[hakfoo]

> Outside of coding, almost every business case for AI doesn’t need above human intelligence, it doesn’t even need human intelligence, or half a human intelligence, a business can extract a lot of value from a machine that has a fraction of a human’s intelligence.

What the business world actually needed isn't intelligence, it's VBA with a bit of polish on it.

Yeah, people want tools to distill reports, and puff nonsense into bigger nonsense, but to a remarkable degree, this doesn't require an LLM. In fact, the alternatives might be preferrable by offering more consistency/repeatability and efficiency (I am so sick of watching a LLM babble for 5 minutes on something a regex would do in 5 seconds).

The genius of the LLM industry is that it avoids "programming anxiety" by hiding it behind a friendly-ish UI and not calling it programming. It's another in the string of innovations like "hide the file system" and "removing user programmability" so we can sell it back to you.

[dada216]

I have deployed very successful LLM based software that reads sales people emails and inserts orders, or stuff akin to orders, in the rest of the systems. Can you write me a regex that parses a messy human email thread and produces a clean JSON with all the order details? It's been working for a year with less than 3% error rate, better than what the humans themselves were doing.

[chairmansteve]

Interesting. A web form completed by the sales people would not have sufficed? I guess it's the backend interfaces to multiple systems that's the difficult part?

[tomnipotent]

A web form assumes the input is or can be made structured, or that you have a user that is willing to fill in a form (vs. writing an email). An LLM is great at taking free-form/unstructured content and mapping it nicely to a structured surface area.

[mxschumacher]

it's astounding how much of human work are tasks like the one you have described here. Dancing around messy interfaces because nobody bothered to properly standardize and automate