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Dwarkesh had a good interview with Zuck the other week. And in it, Zuck had an interesting example (that I'm going to butcher): FB has long wanted to have a ca
by Balgair 1y ago
Dwarkesh had a good interview with Zuck the other week. And in it, Zuck had an interesting example (that I'm going to butcher):
FB has long wanted to have a call center for its ~3.5B users. But that call center would automatically be the largest in history and cost ~15B/yr to run. Something that is cost ineffective in the extreme. But, with FB's internal AIs, they're starting to think that a call center may be feasible. Most of the calls are going to be 'I forgot my password' and 'it's broken' anyways. So having a robot guide people along the FAQs in the 50+ languages is perfectly fine for ~90% (Zuck's number here) of the calls. Then, with the harder calls, you can actually route it to a human.
So, to me, this is a great example of how the interaction of new tech and labor is a fractal not a hierarchy. In that, with each new tech that your specific labor sector finds, you get this fractalization of the labor in the end. Zuck would have never thought of a call center, denying the labor of many people. But this new tech allows for a call center that looks a lot like the old one, just with only the hard problems. It's smaller, yes, but it looks the same and yet is slightly different (hence a fractal).
Look, I'm not going to argue that tech is disruptive. But what I am arguing is that tech makes new jobs (most of the time), it's just that these new jobs tend to be dealing with much harder problems. Like, we''re pushing the boundaries here, and that boundary gets more fractal-y, and it's a more niche and harder working environment for your brain. The issue, of course, is that, like a grad student, you have to trust in the person working at the boundary is actually doing work and not just blowing smoke. That issue, the one of trust, I think is the key issue to 'solve'. Cal Newport talks a lot about this now and how these knowledge worker tasks really don't do much for a long time, and then they have these spats of genius. It's a tough one, and not an intellectual enterprise, but an emotional one.
- wslh 1y agoSorry for the acidity, just training my patience while waiting for the mythical FB/AI call center.
- Maxion 1y agoAs someone who has been involved with customer support (on the in-house tech side) the very vast majority of contacts to a CS team will be very inane or extremely inane. If you can automate away the lowest tier of support with LLMs you'll improve response times for not just the simple questions but also for the hard ones.
- wslh 1y agoI agree with that common pattern but even without [current] AI there were ways to automate/improve the lowest tier: very often I don't find my basic questions in the typical corporation's FAQ.
- zelphirkalt 1y agoI usually assume, that it is, because they do not want to answer those basic questions or want to hide the answers. For example some shop. No answer found in the FAQ how refunds work. Instant sus.
- pclmulqdq 1y agoI have had the problem with customer support that about 90% of the calls/chats I have placed should have been automated (on their side), and the remaining 10% needed escalation beyond the "customer service" escalation ladder. In America, sadly, that means one of two things: (1) you call a friend who works there or (2) you have your lawyer send a demand letter requesting something rather inane.
- Balgair 1y agoYeah, I was a little credulous about what Zuck said there too. Like, if AI is so good, then it'll just eat away at those jobs and get asymptotically close to 100% of the calls. If it's not that good, then you've got to loop in the product people and figure out why everyone is having a hard time with whatever it is. Generally, I'd say that calls are just another feedback channel for the product. One that FB has thus far been fine without consulting, so I can't imagine its contribution can be all that high. (Zuck also goes on to talk about the experiments they run on people with FB/Insta/WA, and woah, it is crazy unethical stuff he casually throws out there to Dwarkesh) Still, to the point here: I'm still seeing Ai mostly as a tool/tech, not something that takes on an agency of it's own. We, the humans, are still the thing that says 'go/do/start', the prime movers (to borrow a long held and false bit of ancient physics). The AIs aren't initiating things, and it seems to a large extent, we're not going to want them to do so. Not out of a sense of doom or lack-of-greed, but simply as we're more interested in working at the edge of the fractal.
- zelphirkalt 1y agoNot to discredit anything you wrote, but: "I'm still seeing Ai mostly as a tool/tech, not something that takes on an agency of it's own." I find that to be a highly ironic thing. It basically says AI is not AI. Which we all know it is not yet, but then we can simply say it: The current crop of "AI" is not actually AI. It is not intelligence. It is a kind of huge encoded, non-transparent dictionary.
- firefoxd 1y agoI worked in automated customer support, and I agree with you. By default, we automated 40% of all requests. It becomes harder after that, but not because the problems the next 40% face are any different, but because they are unnecessarily complex. A customer who wants to track the status of their order will tell you a story about how their niece is visiting from Vermont and they wanted to surprise her for her 16th birthday. It's hard because her parents don't get along as they used to after the divorce, but they are hoping that this will at the very least put a smile on her face. The AI will classify the message as order tracking correctly, and provide all the tracking info and timeline. But because of the quick response, the customer will write back to say they'd rather talk to a human and ask for a phone number they can call. The remaining 20% can't be resolved by neither human nor robot.
