The more examples of this going badly we can get together the better.
This just seems a poor decision made by C-suite folk who were neither AI-savvy enough to understand the limits of the tech, nor smart enough to run a meaningful trial to evaluate it. A failure of wishful thinking over rational evaluation.
for that reason alone humans will always need to be in the loop. of course you can debate how many people you need to the above activity, but given that AI isn't omniscient, nor omnipotent I expect that number to be quite high for the foreseeable future.
one example - I've been vibe coding some stuff, and even though a pretty comprehensive set of tests are passing, I still end up reading all of the code. if I'm being honest some of the decisions the AI makes are a bit opaque to me so I end up spending a bunch of time asking it why (of course there's no real ego there, but bare with me...), re-reading the code, thinking about whether that actually makes sense. I personally prefer this activity/mode since the tests pass (which were written by the AI too), and I know anything I manually change can be tested, but it's not something I could just submit to prod right away. this is just a MVP. I can't imagine delegating if real money/customers were on the line without even more scrutiny.
no no no you don't get it, you would have ANOTHER AI for that
Also, it does appear that there are companies willing to YOLO themselves off a cliff with AI
Until AI gets ego and will of its own (probably the end of humanity) it will simply be a tool, regardless of how intelligent and capable it is.
one would hope that one ability of an 'omniscient and omnipotent' AI would be greater understanding.
When speaking of the divine (the only typical example of the omniscient and omnipotent that comes to mind) we never consider what happens when God (or whoever) misunderstands our intent -- we just rely on the fact that an All-Being type thing would just know.
I think the understanding of minute intent is one such trait an omniscient and omnipotent system must have.
p.s. what a bar raise -- we used to just be happy with AGI!
In reality, even an ASI won’t know your intent unless you communicate it clearly and unambiguously.
I recently came to this realization as well, and it now seems so obvious. I feel dumb for not realizing it sooner. Is there any good writing or podcast on this topic?
Figuring out what to build is 80% of the work, building it is maybe 20%. The 20% has never been the bottleneck. We make a lot of software, and most of it is not optimal and requires years if not decades of tweaking to meet the true requirements.
If anything I've noticed the bar being lowered by the pro-AI set, except for humans, because the prevailing belief is that LLMs must already be AGI but any limitations are dismissed as also being human limitations, and therefore evidence that LLMs are already human equivalent in any way that matters.
And instead of the singularity we have Roko's Basilisk.
this sort of assumes that most humans actually know what they want to do.
It is very untrue in my experience.
Its like most complaints I hear about AI art. yes, it is generic and bland. just like 90% of what human artists produce.
If your pay is 400 times average employee salary because of your unique strategic vision, surely firing 4000 people based on faulty assumptions should come with proportional consequences?
Or does the high risk, high reward, philosophy only apply to the reward part?
If we take out the AI part of this and treat it like any other project, if what they admit is true, it represents a massive failure of judgement and implementation.
I can't see anyone admitting that in public, as it would probably end their career, or should do at least. Especially if a company is a "meritocracy"
Though I’m a bit surprised they have that much support staff.
It does seem like Salesforce relies on Agentforce and therefore doesn't need as much support stuff. But the pressure was also to “reduce heads”, which is a bit of a tone-deaf way to describe firing thousands of people.
Salesforce has a vested interest in maintaing its seat based licenses, so it's not in favor of mass layoffs.
Internally Salesforce is pushing AgentForce full stop
1. literally document everything in the product and keep documentation up to date (could be partially automated?)
2. Build good enough search to find those things
3. Be able to troubleshoot / reason / abstract beyond those facts
4. Handle customer information that goes against the assumptions in the core set of facts (ie customers find bugs or don’t understand fundamental concepts about computers)
5. Be prepared to restart the entire conversation when the customer gets frustrated with 1-4 (this is very annoying)
LLMs are a great technology for making up plausible looking text. When correctness matters, and you don't have a second system that can reliably check it, the output turns out to be unreliable.
