Tag Archives: Technical support

July 12, 2026 · 13:43

From a deceptive mind

Yup, that’s me. I saw an article and the sneaky mind went to work. All because some words gave me ample reasons to do so. But lets start at the beginning. It all started with a story in the Microsoft Source Australia (at https://news.microsoft.com/source/asia/features/how-commonwealth-bank-and-microsoft-are-reimagining-the-future-of-customer-service/) where we see ‘How Commonwealth Bank and Microsoft are reimagining the future of customer service’ really? Reimagining? I get that Microsoft sees a blanket of opportunity, because as I see it, on a near global scale Technical Support and Customer Care will take dives and the need of clear quality is to be found nearly everywhere. But here is the kink in this cable. There already is a supplier. It is called NICE, an Israeli cloud supplier. I saw several options for Saudi Arabia and the UAE. I wrote about it in the story ‘Dominoes’ on December 4th 2023 (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2023/12/04/dominoes/). I didn’t give the entire setting, but they were here first as such the solution ‘reimagined’ is not seen by me here.

So when I saw “Martin Lindsay had a bold vision to reimagine the Commonwealth Bank of Australia’s contact center architecture using an approach that did not yet exist. As Executive General Manager of Customer Service Direct at the banking group, Lindsay set out to bring together multiple legacy systems supporting voice, messaging and digital interactions into a single, AI-powered omni-channel platform. The goal was to create a more intuitive, conversational experience for customers, while supporting frontline teams with better tools to serve them.” I had to giggle, because that is basically what the NICE CX One platform does and in several other ways. As such is this an attempt to plagiarise an already excellent idea, or are these people making sure that the “The Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) serves approximately 17 million retail, business, and institutional customers across the country, representing nearly two-thirds of the Australian population. Of this total, the bank has over 1 million business customers and 8.3 million digitally active users.” (Source: Oogly Googly Google) fall straight via Microsoft into the Cloud Act capturing settings of the United States of America? Yes, people seem to forget is trivialize that cloud act and someone needs to take a longer look at this. For example an optional pretentious Martin Lindsay who had his ideas close to 5 years after NICE did. Nice started in 1986 as Neptune Intelligence Computer Engineering and that’s evolved into the setting we see now. As such what is the setting of imagination at Microsoft? (optionally at the CBA too). And as I see it, it is an Israeli company, but NiCE is an American technology company specializing in customer relations management software (NiCE CXone), artificial intelligence, and digital and workforce engagement management. OK, as I see it the cloud act is not avoided, but the fact that some (read: Microsoft Source Australia) might want to peer their sugar coated story. So when we get to “The catalyst came in early 2024, when Lindsay partnered with leaders from Microsoft to co‑engineer the solution. The timing was driven by a rapid shift in customer expectations for instant, always-on support, while the bank’s existing virtual chatbot was being wound down.” One might have a Conspiracy Theorist mind (that would be me) seeing that I saw this a year before him, that he had an idea to take the idea from NiCE and give it a swirl and optionally he saw Microsoft as a partner in alleged crime. Alleged, because I have no idea how this went, but as we look at Nice (at www.nice.com) you can see how evolved that idea already is and as such why reinvent the wheel? I have my doubts on this idea. Especially as we can see a massively evolved system, it seems to go even further than when I saw it in 2023 (which makes sense). So as I see that setting I also see “We wanted to work with Microsoft to shape their products and deliver a platform aligned to our future strategy. We knew that meant working with Microsoft as a co-creator in our vision from day one.” But I read it as “We needed a Microsoft tainted solution where I get the credit, the commission and I call Microsoft a ‘co-creator’ so that I can get my coins”, so am I pushing the conspiracy theory setting? I might be, but this is how business is done in this modern age. Because if NiCe was rejected, the story would be “We saw a solution that didn’t match with our vision, so we talked to Microsoft and see if they would help us out” and at this point you see the consultancy solution that NiCE could offer and was rejected for a much bigger bill.

