alt Hacker NewsThe assistant thing really shows the lie behind most of the "big data" economy.
1) They thought an assistant would be able to operate as an "agent" (heh) that would make purchasing decisions to benefit the company. You'd say "Alexa, buy toilet paper" and it would buy it from Amazon. Except it turns out people don't want their computer buying things for them.
2) They thought that an assistant listening to everything would make for better targeted ads. But this doesn't seem to be the case, or the increased targeting doesn't result in enough value to justify the expense. A customer with the agent doesn't seem to be particularly more valuable than one without.
I think that this AI stuff and LLMs in particular is an excuse, to some extent, to justify the massive investment already made in big data architecture. At least they can say we needed all this data to train an LLM! I've noticed a similar pivot towards military/policing: if this data isn't sufficiently valuable for advertising maybe it's valuable to the police state.
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> Except it turns out people don't want their computer buying things for them.
I think this also hits an interesting problem with confidence: if you could trust the service to buy what you’d buy and get a good price you’d probably use it more but it only saves a couple of seconds in the easy case (e.g. Amazon reorders are already easy) and for anything less clear cut people rightly worry about getting a mistake or rip-off. That puts the bar really high because a voice interface sucks for more complex product comparisons and they have a very short window to give a high-quality response before most people give up and use their phone/computer instead. That also constrains the most obvious revenue sources because any kind of pay for placement is going to inspire strong negative reactions.