When you're dealing with customer support, everyone involved has already been failed by the regular system. So they're an exception, and they're unhappy. So you really don't want to inflict a second mistake on them.
The counter: the existing system of checks with (presumably) humans was not good enough. For the last 15 months or so, I have been dealing with E.ON claiming one thing and doing another, and had to escalate it to the Ombudsman. I don't think E.ON were using an AI to make these mistakes, I think they just couldn't get customer support people to cope with the idea "the address you have been posting letters to, that address isn't simply wrong, it does not exist". An LLM would have done better, except for what I'm going to say in the counter-counter.
The counter-counter, is that LLMs are only an extra layer of Swiss-cheese: the mistakes they make may be different to human mistakes or may overlap, but they're still definitely present. Specifically, I expect that an LLM would have made two mistakes in my case, one of which is the same mistake the actual humans made (saying they'd fixed everything repeatedly when they had not done so, see meme about LLMs playing the role of HAL in 2001 failing to open the pod bay door) and the other would have been a mistake in my favour (the Ombudsman decided less than I asked for, an LLM would likely have agreed with me more than it should have).
It's my sincerely held opinion that we're fostering a culture here that ignores the "human impact" of the technology that we're rushing to adopt.
I'm well aware that many members of this community have achieved "success" through software. This includes the rapid adoption of new computing paradigms, new technology stacks, new frameworks, etc.
I am fortunate to be employed. But around me, when I step out of my house, it's painful. People are hurting. They're unemployed. They're depressed. And the younger generation is even worse. They can't even afford to dream.
I live in a corporate world of forced smiles and fake enthusiasm. I would hate for that same culture to take root here. We need to be able to express significant doubt, or even cynicism against AI, without fear of backlash.
Unfortunately what we see from you is a pattern of low-effort comments, some of which don't even bother with basic sentence formation features like capitalization at the start and a period at the end. That's a high-signal hallmark of low-effort comments. Looking down your comment feed we see many single-line comments that are low on substance and high in snark.
The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. They ask us to be kind, and to avoid snark and swipes. They ask us to converse curiously. They ask us not to fulminate, and not to sneer, including at the rest of the community.
It's fine to want HN to be better. As moderators we certainly do; that's why we do this job. But it requires us all to actually make the effort to be better in our own conduct. When you see comments from other users that aren't up to standard, we need you to use the tools that have always been here, like downvoting, flagging and emailing us (hn@ycombinator.com) so we can take action.
It isn't other people's job to make good enough for you whilst you conduct yourself in this way. If you really want HN to be better, please do your part to raise the standards rather than dragging them down further.
You should understand that one way people improve the standards of a commons is by imposing social controls on those who violate norms which create a healthy society, such as by shilling. That is normal behavior on every forum I’ve ever seen.
When you allow there to be 100x more of this mindless slop than of anything else, the most any individual can do to resist the tide is to contribute to the voices trying to make antisocial behavior come with a cost.
It works, and because it works, people will continue to do it until you figure out how to keep a clean commons.
PS. I suppose you would probably say the same thing to Rob Pike (if he were a user of your site which he doubtless is not).
https://skyview.social/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fbsky.app%2Fprofile...
The people you claim have “allowed” this have maintained HN for many years – 13 in dang's case, the majority of its history. The primary reason this is a place where people want to participate is because of the guidelines that have been developed and refined since HN's inception, and that we spend hours each day upholding. People have been heralding the decline of HN since it was barely more than a few months old [1], yet it continues to grow as a place where people want to showcase interesting work, which is what we most care about.
Generated comments and posts are banned, and we state this frequently. I spend time each day evaluating submissions and Show HNs to determine whether they're human-authored or AI-generated. We welcome people to flag generated content and email us so we can ban accounts with a pattern of posting it. Yes, it takes time for these mechanisms to kick in. HN is a public, anonymous site. Anyone can post anything, and the immune system takes time to do its work. That's always been the case.
