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The study is about an AI support system (a "recent version of GPT", sources link to GPT4, finetuned on internal company data) supporting customer support agents
by kriro 3y ago
The study is about an AI support system (a "recent version of GPT", sources link to GPT4, finetuned on internal company data) supporting customer support agents at a software company that provides business process software. It increses productivity (measured in number of chats resolved by employee) by 13.8%, the lower the performance before, the higher the impact. The performance increase is mostly based on being able to handle more chats in parallel and handling each chat quicker. For reference, an agent resolved about 2.12 chats/h before and this increaded by 0.47 chats/h (I was surprised that it's "only" 2.12 chats/h).
Interestingly but also not surprising this increase in productivity at the lower end is atypical for tech innovation which tended to favour the higher end positions before. However, this type of customer support seems like a good candidate that will get automated away completely. It seems like the rollout can be in phases, it already increases productitivty as a support system. First, the productivity will be uplifted to a certain level for all workers where the skill difference matters less and less and finally the work will be done completely by AI.
- visarga 3y ago> First, the productivity will be uplifted to a certain level for all workers where the skill difference matters less and less and finally the work will be done completely by AI. First we will build a ladder, climb on it and be uplifted to a certain level until the distance matters less and less, and finally we will reach the moon! There is no single AI task that works on its own without needing human help at all. We are still on earth. The max speed of GPT is still the human reading speed. It's kind of a leap of faith to think we will close the gap, solve that last 1% which is exponentially harder than the first 99%. Where are the L5 cars after 14 years of research? Can we even predict when they will arrive? That's how hard it is to estimate the last 1%. Don't gloss over it. It will surely come some day, but we have no idea how. How do you go from 0 to 1? The mere fact that we are simultaneously stupefied by AI advancements and still not yet there - this shows how hard it is to estimate progress. We are glossing over future problems and imagining we're almost there. Slowly we are learning new things about AI limitations - hallucinations, regurgitated content, sycophancy, context size limits, complex planning. I bet there are many more unknown unknowns ahead.
- Moneyyyyy 3y agoI have seen demos from azure got service and how easy it is to configure and use. It's production ready. Companies only need to start using and fine-tuning it. This should get rid of plenty of manual service request. And in my opinion the biggest leap is that it's now much easier than ever to fine-tune something like this. The last 1% does need much much less personal
- gerbilly 3y ago> Where are the L5 cars after 14 years of research? Uber and Lyft. Turning humans into automatons works better right now that trying to turn computers into humans.
- jnwatson 3y agoThat’s the difference between AI in cars and AI for business processes. L5 must be >99.99% right. Business processes have a much lower bar. Even moderate accuracy is sufficient to have a dramatic impact on all sorts of jobs whose only function is maintaining business processes, and it can be done gradually. Eventually, you’ll have 2 workers doing the job of 10.
- visarga 3y agoOh, let me tell you something. If you want to extract the fields from an invoice, there is no service in this world with more than 90-95% accuracy. OCR itself make errors on each page. So you might send 1 thousand dollars instead of 1 dollar. Or a million. In the end you need a human to double check it, so the automation will only increase productivity by 50%, not 50x. But it sure it pleasant to have the AI pre-fill the fields.
- raducu 3y ago> solve that last 1% which is exponentially harder than the first 99%. We just don't know that yet! But given how GPT-3 took everybody by surprise and how GPT-4 is so much better, I would not be surprised if we'll be shocked by GPT-5 or 6 can do. I'd be in fact surprised if nothing revolutionary comes out of something like GPT-5 + AutoGpt.
- martynr 3y ago“…and finally the work will be done completely by AI.” How will the AI be trained on novel patterns of interaction, for example new products or previously unknown problems? It seems to me that (as the article suggests) high level human support capabilities will be more valuable in this scenario rather than less - rather different from a complete AI solution