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I've now encountered what are obviously ChatGPT-powered chatting tools on multiple product websites. Each time I asked the tool a question, it responded with c

I've now encountered what are obviously ChatGPT-powered chatting tools on multiple product websites. Each time I asked the tool a question, it responded with completely unrelated garbage, in one case even spitting out fake tracking info for an order I never made. This looks SO BAD, I'm truly baffled that any company has signed on to use such a service.

michaelcampbell 2y ago
Ask Air Canada how they feel about them.
malfist 2y ago
I recently needed to reset a rachio device because it was tied to a previous owner and you can't do that yourself. Rachio has replaced their customer service with an LLM that can only link you help pages. 100% useless. If I hadn't been able to find their real phone number from Google I wouldn't have been able to use their device. Really made me question buying anything from them
TeMPOraL 2y ago
I wonder how could they possibly fuck that up so bad. ChatGPT is a dream tool that can easily parse natural language into a fixed number of structured queries - which is the primary function of all the ordinary chatbots, and the one they suck at. Those companies got handled a magic, drop-in solution to the technical difficulties of the bot flow, and somehow managed to use it to make the problem worse. Takes some really special skills.
- mike_hearn 2y ago
  It's a new tool. Give devs time. Bear in mind that accurate tool use is still a very new capability, one that many devs don't realize exists yet, and one that cheap models like GPT-3 have historically struggled with. With time best practices and common patterns will get established.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    I suppose maybe the businesses have different priorities than the users? Wouldn't be the first time. As a user, most of my interactions with pre-ChatGPT breed of chatbots (including "voice bots" on the phone) involved the robot having the capacity to help me at least partially, but failing to understand my request. Fixing that doesn't even require accurate tool use - it requires using LLM on input to parse it in place of whatever they're currently using, instead of directly as a chatbot; something even pre-GPT-3.5 completion models were somewhat good at. I'm all for giving people time with new technologies, but here, 1) somehow they managed to take what should be an out-of-the-box improvement and use it to make things worse, and 2) myself and people like me are on the receiving end of the problem. At scale, there's lots of extra real frustration being created, and lots of additional people-years wasted, through companies jumping on such tools to potentially save a buck by automating away a few jobs. Hell, it probably shows as healthy profit on the books, as it just further disempowers customers, who learn to take a beating instead of fighting, because what's the point anymore...
    - mike_hearn 2y ago
      Yeah, I hear you. I think you see using LLMs for parsing only as intuitive and obvious, but I bet most devs don't think of doing it that way, at least not at first. After all, the thing is right there, willing to talk to you, and the most obvious way to use them is to take the words generated and send them to the customer. Using LLMS to generate tool invocations that then generate templated words is a much more indirect use, and frankly up until recently is not always practical due to the amount of context window that all the tool descriptions and possible actions can take up (which must fit not only the 'training' for the model but also the customer's conversation so far). As tool use becomes more widespread and context window sizes go up, I bet we'll start to see blog posts where devs talk about how they made your approach work well, and then others will see it makes sense and start to copy it.

michaelcampbell 2y ago

Ask Air Canada how they feel about them.

malfist 2y ago

I recently needed to reset a rachio device because it was tied to a previous owner and you can't do that yourself. Rachio has replaced their customer service with an LLM that can only link you help pages. 100% useless. If I hadn't been able to find their real phone number from Google I wouldn't have been able to use their device. Really made me question buying anything from them

TeMPOraL 2y ago

I wonder how could they possibly fuck that up so bad. ChatGPT is a dream tool that can easily parse natural language into a fixed number of structured queries - which is the primary function of all the ordinary chatbots, and the one they suck at. Those companies got handled a magic, drop-in solution to the technical difficulties of the bot flow, and somehow managed to use it to make the problem worse. Takes some really special skills.

mike_hearn 2y ago
It's a new tool. Give devs time. Bear in mind that accurate tool use is still a very new capability, one that many devs don't realize exists yet, and one that cheap models like GPT-3 have historically struggled with. With time best practices and common patterns will get established.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  I suppose maybe the businesses have different priorities than the users? Wouldn't be the first time. As a user, most of my interactions with pre-ChatGPT breed of chatbots (including "voice bots" on the phone) involved the robot having the capacity to help me at least partially, but failing to understand my request. Fixing that doesn't even require accurate tool use - it requires using LLM on input to parse it in place of whatever they're currently using, instead of directly as a chatbot; something even pre-GPT-3.5 completion models were somewhat good at. I'm all for giving people time with new technologies, but here, 1) somehow they managed to take what should be an out-of-the-box improvement and use it to make things worse, and 2) myself and people like me are on the receiving end of the problem. At scale, there's lots of extra real frustration being created, and lots of additional people-years wasted, through companies jumping on such tools to potentially save a buck by automating away a few jobs. Hell, it probably shows as healthy profit on the books, as it just further disempowers customers, who learn to take a beating instead of fighting, because what's the point anymore...
  - mike_hearn 2y ago
    Yeah, I hear you. I think you see using LLMs for parsing only as intuitive and obvious, but I bet most devs don't think of doing it that way, at least not at first. After all, the thing is right there, willing to talk to you, and the most obvious way to use them is to take the words generated and send them to the customer. Using LLMS to generate tool invocations that then generate templated words is a much more indirect use, and frankly up until recently is not always practical due to the amount of context window that all the tool descriptions and possible actions can take up (which must fit not only the 'training' for the model but also the customer's conversation so far). As tool use becomes more widespread and context window sizes go up, I bet we'll start to see blog posts where devs talk about how they made your approach work well, and then others will see it makes sense and start to copy it.