and leads to good reviews, so it is a win/win.
>Did we have actual support issues that needed fixing, yes of course. And the insanely high cost of customer support drove us to improve our first use experience. But holy cow people don't realize how expensive support calls are.
Same in the ISP space. ISP's with low margins often lose multiple months of revenue on a single support call.
> Because workers tend not to stay long, you pay for a lot of training.
I often wonder that if you paid $60K for a top quality support person instead of $30K for two average people (or even $20K for 3 bad people) then the following might happen:
- you would get better support calls
- happier customers
- longer tenured employees
- all of the above would lead to a reputation as a company with AMAZING support
One company whose software I used had an annual support contract. If you did not renew that contract, every time you called support they would ask for a credit card number. If you found an actual bug, the card would not be charged. If it was a user error, the card would get charged.
The root problem is that these big companies are not capable of serving the customers that they have but because they have a monopoly, the customers are forced to use them.
All alternatives which are capable of actually serving the customer are systematically driven out of business.
Had they built a better, more intuitive product, they would get fewer support calls and wouldn't be struggling with costs.
> Had they built a better, more intuitive product, they would get fewer support calls and wouldn't be struggling with costs.
As I mentioned, due to high support costs we worked to improve the UX and we ended up dropping our support costs dramatically.
Doesn't change the fact that everyone who did call cost us more than our profit on the sale.
Customer support is expensive.
Microsoft used to charge for customer support back in the day (90s). The way it worked was that if it was your fault, you paid, if it was a product bug, there was no cost for support. While not a perfect system, it at least aligned everyone's incentives in the right direction. (The huge glaring flaw being it was MS that decided if they were going to charge you for the support call or not...)
Which examples? Lots of times it’s not a forced monopoly but just that customers want the monopoly because they are best/cheapest. Take Google Cloud that people complain about its lack of support. Yet people sign up even if there are thousands of competitors.
Software scales. Customer support doesn't. SaaS companies do not want to deal with customer support at all. It's only gotten worse with AI agents.
It's incredibly frustrating to spend a good 10 minutes navigating a website's complex web of menus to get a phone number (I think they deliberately try to hide it...). Then spend another 5 minutes listening to bots telling me to press 1 for English, only to fall into the wrong menu where the bot repeats some useless information I already know, say goodbye, then hang up.
Having a bot say to me: "we care about your concerns, and we value your business" is absurd and oxymoronic.
Compare this to say Chase, Amex, or Geico. I call, someone answers within 2 minutes and addresses all my problems/concerns in fluent English. I'd happily pay a premium for that.
I can understand this issue with low margin private businesses. But the LLM bots are now everywhere.
I call my bank and I must tell a dumb robot a description of my problem, which it then claims to not understand and fucking hangs up on me. Now I need to repeat like a parrot "operator, operator, operator" until that clanker resigns and connects me to an operator. And the issue is managing a specific account, so nothing in the FAQs was relevant. Bank has more than enough margins for human support.
Or another case - our government went all digital lately and we have main point of access to many stuff via an app/webportal. That service only has a very dumb and limited bot as a support, while service governs a lot of important functions. So instead I have to write comments under their Facebook marketing posts, then if I'm lucky some human spots them and then a real support writes me in a Facebook messenger. This is beyond infuriating. Government also has more than enough money to spend.
Same with other businesses with proper margins, like telco, automotive etc.
The advantage is being able to plug in new models to each piece of the pipeline.
Is it super sexy? No. But each individual type of model is developing at a different rate (TTS moves really fast, low latency STT/ASR moved slower, LLMs move at a pretty good pace).
You should probably split it up: an end-to-end model for great latency (especially for baked in turn taking), but under the hood it can call out to any old text based model to answer more intricate question. You just need to teach the speech model to stall for a bit, while the LLM is busy.
Just use the same tricks humans are using for that.
Everyone predicted twitter would crash and burn within months of the layoffs.
It didn't.
Anyone who has worked at a large company knows that 1/2 the staff there is stuck keeping the lights on because it is easier to hire a warm body than fix tech debt.
I've worked at companies that are literally 10x more effective than other competitors in the market purely due to good engineering practices.
Even within large companies, you can have orgs that are dramatically more effective than others, often due to having to work under just the right set of resource constraints. Too little and no investments in the future, too much and it becomes easiest to build fast and hire people to duct tape the mess that is left behind.
> Everyone predicted twitter would crash and burn within months of the layoffs.
It did, just not obviously. Twitter used to be the store brand social network, vanilla and reliable but not overly obnoxious. It made good money from brand advertisers like Ford, General Mills, and Sony. City governments felt ok with using it to distribute community information. The platform tried its hardest to stay middle of the road and not let things sway too far one way or the other.
