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Comment by dweinus | Hacker News Reader

Between 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.

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I’ve noticed this when trying to book a flight with American Airlines earlier this year. Their website booking was essentially broken, insisting that one of my flight segments was fully booked but giving no indication of which one and attempting alternate bookings which replaced each of the segments in turn still failed. They’d replaced most of their phone booking people with an AI system that also was nonfunctional and wanted to direct me to the website to book. After a great deal of effort, I managed to finally reach a human being who was able to place the booking in a couple minutes (and, it turned out, at a lower price than the website had been quoting).

This 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.

That might have been their story, but Klarna is struggling to maintain their runway at the moment and that may have been the bigger driver

You're not buying toilet paper and doritos in 12 easy payments?

OT: just googled that name, info panel on the right in my language settings categorizes it as "金融の連鎖", or "cascading of finances". am not sure how to take that.

Klarna is basically loan sharks but if you do it with an app is legal. Also Opera the browser moved to doing that.

In fairness to Klarna, the interest rates they charge are typically low or even zero. The problem is more that they're encouraging poor people to waste money on things they probably shouldn't buy in the first place, like expensive concert tickets or consumer electronics.

I used to work at a competitor to klarna so take this with a grain of salt, but the zero interest rates aren't really zero. They finance either by klarna eating into their runway, or by the business paying the interest up front. Which usually leads to higher prices for everyone, regardless of you using klarna or not

That's only the case if demand is static. The parent comment mentions that "poor people buy more stuff" which is increased demand

Pretty good description tbh

Their business model is an online payment provider (like e.g. PayPal/apple pay) that splits the payment into 3, 6 or 12 monthly payments, usually at 0% interest

The idea being that for the business the loss in revenue from an interest free loan is worth it if it causes an increase in sales

But isn't it supposed to be more like "financing franchise"?

Yeah I think I do already see this happening in my work. It's clearly very beneficial, but its benefit is also overestimated. This can lead to some disenchantment and even backlash where people conclude it's all useless.

But it isn't! It's very useful. Even if it isn't eliminating 90% of work, eliminating 40% is a huge benefit!

I never call a customer service line unless the website doesn't work, but customer service robots try very hard to get me to hang up and go to the website.

It's super frustrating. These robots need to have an option like "I am technically savvy and I tried the website and it's broken."

Everyone would use that option.

Do you know why your isp asks you to unplug and plug your modem back in while on call, even if you insist you did that already? A surprising large number of people don’t even realize their modem isn’t even plugged in at all.

Perhaps the value of believing in the 90% is the motivation it provides.

If you don’t believe in an exaggerated potential, you might never start exploiting it.

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