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That's certainly the pattern I've noticed in the replies to me here. People who work with data think that LLMs are great and the wave of the future. They automate so much, they increase productivity, and so on. Laptop people, so to speak, think the tech is valuable. People who work with other people or with the world, though, still don't see the use. LLMs do nothing to help in roles that are primarily about interacting with other human beings, or which are primarily about interacting with physical stuff.
I wonder if there's a level of myopia here, where the data people assume that their kind of work is the whole world. Then again, to be fair, you could make the case that I, with my people-centred job, think that people work is the whole world, so we are both blind to a whole section of society and economy. On the inside view, I'd defend myself by saying that statistically, people and physical stuff do in fact make up almost all the economy, but on the outside view, should I trust myself?
As a laptop person, I’m confident LLMs are useful, but under no illusion they’re useful for everyone and everything. Not even for myself, because I don’t in fact just sit and work on my laptop all day.
Likewise, even very non-technical people can benefit from LLMs, for example by placing an LLM between themselves and the modern bureaucracy (forms, customer service complaints, legal issues, medical diagnoses etc.).
Do you want to drive my blood pressure up? Because the chatbots replacing customer service agents are totally useless for dealing with customer service complaints, and most websites make it extremely difficult to find a way of contacting them to complain or cancel contracts.
Maybe an LLM can do all that work but in the end it'll still be me on the phone trying to find a human to solve the problem for me.
I'm talking about you sending an LLM to talk to the LLM customer service, or work through the convoluted website.
Even worse layers of obfuscation.
Right now my internet is down and after logging the complaint, it will take seven days for them to send out an engineer to look at the box on the telephone pole outside my house. No LLM is going to make that experience easier for me.
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