Apart from that there is nothing. As I see it, the world will have a massive Technical support and Customer Care issue from 2027 onwards. As people are fired all over the place they can hire people with a telephone voice and a good setting towards data entry, both are essential in these fields. But what do I know, I have merely be set into the Technical Support world and Customer Care world since 1992. So I know a few things, which is also why I saw the essential needed setting of NiCE. 

The rest of the story was too self adoring for me to adhere to, as people see that Customer Care has a low tolerance for failure, It is essentially humorous to see that Microsoft is clearly not using their own solution. Why? Perhaps Clippy objected? That Is a mere speculation on the matter and even in this case speculations tend to matter, because the idea is seemingly nice and merely seemingly because someone else saw that sight first and as I see it, the CBA never seemingly saw it as they went shopping at Microsoft. But what do I know? 

Have a great day you all, time for some coffee.

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July 6, 2026 · 12:08

History marks arrived

That is what I see, there are two settings. The first one was not new, it was three weeks old when I saw (at https://www.wired.com/story/a-court-has-ruled-that-google-is-liable-for-false-statements-generated-by-ai-overviews/) ‘A Court Has Ruled That Google Is Liable for False Statements Generated by AI Overviews’ it is not entirely undeserved, but it also sets Google up for people fleecing them, so some will ‘cater’ to the need of supporting a setting that set Google up for a trap. We cannot see this directly from “Germany has issued a ruling that could reshape the operation of search engines and artificial-intelligence-based chatbots worldwide. The Munich Regional Court preliminarily ruled that Google is liable for a series of false statements generated by its AI Overviews feature, requiring the company to prevent the dissemination of erroneous or inaccurate claims through its search engine.” So, whilst some will cater to the need of false feeing that search engine, we are left with a more than slightly vulnerable Google. Whilst we see (at https://www.rmit.edu.au/about/schools-colleges/media-and-communication/industry/rmit-information-integrity-hub/the-repost/june-2026) ‘Should AI be liable for its mistakes? A German court says yes.’ Where we see “Jeannie Paterson, a law professor and co-director of the Centre for AI and Digital Ethics at the University of Melbourne, said the decision was “potentially very important” and could have ramifications for Australian consumers. The decision hinged on who is responsible for the content of AI search results. The law has traditionally considered social media platforms and search engines to be mere conduits for information, Professor Paterson told The Repost, meaning companies “only become liable if they knowingly participate” in sharing information that proves to be wrong.” I personally believe that Professor Paterson is setting up loaded dice. You see, in the first AI does not yet exist. And the second part is “who is responsible for the content of AI search results”, that answer has two stages. The first is the programmer who ‘created’ the analytical setting of predictive analytics, because that is part of any DML/LLM setting. It is not AI. And that data is also a side, because there is a massive failure of validation and verification. We see it all the time and whilst some are ‘whisking’ it away through ‘hallucinations’ I have seen the Grok side of things on data that I created and it take all without any reference other stories I had written, as such we see a programming failure. And through that the stage of “who is responsible” gets a new life and makes the water pretty murky.

That is what I see. And anyone saying I am wrong can take a long walk of a short pier. As I saw that, another stage was handed to me.

