I’m not an AI techie and I’m not well educated on LLMs/AI in general. The issue I’m having is the dichotomy between how people talk about it. I’ve heard completely opposite ends of the spectrum. From AI is quickly becoming advanced enough to threaten human society, all the way to its a glorified dictionary/search engine that can’t really do much of anything. I know Lemmy has a steep anti-AI slant. But, can someone talk about this in a way I can wrap my head around why the divide seems so big?
I guess the difference is that it I have actually seen it do legitimate work now. We have implemented outbound SDR and inbound tech support agents that do the right things. Our SDRs generate new leads for our (currently all-human) sales team to go after. They are boosting the numbers of closed deals. Our inbound tech support agents are closing a significant fraction of tickets. My last metrics call was yesterday, it was 12% of inbound tech support chats that never got escalated to a human. These are both first-draft tools, they’ll improve. They cost pennies per session to run. And client NPS scores show that they’re happy with the results. I don’t think we’ll see either of these tasks become 100% automated, but at even 25% or 50% that’s a lot of formerly-human work not being done by humans anymore. And we’re deploying more agents to handle more of the sales pipeline, development pipeline, HR and accounting. I don’t work for a huge company, there are a few hundred people total. This isn’t something that’s coming, it’s here already.