HACKER Q&A
📣 crosen99

Is 2023 the year chat.company.com starts replacing www.company.com?


Given the step function improvement showcased by ChatGPT, it seems we’ve reached an entirely new realm of possibilities. Will all well funded companies, gurus, etc., now start assessing LLM based chat interfaces as a primary customer entry point to their organization/knowledgebase/methodsbase/etc.?

What would the supply chain look like to enable this?

Who apart from the core tech providers like OpenAI and ML experts are positioned to play key roles here?


  👤 olivierduval Accepted Answer ✓
Well... I think that it's a bit too early to think about this:

1) chatbot are either based on a search engine (so with limited answers) or AI-based (with sometimes totally inaccurate "understanding" or "answers")

2) knowledgebases (and other kindof FAQ) are still really an open problem: wikis are a way to structure informal knowledge but need A LOT of discipline and human... FAQ are generally limited to the 10 most questions

In the end, the best way to provide knowledges right now is the old "website search engine"... but nothing more. And AI has already shown that - even if it LOOK good at first sight - it's not GOOD ENOUGH to be used (wrong answer looking "right" for example)

Moreover: a website embed a structure, so you know what you can search or how to formulate it even if you dont know what you are searching exactly... a chatbot requires you to ask the right question to get the answer you seek, and that's far more challenging for the user !

As an example: try to ask a tax chatbot about how to get family support... and compare it with looking at the website structure (that clearly show that you're not at the right place)


👤 crosen99
Thoughts after reading the comments so far:

I acknowledge ChatGPT grade models are very expensive to operate and that there are still real performance limitations/issues that make it not yet appropriate for autonomous handling of hard transactions. Yet, we still have a new level of capability that is seriously better than anything we've had before.

I'm thinking about the acrobatics I've gone through recently trying to get certain answers from airlines, mail carriers and insurance companies just to even locate the right portion of the site or the right person to speak with. It truly seems ChatGPT would have well outperformed the www and phone channels I went through as an entry point for my journey.

So, given the new capabilities we're seeing with large language models:

1. Will WELL FUNDED companies START ASSESSING chat interfaces as a primary customer entry point - not to autonomously handle hard transactions, but to at least start the customer journey down an efficient path?

2. If so, how will this play out in terms of the evolving supply chain?

And, I would add:

3. If the answer to the first question is "no", what are the key improvements we need to see before that does happen and over what timeline should we expect to see those improvements?


👤 zhte415
www.company.com is still running Windows XP in an emulator for critical systems. Management will still seek to make a head role for losing a large customer, 'The Chatbot lost the customer' isn't going to cut it. Admin functions are still manual spreadsheet and email exercises with monthly reconciliations and no departmental budget to automate anything.

In 2023, the new chatbot might be allowed to do something the expert-system chatbot was already doing, but then why was the expert system doing it badly and employed? There's management inertia for anything else.

There's the assumption the chatbot won't provide outlandish results occasionally - that matters because of the asymmetry of prospect theory, that bad results can be really bad, adding to management inertia.

Others have commented on raw cost.


👤 colesantiago
What you're explaining is basically a chatbot on a subdomain. Which has already existed for years.

This sounds like a expensive solution in search of a problem.


👤 rolenthedeep
Given that ChatGPT doesn't seem to acknowledge "truth" or "accuracy" as concepts, I'd say it's damn near suicidal to trust it with customer service even a little bit.

It's not hard to imagine ChatGPT giving users dangerous advice like microwaving their phone and constructing an entirely convincing (yet utterly incorrect) explanation supporting it.


👤 outsidetheparty
Good lord I hope not. For the same reason we have books instead of conveying all knowledge through Socratic dialogue.

Chat interfaces might be useful for some purposes, where the user largely already knows what they’re asking for, but they would be terrible for any kind of structured information.

Just because we’ve invented a shiny new tool doesn’t mean we need to use it for everything.


👤 theCrowing
No.

Dunno but the AWS cost for your knowledge base would be comical.

Everyone with enough VRAM and data.