Last week we were given ‘Ford rehires human engineers after AI fails to match quality checks’ (source: BBC), this is not new, I saw this coming a mile away and I present (as pseudo evidence) ‘Is it more than buggy?’ (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2024/01/05/is-it-more-than-buggy/) and I wrote that story in January 2024 (over 2.5 years ago), as such it should count as evidence and I gave the clear settings of “On May 27th 2023 the BBC reported (at https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65735769) that Peter LoDuca, the lawyer for the plaintiff got his material from a colleague of his at the same law firm. They relied on ChatGPT to get the brief ready.” Which now intersects with the AFR (at https://www.afr.com/work-and-careers/workplace/ai-use-in-dismissal-claims-borders-on-contempt-of-court-judge-warns-20260705-p60cob) ‘AI use in dismissal claims borders on contempt of court, judge warns’ and considering that this failures car in May 2023 when the BBC reported on this, we see a larger immature failure of other branches as well. You see, that it was tried is OK, and it failed three years ago, as such others should have stopped this as soon as they came aware. These settings all intertwine, because validation and verification is all part of these failures. As I see it, they were never made. I would be in favour of a separate tier of verifying all it produces, and these sources need to be validated. As such “after one claimant’s chatbot cited large swaths of evidence that did not exist, in a case showing the technology bedevilling the workplace umpire is now hitting the courts.” So, evidence that did not exist, where have I seen that before? (Small giggle inserted afterwards). This is why I feel that my services n technical support and customer service will be needed soon enough. When Fake AI fails to this degree. It is one small step for the AI agent to tell the customer “just press the carrier online button on the right side of your device” for this to fail and when that happens a few times, these ai agents will be pushed into the land of the Dodo soon enough. And that (until there is an actual AI) with proper validated and verified data is where that agent remains. You see, it was never rocket science. Some sales person saw the DML/LLM setting and started to call it AI, but Alan Turing had some clear settings on it all and this is not it. I believe in DML/LLM solutions, I saw an amazing application for lost and found in an airport reducing days in optionally less than an hour and there are more, but it is the, not AI, no matter how sweet they mention AI, it is the trap the salespeople set up and now that the class actions are setting in all kinds of field and personally I keep a high note on ‘Unauthorised Training Data’ and ‘AI washing’, whilst an alleged Anthropic settled for $1.5 billion for using pirated books to train its Claude AI model, I see my data transgressed upon and whilst some state that this is $1.5M per work, I was transgressed over 1700 times, as such I should be a billionaire (we can all dream can’t we?) But clearly I am not on that setting yet (to be clear I just confirmed with my wallet and my wallet is moaning due to a lack of green bills of $100. 

All these factors add up and whilst some are already seeing the lack of data, the lack of verification and the lack of validation. There is an overdue stage of properly aligning the settings we should be seeing. And that is why the class actions continue and whilst some will whip them away in settlements. And whilst we wonder why it took so long (over 3 years) for law firms to see that stage, we will see a lot more, because as I see it, the law interns believe that true time savings could be made with any ChatGPT/Claude the reality is slightly different and soon these clients will set up clauses that no AI is to be used and that is the larger failure in all this. So whilst Ford saw their failings in the early age, big software firms  aligning with what they call AI Agentic solutions will soon learn the price of that failure. And this is not just Microsoft, this is likely to effect all large software vendors. As such thousands will be hired once more and some who were pushed out in a slightly disgusting way will seek any other employment, as such these ‘embracers of Fake AI’ as I tend to call them will have a new problem and employment agencies are no longer able to get any, some who used their Agentic solutions from day one. And the fallout is soon spreading all over the world. So as I have seen these markers all over 2025, I see opportunity (for myself) and other technical support people in 2026 and 2027. The question for these firms becomes, did they treat their support people proper, or were they (as the teams goes) ‘dicks in reducing their staff members’ in this I love the quote from Walter Mitty (Ben Stiller) “This thing that you do, Ted, where you come into a place and push people out, you should know those people worked really hard to build this magazine. They believed in the motto. And I get it, you’ve got your marching orders and you have to do what you have to do, but you don’t have to be such a d*ck. Put that on a plaque and hang it at your next job.” And those who loved the part Ted Hendricks (Adam Scott) played in all this, because he was so managemently will now have a much larger problem, because I am still in contact with buddies who did my job 30 years ago and we all talk. So they now are unlikely to find anyone. So whilst they are learning that all AI is Fake AI and they could wait for for 2 decades (for True AI), but their KPI based is not that long, they now have a problem. And the is all before they figured that all data required revalidation, verification and attune it to a newer system, the markets will suddenly experience the bubble setting, that according to SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, who called the current artificial intelligence boom a “bubble” is an insult will be forced to do an about turn on that setting, of course those investors will have faced the write off if trillions, so they are unlikely to send Masayoshi Son a Christmas card in 2028, but that is merely my view on the matter. 

