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LeCompteSftwaretoday at 10:56 AM1 replyview on HN

The problem is that if you're wealthy enough to hire someone to do your errands, those errands likely aren't very mundane - the exception is a socialite giving their friend a low-effort job, but executive assistants are paid well because their jobs are cognitively demanding.

OTOH a lower-middle-class Joe like me really does have a lot of mundane social/professional errands, which existing software has handled just fine for decades. I suppose on the margins AI might free up 5 minutes here or there around calendar invites / etc, but at the cost of rolling snake eyes and wasting 30 minutes cleaning up mistakes. Even if it never made mistakes, I just don't see the "personal assistant" use case really taking off. And it's not how people use LLMs recreationally.

Really not trying to say that LLM personal assistants are "useless" for most people. But I don't think they'll be "big," for the same reason that Siri and Alexa were overhyped. It's not from lack of capability; the vision is more ho-hum than tech folks seem to realize.


Replies

TeMPOraLtoday at 2:47 PM

> which existing software has handled just fine for decades

Existing software is what dumped most of those errands on you in the first place.