What a paradoxical situation now emerges, where human travel agents still need to train for the machine interface, while AI agents are now being trained to take over the human jobs by getting them to use the consumer interfaces (aka booking websites) available to us.
I don't know why people want to turn the internet into a turn-based text game. The UI is usually great.
If you’re using LLMs to extract signal, then the information should have been denser/more queryable in the first place. Maybe the UI could have been better, or your boss could have had better communication skills.
If you’re using them to CREATE noise, you need to stop doing that lol.
Most of the uses of LLMs that I see are mostly extracting signal or making noise. The exception to these use cases is making decisions that you don’t care about, and don’t want to make on your own.
I think this is why they’re so useful for programming. When you write a program, you have to specify every single thing about the program, at the level of abstraction of your language/framework. You have to make any decision that can’t be automated. Which ends up being a LOT of decisions. How to break up functions, what you name your variables, do you map/filter or reduce that list, which side of the API do you format the data on, etc. In any given project you might make 100 decisions, but only care about 5 of them. But because it’s a program, you still HAVE to decide on every single thing and write it down.
A lot of this has been automated (garbage collectors remove a whole class of decision making), but some of it can never be. Like maybe you want a landing page that looks vaguely like a skate brand. If you don’t specifically have colors/spacing/fonts all decided on, an LLM can make those decisions for you.
So how to evade talking to the service's business people ? Provide a chain of Rube Goldberg machines to somewhat use these services as if it was the user. It can then be touted as flexibility, and blame the state of technology when it inevitably breaks, if it even worked in the first place.
So most of the time that path of "build a tool once" will be adversarial towards the service, which will be incentivized to actively kill your ad-hoc integration if they can without too much collateral damage.
I’d argue that lack of interoperability is one of the biggest problems in the healthcare system here, and getting access to data through the UI intended for humans might just end up being the only feasible solution.
Automation technologies to handle things like UI automation have existed long before LLMs and work quite fine.
Having an intentionally imprecise and non deterministic software try to behave in a deterministic manner like all software we’re used to is something else.
The potential advantage of using non-deterministic AI for this is that 1) “programming” it to do what needs to be done is a lot easier, and 2) it tends to handle exceptions more gracefully.
You’re right that the approach is nothing new, but it hasn’t taken off, arguably at least in part because it’s been too cumbersome to be practical. I have some hope that LLMs will help change this.
I spent the first two years of my career in the space, we joked anything invented post Michael Jackson's song Thriller wasn't present.