There is a cohort of community members who have demonstrated a commitment to making HN better over several years through: (a) submitting good articles, (b) posting thoughtful comments, (c) observing the guidelines, (d) flagging bad submissions and comments, and (e) emailing us to point out guidelines breaches and to discuss the healthy functioning of the site. These are the people we listen to when they express concerns about HN's health, because they've established a track record of genuine contribution and care over several years.
From you, we see two comments prior to 2023, and little or none of the above kinds of actions. Instead: ragey fulmination, hyperbole, and ascribing views to us without basis. And now you hold yourself up as HN's heroic defender, having never undertaken the earnest, unglamorous, unseen work that other community members do to make this the place you claim needs you to defend.
Please, if you really want HN to be better, you are most welcome to start doing the things that other community members quietly do every day to help make it better.
stop. reading. evals.
Firing people = smart cost cutting
Hiring people = strong vote of confidence in continued growth
Edit: oh wait, this article isn't the source either. It references an article by "The Information", which I assume is https://www.theinformation.com/articles/salesforce-executive... There's also this follow-up: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/story-salesforces-de...
It's paywalled, so I can't verify.
Both the OP article and this Times of India article appear to be AI-generated summaries of the original article.
Craziness!
Is anyone really buying they laid off 4k people _because_ they really thought they’d replace them with an LLM agent? The article is suspect at best and this doesn’t even in the slightest align with my experience with LLMs at work (it’s created more work for me).
The layoff always smelled like it was because of the economy.
https://www.ktvu.com/news/salesforce-ai-layoffs-marc-benioff
Of course, it could still happen, as maybe AI systems just need another few years to mature before trying to fully replace jobs like this...
... although, one thing I agree with you is that there isn't much info online on these quotes from Salesforce executives, so could be made up.
But, feel like combining LLM's with other AI techniques seems like it could do so much more...
... As mentioned, am no expert, but seems like one of the next major focuses on LLM's is on verification of its answers, and adding to this, giving LLM's a sense for when its result are right or wrong. Yeah, feel like the ability for an LLM to introspect itself so it can gain an understanding of how it got its answer might be of help if knowing if its answer is right (think Anthropic has been working on this for awhile now), as well as scoring the reliability of the information sources.
And, they could also mix in a formal verification step, using some form of proof to prove that its results are right (for those answers that lend themselves to formal verification).
Am sure all this is all currently being tried. So any AI experts out there, feel free to correct me. Thanks!
Interesting that you mentioned Knowledge Graphs, haven't heard about these in a long time. Just looked up "Commonsense knowledge" page on wikipedia and seems like they're still being added to. Would you happen to know if they're useful yet and can do any real work? or are good enough to integrate with LLM's?
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/tech-news/aft...
It isn't regret, they are trying to sell their Agentforce product.
"Why Our Story on Salesforce’s Declining Trust in LLMs Hit a Nerve" - https://www.theinformation.com/articles/story-salesforces-de...
Salesforce regrets firing 4000 experienced staff and replacing them with AI
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Because they don't have 4000+ workers worth of work to do?
No that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that demand (for a product or service) is what drives the amount of labor that is performed, not the other way around.
If a company has maxed out the amount of widgets the can sell in their market and adding new features will not change that, then adding more labor makes no sense.
It follows that making their existing labor more productive leads to layoffs.
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/tech-news/mic...
He also uses cultural revolution tactics and uses the young ones against the old. I imagine AI house of cards will collapse soon and he'll be remembered as the person who enshittified Windows after the board fires him.
A search found an similar article from Times of India which credits The Information, there's no good way for non-subscribers to search it.
chrisjj•1mo ago
The root problem is they /estimated/.
> “We assumed the technology was further along than it actually was,” one executive said privately
... and /assumed/.
toomuchtodo•1mo ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42639532
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42639791
chrisjj•1mo ago
Unless people wise up to the fact what's destroying jobs here isn't "Artificial Intelligence".
It is simply natural stupidity.
imglorp•1mo ago
No, someone just wanted their bonus for being forward-thinking, paradigm-shifting, opex cutters. I'm sure they got it.
mstank•1mo ago
Also probably a part of their go-to-market strategy. If they can prove it internally they can sell it externally.