[bob1029]

Text-to-SQL is effectively pissing in the wind when we start looking at business value. The trouble is that it works just enough to be dangerous. It is a very interesting idea and can easily consume the resources of a technical team ~indefinitely. One obvious sign we are chasing shiny here is the German-to-SQL example. This is fun, but no one would actually pay for it.

I would classify Text-to-SQL as a Schedule I rabbit hole. It has some serious effects, but it otherwise has no acceptable level of value-add in most reasonable enterprises.

[nonethewiser]

>The trouble is that it works just enough to be dangerous.

This is a major theme with LLMs. When they first came out you'd see it randomly returning garbage in the middle of an otherwise good output maybe 30% of the time. You knew you had to go through it with a fine tooth comb.

Now it's more like 3%. And you just gloss over it.

I think you are right about Text-to-SQL being a trap. In this case the deficiencies are unaccaptable.

But elsewhere? I think we are going to see the "customer service effect" applied all over the place. I am referring to the downward trend of customer service. Where quality was eschewed for scale. We went from highly competent agents providing individual feedback to hard to reach agents with no agency. It scales, but the bar has been lowered significantly. You get less customer service.

I think AI begs for the same tradeoff. Settle for less because it makes some things easier. Which of course makes other things much more complex or even undermines the entire premise.

[zurfer]

Reliability is the important dimension to focus on, but what is your baseline? I've worked in data and me and my colleagues regularly had to confront bugs (on many levels) that were communicated to end users

[zurfer]

Germany is the 5th biggest economy in the world, then there is Austria and Switzerland. The claim that nobody would pay for German to SQL seems a bit pessimistic ;)

I'd also love to understand better why you think that there is no "acceptable level of value-add in most reasonable enterprises".

[ROSEDOLA]

Try to sell non-german UI, etc. into the public market… Then you‘ll realize the importance of support for different languages. Honestly, it was surprising how good it worked. But never forget to do your homework first… Or prepare to fail! We tested against several database schemas, but all were well designed. That’s why we stated to achieve reasonable good results. Bad database design and the entire translation process will be anything but acceptable. Utilize all your database offers for commenting or good naming of db objects…