What matters is that is that these evangelists and influencers screaming “AI” are about to be found out as the new evil. There is also the groups that properly set the AI field in a DML/LLM setting, and they will be OK. If they had properly prepared their customers and aligned them with what is, I reckon that they will be OK (still a personal view on the matter).

So where are we now?
As the news is giving us more and more failures, more and more about turns from larger companies. We are seeing what could become the implosion of that bubble. The problem is that is will not implode all at once (some are unable to survive that), it is more likely then not to manifest itself as group implosions. Not all at once, but (for example) 10 explosions of 10% and when they are apart enough, some of the larger player will survive. In one setting when these judges consider that this setting was going on from 2023, making the decision that all AI assessed briefs are regarded as “clear contempt of court” we see that it would become a setting of staggered failures and when the time between these events are enough apart, the write off is optionally limited, but that is me just hoping for a reduced heartache. It is unlikely to affect me, but hoping for the worst setting is just uncivil. 

There was actually more, but I am somewhat exhausted and I have written part f all this before, just browse through my blog. I am still in a setting where I want to see who used my blog for scraping and AI washing. I doubt if I will ever find evidence that holds up in court, but with a (massively delusional) $2.55 billion which was 1700 times 1.5M at stake, one might be willing to waste a few hours on this. Anyway time for men to continue a written adventure in Abu Dhabi, time for more there too.

Have a great day. 

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May 28, 2026 · 02:07

Out of the blue

So, I was attending a setting where I was dependent on customer support. I am being intentionally vague here, because the youthful young sprout side nothing wrong. She was just young (about my age millennia ago), but before you start judging her, and she did nothing wrong. I got to think “What if we had customer support settings on a DML level?” Consider this (overly exaggerated example) 

Tech help: Good morning, how can I assist you?
Customer: My house is on fire
Tech help: Please take a moment to assess how we can help, how can we assist?
Customer: It’s freakin hot, my house is on fire

As you might expect, this will not go anywhere useful soon. And you might think that this is an exaggeration, but when you are assisting a customer and he cannot get to his data, his life figuratively ends. So we need to get tech hardware to assist us. So what if we had a voice measuring setting? Not to interpret (even thought this might help too), a setting where the voice can be measured for stress levels. The technology exist, but consider that this might be overly expensive. How can this technology be made cheaper? Now consider a DML engine that parses the stress level and considers alternative responses so instead of “How can we asses you problem”, state “let us assist you too get your data to you”, but the system gives the tech help options, and the setting gives the 4-5 responses in colour. Red would be ‘Don’t do that’, but others might become options, Orange, Yellow and Green would be available. There will be moments when the Orange is the only one that makes sense, but Green would optionally be the best. And the learning setting that a DML/LLM support system has is that it can keep track of the answers and how it affected the customer. You see, I have been in tech support for decades and there are a few handles you can apply, but the scripted answer is never a great option (I never showed that to my bosses), they had too tender an ego to risk it. 

So when this system would be deployed, optionally with bells and whistles like zendesk, but most of these products are about recording data, not a setting that actively supports the Helpdesk to record and adjust scripts for aiding the tech support. And even if all these AI systems are fake AI, the data for customer service, customer care and technical support exists, there is plenty of it. So these systems are fake AI, but it is based on DML/LLM systems and they could bring a much larger change in this field. And as I see it, change will be required soon enough. The old guard of these systems are retiring and the new generation mostly lack experience. So why not let the DML/LLM system tweak the system? 

