Comment by mistersquid | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mistersquid | Hacker News Reader

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> You know what is even cheaper, more scalable, more efficient, and more user-friendly than a chatbot for those use cases?

> A run of the mill form on a web page. Oh, and it's also more reliable.

Web-accessible forms are great for asynchronous communication and queries but are not as effective in situations where the reporter doesn't have a firm grasp on the problem domain.

For example, a user may know printing does not work but may be unable to determine if the issue is caused by networking, drivers, firmware, printing hardware, etc.

A decision tree built from the combinations of even a few models of printer and their supported computers could be massive.

In such cases, hiring people might be more effective, efficient, and scalable than creating and maintaining a web form.

> but are not as effective in situations where the reporter doesn't have a firm grasp on the problem domain

Hum... Your point is that LLMs are more effective?

Because, of course people are, but that's not the point. Oh, and if you do create that decision tree, do you know how you communicate it better than with a chatbot? You do that by writing it down, as static text, with text-anchors on each step.

> Because, of course people are, but that's not the point.

Are they?

If the LLMs could talk to grandma for 40 minutes until it figures out what her problem actually is as opposed to what she thinks it is and then transfer her over to a person with the correct context to resolve it, I think that's probably better than most humans in a customer service role. Chatting to grandma being random for an extended amount of time is not something that very many customer service people can put up with day in and day out.

The problem is that companies will use the LLMs to eliminate customer service roles rather than make them better.

> If the LLMs could talk to grandma for 40 minutes until it figures out what her problem actually is as opposed to what she thinks it is

Ok, but it can't. If we had superhuman AGI, it would beat people in customer service, yes.

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