[alaskamiller]

The last chatbot wave (when FB opened up Messenger API and when Microsoft slung SKYPE as a plausible bot platform and when Slack rebranded their app store) fizzled out after 18 months.

All to figure out the singular most important thing: chat interfaces are the worst.

[muspimerol]

I agree that chat interfaces are not great, but we shouldn't reduce LLMs to implementations in chat interfaces. For example, the "autocompletion" I get with copilot is a very useful tool that I use daily, and I think that sort of UX could be built into plenty of other interfaces. Most applications where you input some form of text could benefit from LLM AI.

[phillipcarter]

Yes, this exactly. That's why we didn't go with chat for our UX here, and for future product areas we likely won't either. We already have good UX for our kind of product and haven't seen much feedback or convinced via some other means that adding chat would help more than it would hurt.

[JieJie]

One of the weirdest parts of using Bing Chat is that it has tab-to-autocomplete function that is almost always wrong about what I want to say. I wish there was an LLM that actually was an "autocorrect on steroids" because that's honestly one of my most-anticipated features of this technology.

Having an LLM spell-checker that would autocorrect my spelling as I typed, based on the context of what I was typing? That would be magnificent.

[sheepscreek]

My experience with GitHub Copilot has been the exact opposite. Often, it’s magical - as if it can read my mind!

It does have much more context to work with (open tabs, other files) vs. a single/short chat session.

[talim]

Yeah, Copilot serves this purpose wonderfully—I've actually started writing documentation straight in VSCode and even occasionally things like certain emails, Jira tickets, or just general notes pertaining to anything vaguely technical, solely because Copilot is quite good at acting as a technical writing assistant.

Since it's just OpenAI's text completion model with a code finetune and without the chat/assistant RLHF, it works much better as an "advanced autocomplete" than ChatGPT or even OpenAI's Turbo model via their API. I can be much more surgical with how I use it (often accepting just a few words at a time), and it's good at following my usual tone.

[znpy]

> chat interfaces are the worst

Can’t agree more. As an user, a chatbot makes me think the company has put some kind of dumb parrot in front of me in order to avoid giving actual support.

[candiodari]

This makes me think someone could "pull a Google" with LLMs though. I mean we all know the original pitch for Google, right?

There were search engines. Plenty. And indexes. And ... That wasn't it.

Every site had search. That also wasn't it.

The problem was that these things were incredibly low quality versions. Exactly what you're complaining about now with chatbot interfaces. In fact that these were such low quality is what made Google such an incredible opportunity: centralization came almost built in. They never needed to fight books.com: their search sucked. Even now finding a book using Google's interface works better than all search on the internet, except perhaps Amazon. And Amazon's "shittifying" it's search engine too now ...

Google was also never "the best". It was simply consistent quality that worked everywhere. And because all other search engines were pretty far along in their enshittification cycle, with MBA's unwilling to go back, nobody even made a serious attempt at fighting them. Except, perhaps, and very late to the party, Microsoft.

Google was better, but not incredibly better (and it's been going downhill for like 5 years now). It makes me think that if you could make something that would advise 10% of the world population on how to boil eggs, that would be incredible.

[muglug]

Chatbots can be really useful.

At my org we use a chatbot for pull requests — you get pinged by the bot when the PR is ready to merge, with a button in the chat interface that merges the PR — no need to open GitHub and locate the big green button yourself.

That won’t 10x your productivity or whatever, but it does make it slightly more pleasant.

[cjcenizal]

That does sound cool, but I’m not sure that’s what most folks mean by “chatbot”. My understanding was that a chatbot is an automated chat program that will generate responses to your messages, simulating a live human.