Today it is a real time bidding marketplace for changing public discourse. You simply buy blue checkmark accounts in bulk and spread your message free of any content moderation or safeguards. So the Chinese, Russians, and Saudis can get into a bidding war over what rural whites believe to be fact.
With the ad revenue sharing program you don't even need to write the content anymore (one of the biggest things foreign influence campaigns struggle with). Just find someone who is saying the "right" thing already and promote them. Twitter in turn underscores the authenticity of these voices by adding "transparency" features that list where someone is from - because your average person does not know a damn thing about proxies.
You and the poster above disagree about the state of Twitter.
Twitter had been a growth company, it was early/missed the market with Vine, but was showing ad growth.
Now, as a private company, backed by the world's richest man, sovreign wealth funds, and banks that have written down their stakes, it has different economics than a tech / growth company.
It's ad revenue is now, not in the ballpark of the fortune 500 or trendy Instagram ads, but somewhere between reddit and sin site markets.
The purpose of Twitter is IMO no longer to be profitable.
For a man with a trillion dollar fortune it’s just his personal equivalent of Fox News, a way to shape the nations conversation.
Plus a way to get data for xAI.
In that regard it’s a huge sucess. I use grok to find out about stuff on X and it’s very effective. Grok is also nowhere as bad as it should be (it’s still not great).
A way to get data for xAI? Eh, I guess. But it's a source of bad data. Most social media is, even the best case is stuff like Stack Overflow. It wouldn't surprise me if this was at least a strong component of why Grok called itself "Mecha Hitler".
Huge success? Unfortunately I have to agree, given the US government still ended up integrating it despite the Mecha Hitler incident.
> I use grok to find out about stuff on X and it’s very effective.
As with all of these things, I have to ask: How confident are you that it's telling you true things, rather than just true-sounding things? My expectation is Grok will be overtraining on benchmarks (even relative to the others, who will also be doing so at least a bit), and Grok's benchmarks will include twitter reactions, and it will be Goodhart's-law-ing itself in the process to maximally effective rhetoric rather than maximally effective (even by the standards of other LLMs) "truth-seeking".
* plural, not "the", it also works in at least the UK as well as the US
You can ask Grok for “find me this tweet on X, with direct links for sources” and it will do that. It’s basically a super charged fuzzy search engine for X which is great, since a lot of my searches are half remembered tweets that I’d like to find again.
So it’s accurate in the sense that it’s accurate finding things on X. I don’t really use it for anything else.
Thanks, that makes sense. I read too much into your previous comment and thought you were finding out more about things beyond twitter after they were discussed on twitter.
I can't think of a more quintessential crash out of a major brand than Twitter from the past couple years. For a significant percentage (>10% publicly, I'm confident much more than that internally) of users it became unattractive.
If Microsoft did something that resulted in 300 million users leaving it would be considered crashing and burning, but I guess when Elon does the same proportion someone will show up to explain why losing half your revenue is better than losing all of it.
I just want to know who those people are so that I can pitch them on my next investment fund.
> It’s the same for his cars, they haven’t suddenly got worse at building them.
Actually, they demonstrably have. The Cybertruck is a technical and commercial disaster.
You're correct that most people don’t want to buy from someone like Elon Musk. A huge additional problem for Tesla, though, is that instead of focusing on the business that he's paid to run, its CEO has busied himself with far-right demagoguery for the last couple of years. While that was going on, a variety of Far Eastern companies quietly brought a bunch of EVs to market, that are mostly at least as well-made as Tesla's vehicles, while also being cheaper.
On the roads where I live, I now see about ten of these competitors' cars for every Tesla.
I don't know if I've seen "tech debt" do serious damage to any company, and I've been around a long time. I've definitely seen whole teams grind to a halt in pursuit of someone's idealized vision of the "perfect way to organize code" though. They always couch it in the language of tech debt, but really it's just the loudest person's preferred way to shuffle files around - and usually in the direction of more complexity and not less.
Proving a negative and all that. I’ve definitely seen it do crazy damage, features that should take a week takes six months and turn out to need another year of fixing.
But that’s the easy part, the hard part is how it affects culture and how the skilled people leave because they’re severely underutilized.
So when some people talk about tech debt we don’t talk about perfect code or file structure, it’s about painting a wall in a tropical rain, building a house during an earthquake etc. So count yourself happy I guess.
> I don't know if I've seen "tech debt" do serious damage to any company, and I've been around a long time
Just to provide a counter data-point, I've certainly seen companies not being able to move anymore because of tech debt. It's not for nothing that so much has been written about it, and about the ways to fix it.
