> which is why I am surprised that people think these models are good enough to replace humans at work.
There are a lot of office jobs that I'd fit into the category of "bullshit jobs." They may serve some purpose in the huge bureaucracy of enterprises but the day to day ultimately boils doing to managing someone's calendar and sending emails.
Quite a few people at my work have now started using Copilot for their emails. It's obviously AI (at least to me), and yet, the content and formatting are an improvement over what they were sending before.
So much of the marketing hype on LLMs is about how it'll replace all the engineering work (the MBA's wet dream, to replace all the expensive labor). In reality, I think its more capable at replacing non-tech labor and middle management.
An LLM can send out an email to the team and analyze a project check-in faster, and better, than some overpaid middle manager can. I have no doubts an LLM could probably serve the role of a project management office, or a business analyst.
Sure, there should still be a human in the loop for now, but you need far, far less humans in those roles than previously.
I go back and forth on the idea that some jobs are bullshit, maybe I haven’t been exposed to enough industries or work places. Every place I worked definitely didn’t have bullshit jobs to hand out as adult daycare, but I can see how some places can become bloated because an over ambitious middle manager wants to say they manage X number of people on their resume. So there are bullshit jobs in that there are people who aren’t being utilized correctly, so in that case I’d say they’re no bullshit jobs, just bullshit leadership or managers.
Yeah, I agree with that, and a more accurate description than mine.
The people in those roles are being mismanaged/misutilized rather than the job itself being bullshit.
I've seen the bloating first hand though, and you're right, that's usually what leads to those jobs. Some department over hires to pad the resume of some middle manager, and now you have a team that's severely over staffed to the point each individual contributor has maybe 2 to 3 hours of actual work to do in a day.
There are a lot of office jobs that I'd fit into the category of "bullshit jobs." They may serve some purpose in the huge bureaucracy of enterprises but the day to day ultimately boils doing to managing someone's calendar and sending emails.
Quite a few people at my work have now started using Copilot for their emails. It's obviously AI (at least to me), and yet, the content and formatting are an improvement over what they were sending before.
So much of the marketing hype on LLMs is about how it'll replace all the engineering work (the MBA's wet dream, to replace all the expensive labor). In reality, I think its more capable at replacing non-tech labor and middle management.
An LLM can send out an email to the team and analyze a project check-in faster, and better, than some overpaid middle manager can. I have no doubts an LLM could probably serve the role of a project management office, or a business analyst.
Sure, there should still be a human in the loop for now, but you need far, far less humans in those roles than previously.