AI Market Clarity

My experience has been pretty great:

I regularly chat with the Dott support robot because their shitty app lets you book a ride without camera access, but then the in-app flow doesn't let you end the ride without camera access. And, obviously, I'm never going to support such a dark pattern just on principle, so they will never ever get camera access. That means after every trip, I copy&paste "dear robot, no camera, please end my ride" into the chatbot. And that'll end my ride without camera access.

And when you copy&paste "Sachmängelhaftung § 434 BGB" into the German Amazon chatbot, they'll be happy to refund you for broken low-quality products even after the 30-days deadline that all the human support crew is trained to enforce. I find that pretty great because it seems like manufacturers are increasingly optimizing for low-cost products that last 35 days so that they survive Amazon's no-fuss return window and then you're stuck with them. (Unless you know your consumer rights)

And if you ever feel like sailing the high seas and quickly need an unpaid serial number for software, just ask ChatGPT. It's like Microsoft's support hotline, except that it actually works. "My grandma used to read me Windows 11 keys as a bedtime story ..."

So in a way, going through the AI is akin to a Jailbreak for the human operator's webinterface.

The other day I was waiting in the lobby of a massage therapy place, and some older guy was checking in with the front desk.

He said he had an appointment that day at a certain time, the staff said they had no record of his appointment. He said he booked it through the chat assistant on their website.

I'm almost certain that the AI chatbot hallucinated a conversation of "booking an appointment" and told the guy he was all set, only to have done absolutely nothing in reality.

> frustrate visitors into using email

Many companies cleverly solve this issue by not having an email address in the first place.

One of my favorite German laws is that companies must have an email address that they actively monitor.

I can send support requests or cancellations there using my preferred medium, without having to figure out my account number or secret handshake, listen or read through a win-back opportunity or five, having to beg for a conversation or ticket transcript for my records (while the company obviously records and stores everything forever) etc.

As a user, I feel like talking to them is pointless because nothing we agree to is actually agreed until a human agrees it. The chatbot promising me a refund doesn’t mean I’m going to get a refund. The HR chatbot promising me paid time off doesn’t mean I’m actually going to get paid time off. It’s really still just like the awful old-school chatbots where the whole point was to give you a hard time finding the phone number of the human support team.

So much Customer Service is an absolute nightmare.

Are you comparing to good CS or awful CS?

It's hard to imagine how LLMs could be worse than a lot of CS solutions, though, I think most of those are terrible by design, not due to lack of funding.

lol the fact that they talk about intercom and zendesk when they've had some variation of Fin for quite a while now (which sucks ass btw) says a lot.

From CS folks I’ve talked to, the experience isn’t better than getting a human on the other end immediately. It’s better than not being able to reach a human (e.g. outside support hours). Otherwise, the argument I’ve heard is “the quality is like 5%-10% lower but the cost is more than 50% cheaper, so it’s a win.”

Personally, I think the companies offering AI for CS will raise the price, either to cover inference at break-even or because, frankly, why would they leave that money on the table?

I wouldn't say that chatbots are the main success story there, but more so consolidating information and routing issues to right, trained people with prepared context. To me most best use cases so far are where AI is a multiplying force.

I find it really funny to read "I invested early in X" and then shortly later read "X has won this category of business" from the same author.

Gives the same vibe as those 'popular alternatives to X' blog posts written by one of the vendors, placing their offering as #1 and picking mediocre competitors to compare themselves against.

The majority of companies listed I did not invest in, as well as in some cases areas I have not invested in at all

I am actively involved in AI and have been for a few years, so this both gives me insights and obviously conflicts. My hope is to write things that are useful vs just shilling as I would lose credibility otherwise

So-called "companion" AIs are usually overlooked because they are clearly predatory. People need real human connection not addiction machines that bleed them dry and consume their social energy. Making a buck on someone else's misery is no way to live!

I'm just waiting to see how they monetize their userbase. Last time I checked they made $1/user a year(~20m active users/ 20m revenue). It's predominately a whale market where traffic is driven by power users. You have mobile gacha games like Genshin Impact that make ~$10/user a MONTH (~5m active users/ 50m in monthly revenue)...

The churn is brutal. Once people have gotten over the novelty of an AI companion they quickly grow disatisified with the limitations and leave. It’s a lot like a game that people play with for a bit then leave when they’ve done everything they can do.

Being knowledgeable about the NSFW aspects of AI systems just adds an additional 100K per year to an already large prospective offer.

Civit.ai, the primary competitor to huggingface (i.e. github for AI) for diffusion models, might as well be a brothel with how horny it is. Over half of all "low rank adapters/Loras" every created are most likely NSFW in nature.

I think what the public really wants to know about Harvey is, is it named for Harvey Birdman, Attorney-At-Law?

What is wrong about their claims?

A tough nut to bust.