I am actually shocked to learn that x.ai has human beings reading the emails.<p>X.AI's marketing materials state it's "An AI personal assistant who schedules meetings for you."<p>Their default tagline in every email sent says "x.ai – artificial intelligence that schedules meetings "<p>You have to dig into their press kit to get any mention of human "Supervised Learning".<p>My typical interaction with Amy has been a 3rd party suddenly CC'ing her (it) into an existing thread.<p>In many of those cases those threads contain information that I would consider to be confidential.<p>In some cases the people on the other end work for public companies that I am POSITIVE would not allow for a non-approved human to have access to that information.<p>I understand the counter argument that x.ai's warehousing this info regardless, but introducing a human under the guise of a blind-AI is unsettling.<p>It's a disingenuous pitch and should have repercussions if they don't improve their disclosures of what the service is actually doing.
I get that they are trying to use the human responses as a training set.<p>But the scope of these general purpose concierge services mean that what they are going after is damn near Artificial General Intelligence. At least in terms of capability, after-all ordering a burrito and locating an antique skull is a pretty broad capability range.<p>And at what point of accuracy are they aiming for for the systems to run on their own?<p>I guess they're thinking they can get pretty good at identifying the easy requests the system can fulfill at 99.9999% accuracy and then shift the harder requests to a human.<p>At that point it seems like they're just building a system that can distinguish hard requests from easy requests. Sure fulfilling the easy requests with AI is a feat in itself, but how many of those easy requests does it make sense to go through a third party? Why doesn't the burrito shop just set up it's own ordering bot?<p>Am I missing something?<p>The edge cases seem so broad that to sufficiently fulfill them would require something like AGI and the more approachable tasks of ordering pizza or burritos seem unnecessary of a third party.
The solution is so blindingly obvious: You are creating AI not to replace humans, but to <i>assist</i> humans. If your humans can manage 50 emails per hour, you judge the quality of improvements to the AI on how any more emails per hour they can handle. This is from improving the tools humans use to completely eliminating the human from the equation in certain cases. Then your customers need to rate the quality of the service to see if automatically handled emails had the side-effect of reducing quality, which then needs to be weighed against the cost savings.
No one here will be shocked at the eventual investor lawsuits, but I was a bit surprised at the "Pain -- Solution" graphic. Unless "Michael" is very senior to "John", he is a complete asshole:<p><i>J: I'll be free to meet at these times...<p>M: Yeah whatever. I can't be arsed to look at my calendar, so talk to my secretary. Oh wait... I'm too cheap to hire a secretary so why don't you talk to this robot instead?</i><p>I get it, Lords of the Universe can make you work out the details with their administrative assistant. But then they actually have to employ that person. Is this product pitch aimed at "temporarily embarrassed executives" who envy that sad dominance game?
Sounds like some of these companies aren't even implementing the automation part.<p>> But she and another former employee, Alex Gioiella, said the only automated part of the service they saw was the occasional marketing text message.<p>You'd think that the human workers would at least get served up suggestions by the system if it were actually learning, to make sure the algorithm got "gold-standard" feedback on its dataset.<p>Especially requests like those for delivery food could be standardized pretty quickly, so that workers would only be handed situations where the "AI" (if there even was any machine learning involved) was uncertain as to what needed to be done.<p>> But usually, the Hero said, the requests were for pizza or Chipotle delivery.
Funny comment from a Facebook friend: "The meta-turing test: A human trying to convince another human that it is chatting with a computer program. Thankfully a human dumbing itself to chatbot level is far more doable than the opposite." <a href="https://www.facebook.com/groups/cyberpunkculture/permalink/531331800380538/?comment_id=531332370380481&comment_tracking=%7B%22tn%22%3A%22R%22%7D" rel="nofollow">https://www.facebook.com/groups/cyberpunkculture/permalink/5...</a>
Is there any indication that there is actually light at the end of this tunnel, and not just a lot more tunnel? How much of this is just smoke and mirrors for the sake of product development, and how much is just to bilk investors? I read the entire article, and I don't get the sense that the author is totally sure either.
One of the reasons I left x.ai was that I believed the leadership was deliberately misleading users, investors, and employees with false advertising and extremely inflated and skewed metrics. I am sure that the company is making great progress, because it is full of very intelligent people tackling an interesting problem. But the way they treated employees, customers and investors was unacceptable to me.
I suppose on its face it's not a bad idea: pay some people to train an AI agent. It's a bit annoying that any information about how it's working out so far is unavailable, but on the other hand, it's also rather revealing that it is. If it was working that well we'd probably have heard a lot about their tech by now.
The goal/intent/promise with these companies is always train AI to automate the process. This is good for both "buzz" and cost reasons long-term.<p>Companies describe the AI as two-fold: 1) actual AI responding to your requests and 2) Automation making human workers' jobs much easier, ie. a really good CRM or scheduling algo.<p>The reality is that high growth almost always means throwing more people at the problem under the guise of being "trainers" when in reality the technology only really caters to #2 (better automation) and the company is forced to pivot before ever really getting to #1 (AI handling the requests) either due to distractions or inability to actual deliver on the promise.
"But for now, the companies are largely powered by people, clicking behind the curtain and making it look like magic."<p>Does this remind anyone else of the anonymous voice actors behind the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer?