Chat GPT and other AI guff

Huskaris

Been building some things in something called power automate recently (it's basically great if you are in the Microsoft space as it plugs into everything, and yes, I'm acutely aware someone like Leroy is going to read this like I'm a caveman who's just discovered fire while he is in a spaceship above me but here goes ).

I've managed to build something which when an email comes into an inbox, it scans the contents of the email, including any attachments through an AI Agent, it then can automatically populate onto a tracker that our teams use to track their work, key details, basically something we had 9 people globally spending a significant proportion of each shift doing. It can take an email and within 40 seconds create these entries, turning that team from people adding things to the tracker manually, to auditors of that info. 

It'll save about 15% of their time, or another way of looking at it is 1.5 redundancies almost (we are going to get them doing other things instead).

I built it in 6 hours... Basically all I was doing was talking to desktop copilot on one screen, and doing what it was telling me to do in Power Flows/Prompts etc. And you could rightly tell me that software like this has existed for ages, eg integrations that can scan invoices and auto populate info etc, but the difference is now some idiot like me can create a solution incredibly quickly, without needing external consultants and therefore incredibly cheaply, that is "bespoke" to the needs and workings of the business. I work in an industry like any other, where AI is the big buzz word, and my observation is some of the companies in the industry I work in are becoming sales and marketing teams with a small AI offering bolted onto the side. The valuations and funding raises I am seeing in these companies Vs the quality of their output is staggering. 

Next thing I'm going to do is create something that scans documents and then automatically populates draft trmplates from those documents (eg can scan a PDF and auto populate things from that into a template etc, but it can also understand what is and isn't relevant to quite a strong degree. You more or less write the agent a job description, and it does what you say (mostly!).

Across the amount of people we have, this can save serious amounts of time, and free people up to use their brains rather than copying and pasting. I think we can get to a point where we save 15-20% of our workforce time. The nice output of what we have is that we are growing quickly so won't lead to redundancies but otherwise it definitely would...

Another example (because I find examples help inspire people to think what they could do with it) is we have a retention policy where no finished work is allowed to be stored for more than 3 years which is a very time consuming endeavour. I've created something in 15 minutes which can scan a library of documents every week/month/minute if you want, and automatically delete any files created over 3 years ago.. 

DamoNorthStand

Working in tech / sports tech - I have never known a month like the last 30 days.

AI has been nibbling away at the industry, and all of a sudden a tidal wave has come crashing through.

After spending 5 years developing a software platform - thats basically going to change into an AI agent in the next few months. We have no choice.

The arms race is now data and insight - because without it AI is giving fast guff.

The next 6 months are going to be wild

Charlton and on

Huskaris said:

Been building some things in something called power automate recently (it's basically great if you are in the Microsoft space as it plugs into everything, and yes, I'm acutely aware someone like Leroy is going to read this like I'm a caveman who's just discovered fire while he is in a spaceship above me but here goes ).

I've managed to build something which when an email comes into an inbox, it scans the contents of the email, including any attachments through an AI Agent, it then can automatically populate onto a tracker that our teams use to track their work, key details, basically something we had 9 people globally spending a significant proportion of each shift doing. It can take an email and within 40 seconds create these entries, turning that team from people adding things to the tracker manually, to auditors of that info. 

It'll save about 15% of their time, or another way of looking at it is 1.5 redundancies almost (we are going to get them doing other things instead).

I built it in 6 hours... Basically all I was doing was talking to desktop copilot on one screen, and doing what it was telling me to do in Power Flows/Prompts etc. And you could rightly tell me that software like this has existed for ages, eg integrations that can scan invoices and auto populate info etc, but the difference is now some idiot like me can create a solution incredibly quickly, without needing external consultants and therefore incredibly cheaply, that is "bespoke" to the needs and workings of the business. I work in an industry like any other, where AI is the big buzz word, and my observation is some of the companies in the industry I work in are becoming sales and marketing teams with a small AI offering bolted onto the side. The valuations and funding raises I am seeing in these companies Vs the quality of their output is staggering. 

Next thing I'm going to do is create something that scans documents and then automatically populates draft trmplates from those documents (eg can scan a PDF and auto populate things from that into a template etc, but it can also understand what is and isn't relevant to quite a strong degree. You more or less write the agent a job description, and it does what you say (mostly!).

Across the amount of people we have, this can save serious amounts of time, and free people up to use their brains rather than copying and pasting. I think we can get to a point where we save 15-20% of our workforce time. The nice output of what we have is that we are growing quickly so won't lead to redundancies but otherwise it definitely would...

Another example (because I find examples help inspire people to think what they could do with it) is we have a retention policy where no finished work is allowed to be stored for more than 3 years which is a very time consuming endeavour. I've created something in 15 minutes which can scan a library of documents every week/month/minute if you want, and automatically delete any files created over 3 years ago.. 

Weird. I've also used Copilot and Power Automate to create a multi functional tracker in the last few weeks. I'd never heard of it either and thought I would have go through a long process with the tech team or pay a third party to get what I needed. Except for having to correct CoPilot or keep it on track a few times, it blew my mind how easy it was.

Chunes

Leroy Ambrose said:

So you might have seen stories in the media about AI companies 'warning' of open weight AI models being 'only months away' from being able to be hacked onto home devices. 

Spoiler - this is absolutely ludicrous nonsense, put out by Anthropic's marketing team and dutifully picked up and run with by their client media (which appears to include most media outlets in the world now), capitalising on the fridges being 'hacked' in Europe last week - designed to scare the public into demanding checks and balances on AI so that governments prop up Anthropic and OpenAI financially and outlaw/restrict development of free models.

Don't fall for it. 

What concerns me, is knowing the only thing that would really bring strong laws to restrict open source models, would be some kind of large disaster that costs human lives. 

With the amount of money at play here, people have done worse for less. 

We're entering an era where companies with trillion-dollar valuations would benefit from open source models causing death and chaos, because then their businesses would be ring fenced. 

Stig

By chance we saw our neighbour's house for sale on an estate agent's website. What got me was that the pictures of the area have been reshaped, presumably using AI as it would be far too resource intensive to do by hand. So our house, the property opposite the one for sale, is shown as having a lush front garden rather than a bog-standard driveway, whilst the front door has been replaced with a large window making the house, and by dint the area, look more valuable. I know estate agents have a reputation for being dodgy fuckers, but I don't like the blatant dishonesty of it. Oi tarquin, put my bloody door back!

Leroy Ambrose

Stig said:

By chance we saw our neighbour's house for sale on an estate agent's website. What got me was that the pictures of the area have been reshaped, presumably using AI as it would be far too resource intensive to do by hand. So our house, the property opposite the one for sale, is shown as having a lush front garden rather than a bog-standard driveway, whilst the front door has been replaced with a large window making the house, and by dint the area, look more valuable. I know estate agents have a reputation for being dodgy fuckers, but I don't like the blatant dishonesty of it. Oi tarquin, put my bloody door back!

If there's one single 'service' that is ripe for being utterly ironed out by AI it's estate agents. Absolute fucking chancer profession.