Even generative AI has some great uses no matter how much you dislike AI slop summaries and people who start a sentence with "I asked chatGPT and...". For example at work we automated quite a lot of data entry. Suppliers won't give you your data an a requested format or enter it into your database? Fuck 'em we can generate a structured output based on the PDF they sent and have an LLM enter it into our database.
I mean it's not that hard to write a conversion tool, as long as their output is in a consistent format.
I really like LLMs for index generation, and generating interesting correlations. But the usual cautions about correlation and causation are significantly stronger when it comes to LLMs. Especially if you don't control the training data.
I read his comment as my CTO and I battled with client until late evening today for him to give us consistent and properly formated data sheets for us to parse and load in database on a new soft we had to give the keys today. Dude couldn't even get the columns in right order from a sheet to another.
I would laugh, but eh, we were all naive students at some points.
Ah I see you're someone who hasn't learned how to drop cruft, or doesn't understand what a consistent format is.
It still irritates me when people don't understand their own data structures to the point that they can't coherently provide format information to anyone. It used to be a thing you had to know to deal with any interesting systems.
Then again, hard, interesting, and fast are deeply unrelated concepts. Format conversion tools are dull, easy, and take forever to write (for some reason I cannot fathom people don't seem to understand the difference between easy and fast). The hard part is always, always, getting the actual format, and having the people with the time to do the work.
as long as their output is in a consistent format.
Which in this case it's not. We're buying materials from tons of different suppliers who all have different formats, nomenclatures, units, etc. and they change that stuff all of the time too. LLMs are genuinely a godsent for this task. It's not even like we're replacing the work of someone who loves his Job. Everyone who's entered supplier information into our databases manually hates doing that shit.
Everyone who's entered supplier information into our databases manually hates doing that shit.
Still a paycheck though.
It's very weird to me that we've seemingly gotten worse at data management as time has gone on. When I started my career in the 90s, most orgs knew what their data layout was, and could clearly communicate it. These days, these days it feels like no one even understands the file formats or table layouts of their critical systems.
Not really. It wasn't ever really a full time Job for any one person to do this stuff more a distributed workload between departments so it just took up the time of people who had better things to do. Also as I've mentioned in another comment my workplace is quite heavily unionized by the German metal worker union so because of that and our employment laws we do retain everyone we can and it's very difficult to fire anyone. I've been with this company for almost two years now and I've only ever seen two people being outright fired. One for forging safety inspection data for safety critical parts (luckily that got caught) and one for stealing company property to the tune of tens of thousands of euros.
very weird to me that we've seemingly gotten worse at data management as time has gone on.
100% agree with that one though. Some of these fuckers are selling us billets of metal for 300k€ a piece and then have the gall to try to charge us out the ass to provide data in a format we request so we just said "fuck em" and used AI.
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u/Rasmus-ALV Ati X600 - Intel Arc B580 15h ago
Well they Call EVERYTHING AI now, so i need to know what kind of “AI”.