- dweinus 1y agoBetween 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.
- svelle 1y agoThis 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.
- palmotea 1y ago> Most of the calls are going to be 'I forgot my password' and 'it's broken' anyways. So having a robot guide people along the FAQs in the 50+ languages is perfectly fine for ~90% (Zuck's number here) of the calls. No it isn't. Attempts to do this are why I mash 0 repeatedly and chant "talk to an agent" after being in a phone tree for longer than a minute.
- Matthyze 1y agoAnd you don't think that this won't improve with better bots?
- palmotea 1y ago> And you don't think that this won't improve with better bots? Actually, now that I think about it, yeah. The whole purpose of the bots is to deflect you from talking to a human. For instance: Amazon's chatbot. It's gotten "better": now when I need assistance, it tries three times to deflect me from a person after it's already agreed to connect me to one. Anything they'll allow the bot to do can probably can be done better by a customer facing webpage.
- spongebobstoes 1y agoMaybe for you, but not for most people. Most people have problems that are answered online, but knowledge sites are hard to navigate, and they can't solve their own problems. A high quality bot to guide people through their poorly worded questions will be hugely helpful for a lot of people. AI is quickly getting to the point that a very high quality experience is possible. The premise is also that the bots are what enable the people to exist. The status quo is no interactive customer service at all.
- safety1st 1y agoThis sounds to me like something that's better solved by RAG than by an AI manned call center. Let's use Zuck's example, the lost password. Surely that's better solved with a form where you type things, such as your email address. If the problem is navigation, all we need to do is hook up a generative chat bot to the search function of the already existing knowledge site. Then you can ask it how to reset your password, and it'll send you to the form and write up instructions. The equivalent over a phone call sounds worse than this to me. I think Zuck is wrong that 90% of the problems people would call in for can easily be solved by an AI. I was stuck in a limbo with Instagram for about 18 months, where I was banned for no clear reason, there was no obvious way to contact them about it, and once I did find a way, we proceeded with a weird dance where I provided ID verification, they unbanned me, and then they rebanned me, and this happened a total of 4 times before the unban process actually worked. I don't see any AI agent solving this; the cause was obviously process and/or technical problems at Meta. This is the only thing I ever wanted to call Meta for. And there is another big class of issue that people want to call any consumer-facing business for, which AI can't solve: loneliness. The person is retired and lives alone and just wants to talk to someone for 20 minutes, and uses a minor customer service request as a justification. This happens all the time. Actually an AI can address this problem, but it's probably not the same agent we would build for solving customer requests, and I say address rather than solve as AI will not solve society's loneliness epidemic.
- SoftTalker 1y agoZuck is just bullshitting here, like most of what he says. There is zero chance he wants to pay even a single person to sit and take calls from users. He would eliminate every employee at Facebook it it were technically possible to automate what they do.
- ivape 1y agoHe can definitely fire most people at Facebook. He just doesn't because it would be like not providing a simple defense against a pawn move on a Chess board. No point in not matching the opposition's move if you can afford it. They hire, we hire, they fire, we fire.
- BobbyTables2 1y agoSounds like his own job could be automated…
- cylemons 1y agoThe company is his property, ofc he won't fire himself
- zelphirkalt 1y agoFB would be run into the ground on day one, if he fired most people (>50%) at FB.
- falcor84 1y agoWhy? Other than on-call roles like Production Engineers, whose absence there would make the company fail within a day?
- zelphirkalt 1y agoBecause things would happen on the platform, that would be bad PR. Availability might even go down. Who knows what kind of automatized things need to be kept in check daily.
- PunchTornado 1y agoWeird to find out that some people still believe a thing that guy says.
- gessha 1y agoWhere’s my free internet to migrants, Zuck?
- Garlef 1y agoI like the analogy of the fractal boundaries. But there's also consolidation happening: Not every branch that is initially explored is still meaningful a few years later. (At least that's what I got from reading old mathematical texts: People really delved deeply into some topics that are nowadays just subsumed by more convenient - or maybe trendy - machinery)
- paxys 1y agoZuck also said that AI is going to start replacing senior software engineers at Meta in 2025. His job isn’t to state objective facts but hype up his company’s products and share price.
- sanderjd 1y agoHonestly I hope this is true. I recognize this is a risky thing to say, for my own employment prospects as a software engineer. But if companies like Facebook could run their operations with fewer engineers, and those people could instead start or join a larger diversity of smaller businesses, that would be a positive development. I do think we're going to see less employment for "coding" but I remain optimistic that we're going to see more employment for "creating useful software".
- begueradj 1y agoLet's watch your mood when AI answers your call.