These were just a few settings I was looking at and at present I have no idea what there is, so I ned to look into this, because I might have developed an idea here, but perhaps so did someone else and I need to look into this to see what there is. So it is a little out of the blue, but I have been involved with customer care and technical support for decades, so I might has an idea or two to help this along. So, I need to mull over a few things and as I had nothing to offer DARPA (they are all in drone mode) I need to find a new hobby in the non-drone setting. Although destroying the Iranian railway systems are done based (as was my handle to destroy their refineries). And as DARPA is in delusional mode (as I personally see this) to get a drone carry twice the weight of the drone, is simply ridiculous. The Cessna 408 SkyCourier couldn’t do it, the ATR 72-600F couldn’t do it and the BAE 146-200QT couldn’t do this, and they have people in place who tried that for a life time, so why push the cogs of a civilian setting? I felt pretty proud that I as a non-expert in drones found a way to destroy Iranian railway lines and refineries. But I do believe that DARPA is taking this to a delusional stage. 

Still for now lets see what we can do to improve customer carer lives and reduce the stress they are confronted with. A much more rewarding result. Don’t you think so?

Have a great day.

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January 5, 2026 · 16:25

The setting we hope for

That is a given, we all hope that certain settings come to play and I am no different. Part of it is banked on settings that are realistic and then there are those that are not that realistic. Before I start with this, one little update. I made mention of a new movie that would scare the nasty cloth out of the NSA (GCHQ too) and I just gotten the first few scenes out of the way. It makes me happy, but now I realise that it is not going to be a two hour event. At present I’m sitting on the first part, but the continuing story will not be a lot more than a short film some define this as under 40 minutes (including credits), That is what I am looking at. Perhaps a TV film? It wouldn’t be much longer and lets be clear. If you need two hours to scare the pants out of the NSA, your not doing a particular good job, but I might be wrong. So the script will be ready a lot sooner than I bargained for. 

So back to the matter at hand. Realistically the employment game is definitely changing because (at https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/23/oracles_new_aienhanced_support_portal/) we get told that ‘Oracle’s new AI-enhanced support portal leaves users fuming’ which was released just before Christmas, so I missed out on this initially, but we are given “Oracle’s new AI-powered support portal is frustrating customers and support engineers who are struggling to find the basics, such as old tickets, links to database patch programs and release schedules for current databases.” It works for me as I have worked my whole life in customer service and technical support. As such it seems my streak of bad luck is ending and when a company like Oracle gets it wrong, there is not much hope that the others are fairing better, which would work out well for me.

I miss customer service and I remember when I was ‘made redundant’ all whilst others were saying that the new technologies were making my job obsolete. And I have reason to smile. When I am shown “Greg Parikh, Oracle veep for information development and operations, said in a blog post that the MOS portal offers new features, including AI-powered interactions, streamlined navigation, improved search capabilities, and enhanced knowledge access.” And as I see it, those who live according to the sweet spot of cheap revenue now see that others aren’t having much luck either and they need to consider their sales track and how they can salvage what can be salvaged and now it turns out that they will need manpower as the most defining resource and that is good news for me. And as I see it (in case of Oracle) that looking at “Users pointed out IDs had completely changed, such that searching for 888.1 — the Primary Note for Database Proactive Patch Program — or 555.1 — database 19c Recommended One-off patches returns error message KA912 as the top result. “Links to other documents, which still reference the old IDs, are currently failing for me,” one user said.” Gives the indication that their knowledge base isn’t doing any better and if the programmers cannot make it work, their manpower setting will drastically change and this is just Oracle. As I see it, there are hundreds more firms who have that very same escalating problem, as such I expect that places like ADNOC (Abu Dhabi) might soon require their own corporate service division and their own technical support making short work of the available resources. I reckon that this works out nicely for me. 

So we have the realistic settings, and the dreamy station of a new movie, or at least whilst I am still applying for jobs, it will have to do and it keeps my but this creativity high, an undervalued ability in customer service. But this is merely one setting. Is it that bad? Well you judge, but a little over a year ago we were given ‘16 technical support tools to look out for in 2025’ (source:outsource accelerator) and some do work, but if didn’t grab the right one, the setting is a precautious one. Do you switch and take that chance or reinvest in your own knowledge base and that setting is dangerous, because you could lose a lot more than you bargained for. So whilst some went into combinations of SaaS, Paas or IaaS, your customers are in a tight setting where they demand service or they walk. Larger firms have even a more robust setting and in this age of fake AI, revenue lost is a large setting of shareholders giving up on you. That is the upside for me and as I see it, my time is not worth its weight in gold. 

So whilst we are given ‘IBM Is Laying Off Thousands of Employees as Its AI Business Surges’ they are also cutting a single digit percentage which in case of their 270,000-person global workforce which implies that up to 25,000 people are being laid off. Now consider where they are and that is not a given, but technical support requires certain people to stay in place and when that is messed with nearly anything can go wrong. Now IBM and Oracle are two of the big boys and they wold have their ships in place. And in that setting we see the Register giving us the setting above. 

So, who else and how much is being slid down the pipeline because some people think of their trolley and forget that other trolleys require assistance. It is in that setting that I think that the larger players need to hold one and rehire their old staff a lot faster before that knowledge goes somewhere else and in both these settings I get to win a better place in the work atmosphere.

Am I right? Am I wrong?

That is usually the question, but I personally believe that I am right because I never expected a player like Oracle getting that part wrong, as such things are looking up to the people who worked their lifetime in Technical Support and Customer Care. Even if it goes more towards a player like Zendesk. The knowledge that they have requires expansion because that knowledge is about to go the way of the Dodo. In other views, they are not the only one and the one who has the most diverse software takes over the others who are lacking. And as I see it, these systems are not enabling systems. They take it all and that is fine, but when we see the kind of failures that Oracle is showing the world, we see a growing set of barriers that could (merely a could here) define the needs for the next decade because all these cost crunchers require AI (which does not yet exist) and now that they are getting nervous, they need to concentrate on what works and what is merely bling for show. As such I feel vindicated is probably the best word. My knowledge is about to get a value upgrade, so I start 2026 feeling rather happy. And of course I could be wrong and I need to consider other venues. Time will tell.

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December 6, 2025 · 20:40

TBD CEO OpenAI 

That is the thought I had, yesterday, 5 hours after I wrote my piece, I still saw the news appear all over the media, some on it was getting a ridiculous amount of attention, so I decided to take another look at some of this. First there was the Business insider (at https://www.businessinsider.com/openai-code-red-chatgpt-advertising-google-search-gemini-2025-12) giving us ‘OpenAI’s Code Red: Protect the loop, delay the loot’ where we see “Focus on improving ChatGPT, and pause lower-priority initiatives. The most striking pause is advertising. Why delay such a lucrative opportunity at a moment when OpenAI’s finances face intense scrutiny? Because in tech, nothing matters more than users.” This was followed by “Every query and click fed a feedback loop: user behavior informed ranking systems, which improved results, which attracted more users. Over time, that loop became an impenetrable moat. Competing with it has proven nearly impossible.

ChatGPT occupies a similar position for AI assistants. Nearly a billion people now interact with it weekly, giving OpenAI an unmatched new window into human intent, curiosity, and decision-making. Each prompt and reply can be fed back into model training, evaluations, and reinforcement learning to strengthen what is arguably the world’s most powerful AI feedback loop.” All this makes sense, it comes with the nearly mandatory “Google’s Gemini 3 rollout has lured new users. If ChatGPT’s quality slips or feels cluttered, defecting to Google becomes easier. Introducing ads now risks exactly that. Even mildly irritated users could view ads as one annoyance too many.” Whilst in the background we are ‘sensitive’ to “OpenAI has already committed to spending hundreds of billions of dollars on infrastructure to serve ChatGPT at a global scale. At some point, those bills will force the company to monetize more aggressively.

If OpenAI manages to build even half of Google’s Search ads business in an AI-native form, it could generate roughly $50 billion in annual profit. That’s one way to fund its colossal ambitions.” This gives OpenAI a two sided blade in the back. It was a good ploy, but that ploy is deemed to be counter productive and I get that, but dropping the ads might sting with the investors as It was the dimes that they were seeing coming their way and ChatGPT needs to make a smooth entry all the way to the next update, which will be near impossible to avoid in several ways. Google has the inside track now and whilst there are a few settings that are ‘malleable’ for the users, the smooth look is essential for ChatGPT to continue. And that is before other start looking at the low quality data it verifies against. Google has, as I see it, exactly the same problem, but as I see it, ChatGPT gets it now in advance. 

Newcomer (at https://www.newcomer.co/p/openais-code-red-shows-the-power) gives us “In truth, as Newcomer’s Tom Dotan wrote back in April, Google, with all of its formidable assets, was never very far behind. Nor is it currently very far ahead. Anthropic too has always been essentially neck-and-neck with OpenAI on the core technology. The capabilities of the big foundation models, and even some lighter ones like DeepSeek, are broadly similar. Marc Benioff, himself a skilled practitioner in the arts of attention, even claimed this week that the big models will be interchangeable commodities, like disk drives. Yet the perception of who’s on top matters quite a lot at a moment when consumers, enterprise technology buyers, and investors are all deciding where to place some highly consequential long-term bets. That brings us back to Altman’s “Code Red.”” Is a truth in itself, but the next part “while the alarm came in a company-wide memo that wasn’t officially announced publicly, we can stipulate that the “leak” of the memo, if not necessarily orchestrated, was almost certainly part of the plan. A media maestro like Altman surely knew that a memo going out to thousands of employees with charged language like “Code Red” was all but guaranteed to make its way to the press. Publicizing a panicked internal reaction to a competitor’s new product might seem like a counter-intuitive way to maintain your reputation as the industry leader.” As I see it, someone in Microsoft marketing earned his dollars in marketing that day, but this is a personal feeling, I have no data to back it up. It is now up to Sam Altman to deliver his ‘new’ version in the coming week and it better the a great new release, or as I see it, there will be heads rolling all over the floor and Sam Altman knows that the pressure is up. I don’t think he is scared as some media says, but he is definitely worried, because this setting will set the record of $13 billion straight, into or away from Microsoft and Sam Altman knows this, as such he is probably a little worried and in a software release any of a hundred things can go wrong and they all need to go right at present. 

Then we get “Altman and OpenAI are so good at making news that it’s sometimes hard to tell what’s real.” So, isn’t that the setting all the time? I have always seen Sam Altman as a bad second hands car salesman, That is my take, but I have had a healthy disgust for salespeople for over 30 years. I am a service person, Technical support, customer support. That was always my field. I am not against sales, merely against cleaning up their messes. At times this comes with the territory, shit happens, but those salespeople overselling something just so that they can fill their pipeline and make their numbers are not acceptable to me. To illustrate this, A little setting (devoid of names and brands) “A salesperson came to me with what he needed. We could not do that and I told him, so off he goes calling every technical support person on the planet until he found one that agreed with him and then he sold the solution to the customer and hung that persona name on this. I had to clean up the mess and set up a credit invoice, but after I went through the whole 9 yards making it over 30 days ensuring him that he kept his commission” that is the type I am disgusted with because the brands as a whole suffers, all for the need of greed. It is short sighted thinking. I goes nowhere, but his monthly revenue was guaranteed. And I feel that Sam Altman is not completely like that, but it is the ‘offset’ of salespeople that I carry within me. For me protecting the product and the customer are first and foremost on my mind. 

