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Funnily this whole example illustrates what everyone on the outside of the LLM psychosis train is saying.

The user without empathy has managed to save 30 minutes on a task they could have done themselves anyway. The only cost was wasting the time of at least 39 other people. It’s gross.

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That’s how I feel about AI people taking over the arts and fields like mathematics. For most of them it’s just a neat trick, and maybe there’s some business in there (the OpenAI tik tok clone as an extreme example), but for a huge portion of the world AI doing this work represents the end* of one of the best parts of life. I can’t help but view the AI researchers and promoters as callously stomping all over human culture and patting themselves on the back (also stuffing their pockets with the loot) for doing so.

*Or at least a serious philosophical adjustment, and not all artists want to draw without even being seen.. Not all mathematicians are playing some abstractly analogous version of chess. Not every way of human existence that has been forgotten is 100% regressive and bad.

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> The user without empathy has managed to save 30 minutes on a task

One supplier ended up with a direct sale they wouldn’t have otherwise

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IIUC, so far the supplier has only ended up needing to send samples and a quote to a prospect, and no sale has actually happened. So as of today, everyone is showing a net negative result except whichever company sells the Grok bot tokens.

If that company is subsidizing the price of the bot with VC money and not turning a profit, then as of today, 40 suppliers, 1 HN member, all Grok/SpaceX investors, all Nasdaq index investors, and probably some others, are showing a net negative, and the only company showing a positive result from all this is NVidia.

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> the only company showing a positive result from all this is NVidia

Everyone upstream of the AI labs should be showing a positive result, that includes all the companies needed to actually build the chips and the datacenters around it. If they aren't too incompetent, they should end up with a pile of cash regardless of where their stock goes when the bubble pops.

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And if all of their customers start doing this, then they're going to need to jack up prices to cover all of their costs dealing with the deluge.
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They'll probably just generate the quotes with AI, which is fair.
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Normally you’d get 2-3 quotes, meaning suppliers would on average get a sale for every few RFQs they respond to.

Now guys like this twiddle one knob and generate 20x as much RFQ spam, costing suppliers 20x as much. It’s tantamount to a DoS attack.

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And more generally, very often the recipient of an email bears more cost than the sender.

I heard this once and keep it in mind for every email I send. How do I reduce the cost of replying. Many times it means getting on the phone/ not sending the email at all.

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Isn't a phone call like 10x more taxing than an email reply?
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Very likely varies person by person, and topic by topic.

I don't like speaking on the phone, but there are some things where a single 3 minute phone call is much simpler and easier than a seven email reply chain spanning four days.

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For every meeting that could have been an email. There are 30 back and forth emails that could have been a 5 min phone call.
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it entirely depends on the topic. an example is realizing the queries will end up with multiple back and forths.

for a lot of things a phone call can solve something in minutes and it’s cleared from your brain queue. while some emails end up with back and forth waiting for each others responses. that’s can be hours or days where it sits in your brain as yet another task to manage. wasteful for something that could have easily been tied up with a quick phone call.

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[flagged]
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I think in the abstract there's a lot to be concerned about with that. However, I don't see it in this particular case. It's a real customer with a real order and real money, going through proper business channels to place an order. The only thing that was possibly automation overboard here was reaching out to so many suppliers when the original ones didn't respond -- there's a question of how long they waited and how long is considered reasonable turnaround for this kind of supplier. But this is just buying a thing that vendors are selling, in the way they expect to sell it, and in the end resulted in a closed deal.
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