Your other point stands - the resume-driven development is also a real problem.
> Everyone predicted twitter would crash and burn within months of the layoffs.
I remember people celebrating and praising Musk, predicting new era of free speech twitter that earns tons of money and is massively effective.
Meanwhile, it lost on value, lost on income, became nazi echo chamber and overall much worst version of itself. It did not "crash and burned" simply because Musk was willing to pay huge amount of money for all of that. What it shows is that original engineering was good and reliable, actually.
> They were rare, and special, and you'd have a few photos per YEAR to look back on. The feel of photos back then, was at least 100x stronger than now. They were a special item, could be given as a gift. But once they became freely available that same amount of emotion is now split across many thousands of photos. (not saying this is good or bad, just increased supply reducing value of each item)
I take a hundred photos on a trip, my phone uses AI (not even the new fancy AI, but old 5-10 year old stuff to detect smiling faces and people in frame) to pull out less than a dozen that are worth keeping. Once a month or so I get fed a reminder of some past trip.
This isn't any different than before. The number of photos taken is greater, but the overall number of worthwhile photos from a given trip is about the same.
Sometimes I like to imagine what this would be like if the technology had appeared 25 years ago.
First off, nonetheless open publishing stuff. Everything would have been trade secrets.
Next off no interoperable json apis instead binary APIs that are hard to integrate with and therefore sticky. Once you spent 3 or 4 months getting your MCP server setup, no way would you ever try to change to a different vendor!
The number of investors was much smaller so odds are you wouldn't have seen these crazy high salaries and you wouldn't have people running off to different companies left and right. (I know, .com boom, but the .com boom never saw 500k cash salaries...)
Imagine if Google hadn't published any papers about transformers or the attention paper had been an internal memo or heck just word2vec was only an internal library.
It has all been a net good for technological progress but not that good for the companies involved.
Could they have even trained the models 25 years ago? Wikipedia was nothing close to what it is today and I know folks here like to mourn the fall of the open web, but it's still orders of magnitude larger today than it was in 2001. YouTube, so many information stores that simply didn't exist then.
Maybe not 25,but IBM Watson beat humans at Jeopardy over 10 years ago. The technology has been there, the difference is the willingness to burn money on it in hopes of capturing exponential revenue from disrupting industries.
Obviously the costs have come down but if IBM felt like burning 100 Billion in 2012 I'm pretty sure they could have a similarly impressive chat bot. Just not sure how they would have ever recouped the revenue.
Nah, IBM watson jeopardy version was a one-off. It was an app specifically tuned for that usecase. IBM Watson is not a single product or app. It is more of a marketing term
The book archives are a big one as well, all the journals that have been published digitally throughout the 2000s, and all the newspapers.
Though with some types of models (specifically voice) it has been discovered that a smaller high quality dataset is better than a giant dataset filled with errors.
The thing is computing has become fun again. Weird and wild cases, crazy water cooled setups, insane keyboards with new types of sensors being developed all the time (not only are analog keyboards a thing now, there are multiple types of analog keyboards!)
There was a lull in the market for a bit but IMHO the tech scene is interesting again.
This is the best use case for them IMHO. So many wonderful shots taken in the moment, and I don't have to see the world through a phone screen for fear of missing a cute picture.
Quality is iffy and framing is hard, but I'd rather have a OK photo taken while playing than a great photo taken while standing apart from the action trying to get the perfect shot lined up.
Not only that, but smart glasses have terrible recording time limits. A cheap $30 pinhole camera with a SD card will far surpass meta glasses in recording capabilities.
Hidden cameras have been a thing for a long time now. Stick one in a pair of glasses and give it a super short battery life and people freak out...
Wearing a hidden camera and recording people is also very socially unacceptable. If someone knew you were wearing they would probably also “freak out”.
Every person holding a cellphone up in their hands could also be pointing a camera around at people, a camera with much higher fidelity, computing power, and one that can take much longer videos.
This is just panic about a new form factor. The same thing happened when cell phones came along, with the exact same talking points.
Totally agree, but that's not a justification. "We already do a thing you don't like so you won't mind if we do it lot more, right?"
The same talking points still apply to cell phones. I think people who record TikToks in public are similarly gross and I go out of my way to avoid them.
I watched a guy setup a cell phone to record his laps in a pool yesterday. He swam one lap right about a meter from the 15 year-old girl playing with her mom, then climbed out of the pool, shut off his phone, and walked away. The remainder of the pool was open. Should I have called him out? I couldn't decide, and therefore didn't. This is normal now.
Holy cow I never realized and I had to keep checking which model was which, I never had managed to remember which model was which size before because I never realized there was a theme with the names!
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