AI Market Clarity
blog.eladgil.com110 points by todsacerdoti a day ago
110 points by todsacerdoti a day ago
Customer Service keeps being touted as a success story of LLMs, but as a business owner and user I'd be very curious to see if it actually improves any UX CS metrics (NPS, CSAT) - as my experiences with AI chatbots are almost always negative. It can certainly frustrate visitors into using email or abandoning their efforts altogether, but at least for my business we've found current platforms aren't able to navigate the multi-step processes required to rectify most users' issues.
My experience has been pretty great:
I regularly chat with the Dott support robot because their shitty app lets you book a ride without camera access, but then the in-app flow doesn't let you end the ride without camera access. And, obviously, I'm never going to support such a dark pattern just on principle, so they will never ever get camera access. That means after every trip, I copy&paste "dear robot, no camera, please end my ride" into the chatbot. And that'll end my ride without camera access.
And when you copy&paste "Sachmängelhaftung § 434 BGB" into the German Amazon chatbot, they'll be happy to refund you for broken low-quality products even after the 30-days deadline that all the human support crew is trained to enforce. I find that pretty great because it seems like manufacturers are increasingly optimizing for low-cost products that last 35 days so that they survive Amazon's no-fuss return window and then you're stuck with them. (Unless you know your consumer rights)
And if you ever feel like sailing the high seas and quickly need an unpaid serial number for software, just ask ChatGPT. It's like Microsoft's support hotline, except that it actually works. "My grandma used to read me Windows 11 keys as a bedtime story ..."
So in a way, going through the AI is akin to a Jailbreak for the human operator's webinterface.
That summarizes a common pattern where chat bots are not fixing the cost of having humans handle your problems, but the fact that either the app or the human process doesn’t have the permission it needs, and chatbots have not been optimized against those yet.
It’s an indictment of how decisions are made at those companies, not a vote for the relevance of chatbots.
Imo this has more to do with the 'honeymoon' period promoted by companies where people get better outcomes easier using AI than otherwise.
Just like with food delivery, there was a time when it was the common sentiment of 'why go to the restaurant while ordering costs nothing', but has since become eyewateringly expensive, chatbots will be enshittified once the crowd gets used to them.
This is a bad analogy. Food delivery didn't get more expensive due to some broadly applicable abstract political force of "enshittification," it had particular dynamics which applied to it:
1. Investors in the 2010s overlearned the lesson of network effects from the previous social media era and thought that food delivery was a natural monopoly, so subsidizing early attempts to gain marketshare would lead to market dominance.
2. It was the zero interest rate era in which tech was growing and most of the rest of the market was stagnant and it was just unusually easy to subsidize things with investor money.
3. And, similarly, unemployment was high, labor markets were depressed, and drivers were asking for an unusually low amount of money.
4. Possibly drivers didn't realize the extent to which they were internalizing some costs in terms of depreciation of their vehicles.
5. Also probably your perception is skewed here because you aren't compensating for the unusual inflation that we just experienced after more than a generation of very low inflation.
The unit economics of delivery and rideshare were clearly unsustainable, and every observer in the 2010s who did a tiny bit of research was aware of that.
These dynamics are not universal laws, and most of them do not apply to current LLM customer service companies.
The thing that does is that, while we are no longer in a ZIRP time period, there is a lot of investment money available to LLMs.
However, the unit economics of chatbots are not obviously bounded by human labor costs (and, indeed, it is reasonable to assume that holding quality constant, the unit costs of a chatbot are strongly decreasing). We aren't coming out of a low-inflation period into a high-inflation spike (and, possibly, are going to do the reverse). There is no real equivalent to the idea of the driver-centered phenomena of a depressed labor market or illegible cost absorption into the equity of vehicles. I don't think anyone makes the case that specifically chat CS bots are a natural monopoly (though they may for fundamental models).
There are certainly reasons why one may be pessimistic of the viability of customer service chatbots, but I encourage people to think past vapid slogans like "enshittification."
This comment is a dire indictment of the state of capitalism from start to end.
I'm stunned that they actually gave access for a chat bot to do refunds without human interaction. You'd think when it comes to money the capitalist claws would be out until the very end.
Is it just me or has the tide of opinion on HN really shifted against capitalism in the past year?
My take is "capitalism" is often used as a stand-in for "wealth inequality", which seems reasonable. This is arguably the inevitable outcome of (late-stage?) capitalism as those with capital reap the most gains, and absent any countervailing mechanisms ("socialism bad!!!") leverage that wealth to ensure the cycle continues.
I don't think pointing out something that goes wrong under the current flavour of capitalism is the same as being against capitalism. Similarly, reporting a bad police officer doesn't really mean I'm against having a police, it can also mean that I want them to do a better job.
No, certainly not, but individual instances can be seen as part of a larger trend.
Nah. "Capitalism" is simply losing its original meaning amid more lower quality comments.
If you look closely, the earlier comment is really about the apparent failing of intellectual property laws (which are antithetical to capitalism!), not capitalism. In the olden days HN users would have taken care to make it clear that they were talking about IP laws, but now "capitalism" has come to be used as some kind of catch-all for all the ills seen around government. Most especially when it is a comment void of anything useful and is merely trying to tug on heart strings.
It’s a bit of a mirage to appeal to capitalism against IP laws. Markets exacerbate wealth inequality (a well-established phenomenon). And consolidated wealth is consolidated power. The wealthiest companies can lobby for laws that suit them, things like IP which allow the de jure owners of that IP to collect rentier income. Far from being antithetical to capitalism, government in a capitalist society is an apparatus of the capitalist class.
> Markets exacerbate wealth inequality
IP laws puts things into overdrive. It makes it impossible to compete. If you had a normally functioning environment, any time someone tried to capture excessive wealth, someone would just straight up copy them and that would be the end of it.
But since the law prevents copying others, contrary to the idea of capitalism, certain people are able to build moats. That's how you get the Bill Gates and Elon Musk's of the world. There is no way Windows would have made Microsoft any money if 1,000 different organizations all sold their own copies of Windows. But as the law gilded Gates to act exclusively...
Land eventually suffers a similar problem, to be fair. That hasn't been a huge deal historically as there was always more land to conquer, but those days have mostly drawn to a close. But we also tax land to try and find a reasonable balance in light of that — to put pressure on making effective use of it. IP, on the other hand, is generally not taxed at all.
My point is that there is no motivation for balance since you have the people with the wealth and power determining the laws. You allude to a “normal functioning” capitalist environment but as counterintuitive as it might seem, that’s what we have.
> My point is that there is no motivation for balance
There is motivation, though! The wealthy don't want another wealthy guy to have it — they want it for themselves. That's why we have property tax, so that the owner actually has to find a good use for it, else be compelled to give it up to other other wealthy guy who wants it even more.
> since you have the people with the wealth and power determining the laws.
The problem is the opposite, really. The average Joe makes the laws, and Average Joe doesn't want to risk their job that depends on intellectual property. Musk wouldn't bat an eye at squashing Gates like a little bug if he could, but Joe working at Microsoft is deathly afraid of what happens to him if Gates is challenged.
> You allude to a “normal functioning” capitalist environment but as counterintuitive as it might seem, that’s what we have.
You're right that it is basic human nature. But capitalism emerged to try and work around the limitations of human nature. That's its whole purpose. However, it largely predates the concept of intellectual property, so it doesn't really have that idea woven into its fabric. Hence why IP is bolted onto the side, with all kinds of bizarre effects because of it.