[devbent]

Thousands of call center employees are being replaced right now. You may not even notice the difference, tier 1 support is heavily scripted already.

Outbound sales is being automated.

Lots of very hum-drum stuff. Ordering room service at a hotel for example.

Tons of data entry jobs are now gone.

LLMs are already better at humans from a cost perspective for many tasks.

[tkgally]

Translation is another. It's uncertain to what extent experienced professional translators are losing work—I work in the field, and I've heard anecdotal evidence on both sides—but it's clear that LLM-driven machine translation is already producing significant value for millions of people around the world. This might not be apparent to monolingual people in English-speaking countries, but it's a major factor driving the rapid adoption of LLMs here in Japan.

If OpenAI's new voice mode turns out to be as versatile and context-aware as promised, it should be equally valuable for interactive spoken interpretation.

[lmm]

There's definitely some value in undercutting minimum-wage outsourced call centres. But enough to justify these valuations? This is stuff that was already being partially automated back in the '80s; I can see the argument that OpenAI is the next Autonomy, but when you're this heavily leveraged an incremental improvement is a failure.

[devbent]

OpenAI is the platform everyone else is building on top of.

Think Microsoft in the late 80s through the 90s.

If you are charging for the platform, you can let thousands of other businesses try the risky hard to scale stuff and you'll get a cut of everything no matter who wins.

[lmm]

Microsoft wasn't taking any risks there though, they were a profitable business selling positive margin projects the whole time - that's more where NVidia is than where OpenAI is.

[Ekaros]

Do we need AI for all this?

Or could we have instead done some simple web service that would do most things... The sad reality is that companies don't want easy and efficient customer service... As that would allow customers to cancel their continued payments...

[devbent]

Credit card companies and large banks each have call centers with multiple tens of thousands of employees.

> The sad reality is that companies don't want easy and efficient customer service... As that would allow customers to cancel their continued payments...

This is not true at all. The true reason is that a well trained call center employee can easily cost a company $20 per customer issue resolved (total cost inclusive of training, office space, equipment, etc).

For any low margin business (e.g. hardware under $500 USD!) that basically destroys the entire profit from that customer.

Customer service is expensive.

[consteval]

> Thousands of call center employees

Uh... you realize they were already algorithms, right? Meaning, they have a flow chart they follow. They don't make any decisions, they take input and respond to output.

The only reason they're not computer programs is because they NEED to be human. So the human on the other end trusts them. Even though everyone understands they have no free will or reasoning abilities (or if they use them they get canned).

AI doesn't fit that use case. Number 1 is because AI IS NOT algorithmic. So it's a liability to use. Number 2 is it's not human. Again, if you're going the no human route there's infinite cheaper, more reliable, faster, and overall better in every way programs you can use.