The shoehorning of llms into business use is just laziness.
The shoehorning of llms into business use is just laziness.
This is what drives me nuts. It's pure laziness that drives this shit.
You know what would actually improve productivity? Allowing use of ad blockers so I can study work related content or instructional videos without a million ads. An email client that isn't a piece of shit like outlook. A chat program that is not the horrendous teams. A cloud storage solution that is not one drive. Everything I've mentioned could/would be improved by open source implementation, but they think throwing an llm at it will improve productivity. Its just laziness. AND the fact that millions are spent on a business llm account per year is utterly stupid. I've not seen one scenario at our work where an llm has actually improved productivity. Sure, maybe some have used it for fixing bad grammar or writing an email they were too lazy to come up with, but to me if you are that dumb or lazy, you don't deserve a good job.
To add. I've actually tried using the llm for certain things, and it maybe helped 5% of the time. Every other time it was wrong, or wasted more time than it took to actually do the work. Its scary how many blindly trust it and think they are working efficiently, while those of us in the background fix all the shit they screwed up because they were lazy.
Maybe something good will happen and the dumb will be easier to weed out because of this. That is one potential upside.
The reason is as bland and unpoetic as you might imagine:
companies put billions into this trend, and they want their money back.
Do not believe the lies about free market and companies losing money: they just pass their losses onto their customers. Don't like it? Fuck off, and pay more for everything anyway.
The earlier efforts were to get rid of creatives and makers. Why not go for the CEOs? Would make quite the fiscal impact.
If they go after CEOs it might turn out there is nothing to do. That's why they go after technical / creative people because their job means something.
The result would be something like a modern planned economy. Without the transition of ownership.
A few months ago, my work got everyone Copilot 365 licences. I have yet to use it, and I haven't seen anyone in my immediate vicinity using it either. So from my perspective, it's wasted money and bandwidth. I do work at a very large organization, so maybe there are people elsewhere who do use it, but it has yet to contribute anything to my work.
You want to know what would make my job easier? A password manager or unified login of some sort. I'm currently juggling nearly a dozen unique passwords, and it's mentally taxing.
At least our work allows bitwarden which is nice.
The one case where it helps is in formatting. Like my boss often asks like "here's a excel file of 200 serial numbers, can you get the info from the database for them?" and yes but I need to erase the carriage return and an extra space from each so it will be 2 hours... Or I ask copilot "take this query and add in a where clause for each of these serial numbers" and it works.
Now asking it write that query is probably failure but simple formatting tends to work.
Last time a colleague asked chatgpt to format a document, a few ids got removed and new ones got hallucinated in. Still laugh whenever I remember, thanks for that 🤣
I have a similar story, but it got worse and worse with the lies as it got through the table. I fought it for an hour, then I wrote a script instead.
There are so many better tools out there for sanitizing data like that. Tools that don't run the risk of inserting hallucinations into your work. Granted, they do take effort to learn (Regular Expressions would be the obvious one). If it needs to be right or even has to be right, I can't imagine risking it to an LLM / GAN tool.
Yes, simple excel stuff is useful, I have used it for that too