I think the above post has a fair point. Demand for chatbot customer service in various forms is surely "insanely high" - but demand from whom? Because I don't recall any end-user ever asking for it.
No, instead it'll be the new calculator that you can use to lazy-draft an email on your 1.5 hour Ryanair economy flight to the South. Both unthinkable luxuries just decades ago, but neither of which have transformed humanity profoundly.
This is just the same argument. If you believe demand for AI is low then you should be able to verify that with market data.
Currently market data is showing a very high demand for AI.
These arguments come down to "thumbs down to AI". If people just said that it would at least be an honest argument. But pretending that consumers don't want LLMs when they're some of the most popular apps in the history of mankind is not a defensible position
I‘m not sure this works in reverse. If demand is indeed high, you could show that with market data. But if you have marked data e.g. showing high valuation of AI companies, or x many requests over some period, that doesn’t mean necessarily that demand is high. In other words, marked data is necessary but not sufficient to prove your claim.
Reasons for market data seemingly showing high demand without there actually being one include: Market manipulation (including marketing campaigns), artificial or inflated demand, forced usage, hype, etc. As an example NFTs, Bitcoin, and supersonic jet travel all had “an insane market data” which seemed at the time to show that there was a huge demand for these things.
My prediction is that we are in the early Concord era of supersonic jet travel and Boeing is racing to catch up to the promise of this technology. Except that in an unregulated market such as the current tech market, we have forgone all the safety and security measures and the Concord has made its first passenger flight in 1969 (as opposed to 1976), with tons of fan fare and all flights fully booked months in advance.
Note that in the 1960 it was market forecasts had the demand for Concord to build 350 airplanes by 1980, and at the time the first prototypes were flying they had 74 options. Only 20 were every built for passenger flight.
As an end user I have never asked for a chatbot. And if I'm calling support, I have a weird issue I probably need human being to resolve.
But! We here are not typical callers necessarily. How many IT calls for general population can be served efficiently (for both parties) with a quality chatbot?
And lest we think I'm being elitist - let's take an area I am not proficient in - such as HR, where I am "general population".
Our internal corporate chatbot has turned from "atrocious insult to man and God's" 7 years ago, to "far more efficiently than friendly but underpaid and inexperienced human being 3 countries away answering my incessant questions of what holidays do I have again, how many sick days do I have and how do I enter them, how do I process retirement, how do I enter my expenses, what's the difference between short and long term disability" etc etc. And it has a button for "start a complex hr case / engage a human being" for edge cases,so internally it works very well.
This is a narrow anecdata about notion of service support chatbot, don't infere (hah) any further claims about morality, economy or future of LLMs.
No, instead it'll be the new calculator that you can use to lazy-draft an email on your 1.5 hour Ryanair economy flight to the South. Both unthinkable luxuries just decades ago, but neither of which have transformed humanity profoundly.