[kvh]

Author here, I’ve updated the post. The first draft of this app and blog post took me two hours, but I kept coming back with new ideas and tweaks throughout the week. By the end, I’d certainly spent more than two hours (more like 8?), so you’re right, I just failed to update the post. The main point stands — it’s surprisingly good for the amount of effort put in (although unclear how much more juice you could get out of gpt with more effort. Clear diminishing returns)

[_hcuq]

Couldn’t you have just got ChatGPT to write the post?

[mdcox]

no one wants to automate themselves out of a job, only other people.

[foobarbecue]

I totally automate my roles on projects all the time so I can move on to more interesting things. I guess you mean that no one wants to be fired, but I don't see how that can result from automating one's work.

Also, I HATE doing repetitive things. Some people seem to like it though. To each their own, I guess. Reminds me of https://youtu.be/wNVLOuQNgpo

[blowski]

We all believe our job is so challenging and has such special requirements that it _can't_ be automated. It requires someone with the kind of experience learned with wisdom over a long time. Blah blah blah.

[tremon]

Except for the ones of us who keep automating our jobs so that we can spend our effort on more challenging tasks.

[foobarbecue]

Not all of us.

[banku_brougham]

I am trying to automate my job away, but i'm not succeeding.

[Hellmitioksldf]

Thats actually my strategy;

This makes it so that 1. my quality overall becomes better and my bosses always liked that (doing things per hand are more error prone, not on time etc.)

2. I can go on holiday knowing my company doesn't need me desperate

3. I can spend the free time of actually innovating and bringing more value to the company/product

The problem is not automating yourself out of a job but not being able to leverage the new gained capacity.

[Hedepig]

Despite productivity generally improving over the last few decades, wage compensation has not.

I'm concerned this will continue as a trend with any productivity improvements from these models.

[Hellmitioksldf]

My way helped me succeed. I took my skills and my achievements (which i made in my R&D Time) to another company and got more money and than i did it again and got more money again.

[foobarbecue]

Right. Presented with efficiency gains, firms tend to increase profit, not wages. One way to change that is to give workers more bargaining power through market shifts or unionization.

[sumitkumar]

All the productivity gains are first transferred to the consumer(because of market dynamics) and then(by the market winners) to shareholders. The workers' wage market is not related to productivity but how the company is internally organized is linked to productivity.

[tw1984]

gold. very deep insight into the human nature.

;)

[devmor]

It doesn't seem like you've really replaced anyone with this. You spent 8 hours doing the work that you could have paid an SQL analyst to do in much less.

Unless you're saying that your time is worth less than you'd pay the analyst?

[antihipocrat]

I think the idea is that once built it would be a service that could parse a question, then automatically develop and run any query in response.

Sounds cool until it produces the wrong results.. then you'll need to hire an analyst to check every query just in case.

[skissane]

Put the requests in a queue. Have the bot generate the response. Then forward the response to a human analyst to double-check. A human can surely double-check a response much faster than they can produce one from scratch.

In many professions, it is common to have junior staff members do the grunt work, and then the more senior staff just review their work and either sign off on it, correct it, or send it back to be redone. You could use the same pattern here, replacing the junior staff with an AI, but keeping the senior one.

[kqr]

As if the analyst doesn't get the results wrong! For 1/50 of the price, maybe a few more errors are acceptable, even.

[desert_rue]

Which errors are you okay with?

[shinycode]

Yeah and whose responsibility is it when not catched in time and there this consequences / damage ?

[kqr]

The consequences would be accounted for up front and paid out of the savings from using GPT.

[kqr]

The ones for which I would refer the question to GPT. We are still in control of which questions go to GPT/the intern analyst (less critical ones, where a fraction erroneous are okay) and which go to the resident expert analyst.

[gampleman]

Also it could possibly remove the (dreaded) on call aspect of it.

I think a lot of business owners would be relatively happy with automated instant answers, or get carefully considered answers in a week.

[stkni]

This is a good point. If the users know the difference the costs and benefits between using GPT and not using it then it certainly has value if those users are also willing to accept that not every answer needs to be 100% accurate.

In my experience business people often have a 'nose' for the right number and will bluff it out if the numbers are wrong and they're challenged.

Blue sky things or stuff you're putting in the annual report should be left to hoomans IMHO.

[guru4consulting]

If there are extensive test cases with static dataset, this may help with query modifications (optimize query, fine-tune, etc.) Of course, this may not feasible for new queries as you can't have test script until the query is ready.

[jhugo]

They built a bot which can answer any number of questions, each of which would have needed some analyst time. Given that the analyst rotation was an entire day once every N weeks, and the bot took 1 day to make, this is going to pay for itself after 1 week.

This all assumes that the bot doesn't need tweaking for every answer — i.e. it gets at least some answers right without needing modifications to the bot — which appears to be the case based on the examples in the post.

[freejazz]

But, generally and unless there is a glaringly wrong result, only an analyst is going to know if the bot is right or not... what exactly does that gain you?

[kqr]

Maybe it's not a position where it is critical that all answers are 100 % accurate. Maybe getting it right every once in a while is enough to pay for the GPT compute time, but not really for analyst time.

[anentropic]

Seems like the issue would be you'd generally get results that 'look' right but would never know if they were actually right without going through and... analysing them

[kqr]

I'm saying there are applications where you don't have to know! As long as the fraction incorrect is less than 50 % and you have 2:1 odds on the consequences you don't have to know which 50 % are incorrect.

[moonchrome]

If you're OK with garbage data you don't need ChatGPT - you can probably make up plausible data on your own. Unless you're building some lorem ipsum stuff.

[kqr]

I might not be okay with only garbage data, but data that are correct 60 % of the time may be good enough for some use cases, when it can be had for 1/50 of the price.

[catothedev]

It gets you a really sophisticated 'auto-complete' feature

[freejazz]

Not really. I'd guess that most people can tell if auto-complete is providing the answer they "wanted".

[xwolfi]

Can we replace a webmaster with 26 chatgpt prompts?

[OOPMan]

I reckon we can replace a shill with less