In most cases, LLMs will not replace humans or reduce labor costs as companies hope. They will •increase• labor costs, in the form of tedious clean-up and rebuilding customer trust.
After a brief sugar high in which LLMs rapidly and easily create messes that look like successes, a whole lot of orgs are going to find themselves climbing out of deep holes of their own digging.
Example from @Joshsharp:
https://aus.social/@Joshsharp/112646263257692603
Those who’ve worked in software will immediate recognize the phenomenon of “messes that look like successes.”
One of my old Paulisms is that the real purpose of a whole lot of software processes is to make large-scale failure look like a string of small successes.
The crisp “even an executive can understand it” version of the OP is:
(“Why?” “Because it’s labor-intensive to clean up its messes.”)
I said “the purpose of a whole lot of software processes is to make large-scale failure look like a string of small successes.”
Huh? What does that look like??
It looks like this:
or
or
or
or
or
(Yes, I consider that last one a failure too.)
My most hilarious example of “large-scale failure looks like a string of successes:“
Years ago, I worked on a project for retailer Megacorp Y to sell their house-branded cables on Megacorp Z’s online sales platform. It was an integration project: wire up inventory, wire up payments. The tech side was sloppy (weird, ancient APIs, Z’s official API involved •FTP• transfers (yes, really)), but ultimately quite tractable.
The problem? Internal conflict between ambitious humans.
@inthehands hahahah! I was once brought in as a technical consultant by a primarily sales org that, wanting a product in a new sector to sell, had gone out and bought the two biggest competitors in the space and told them to merge to make a really good product. And they didn't understand why these two teams that had been built around beating each other and developing contradicting worldviews to differentiate their products couldn't just merge their products...
@kitten_tech
As the Minnesotans say, uff da