Then we get Futurism (at https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/openai-is-suddenly-in-major-trouble) where we see ‘OpenAI Is Suddenly in Major Trouble’ OK, is this true? We are given “The financial stakes are almost comical in their magnitude: The company is lighting billions of dollars on fire, with no end in sight; it’s committed to spending well over $1 trillion over the next several years while simultaneously losing a staggering sum each quarter. And revenues are lagging far behind, with the vast majority of ChatGPT users balking at the idea of paying for a subscription.” I don’t agree with this setting. You either pay, or you see advertisement that is the setting. There are no free rides and the sooner you realise this, the easier this gets. Then we are given “Meanwhile, Google has made major strides, quickly catching up with OpenAI’s claimed 800 million or so weekly active ChatGPT users as of September. Worse yet, Google is far better positioned to turn generative AI into a viable business — all while minting a comfortable $30 billion in profit each quarter, as the Washington Post points out.” I agree with the setting the Washington Post sets out with and Google does have an advantage, but that is still relying on the fact that Sam Altman does not get his new version seen as stellar in the coming week. He still has a much larger issue, but that is for later. All this comes at the price of being in the frontrunner team. Easy does it, there is no other way and the stakes are set rather high. So then we are given “In a Thursday note, Deutsche Bank analyst Jim Reid estimated staggering losses for OpenAI amounting to $140 billion between 2024 and 2029.” This is probably true, but where are the numbers. $140 billion over 5 years is one, but what revenue is set against it? Because if this is still set against a revenue number that OpenAI keeps making they are going decently sweet, the numbers were never in debate, the return on investment was and these stakes are high and there is no debating that, these numbers are either given or they are not. 

Then we are given something that makes sense ““OpenAI may continue to attract significant funding and could ultimately develop products that generate substantial profits and revolutionize the world,” he wrote, as quoted by WaPo. “But at present, no start-up in history has operated with expected losses on anything approaching this scale.” “We are firmly in uncharted territory,” Reid added.” I agree, in several ways, but the revenue is not given as such the real deal is absent. Consider YouTube, did anyone see the upside of a $1.65 billion acquisition 20 years ago? It now generates $36.1 billion in annual revenue (2024), Microsoft and OpenAI are banking on that same setting and Microsoft needs it to get a quality replacement for Clippy and they are banking on ChatGPT, this will only happen if they win over Google and I have my doubts on this. There is no real evidence because the new version isn’t ready yet, but it really needs one hitch to make it all burn down and Altman knows this. The numbers or better, the statistics are not on his side. And as I haven’t see a decent software price fight for a while, so I am keeping my thumbs up for Altman (I am however a through and through Google guy). This is a worthy fight watching and I am wondering how this might evolves over the next week.

The stakes are high, the challenge is high, lets see if Sam Altman rises to the occasion. It’s almost Sunday for me so have a great day you all, I reckon that Ryan Reynolds is about 6 hours from breakfast in Vancouver now.

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May 18, 2021 · 11:04

When is a job not a job?

This is not a farce or a joke, it is a serious question. So at what point have you seen a customer service role, paid $400K a year with the following:

– You will receive an email with a link to start your self-paced, online job application.
– Our hiring platform will guide you through a series of online “screening” assessments to check for basic job fit, job-related skills, and finally a few real-world job-specific assignments.
– You will be paired up with one of our recruiting specialists who can answer questions you might have about the process, role, or company, and help you get to the final interview step.

This is my view of a really silly approach to data collecting!

We get more when we seek deeper quotes like “(name redacted) has turned down high profile tech roles in Europe, preferring to be near his family in Egypt. Crossover enables him to work remotely as a Senior Software Engineer for Trilogy – a role in which he gets to learn new things every day” and it is all possible via a place in Austin Texas (a big city in the USA).

So it took less than 2 minutes to find ‘This company is a scam. Become your own contractor’ This was one source, there were more, the larger stage is found (at https://www.glassdoor.com.au/Reviews/Employee-Review-Crossover-for-Work-RVW11216098.htm). 

Now, normally I do not give a fig, I really do not care who they entangle and how they go about it, but in today’s market to find these so called ‘scams’ going on in places like LikedIn is a larger concern. And to make matters worse, they now have over 2.8 MILLION followers. When places like LinkedIn and Indeed cannot keep their offer database clean, the actual people desperately looking for a job will not ever succeed. Places like Australia have to deal with age discrimination for too much, getting data clowns thrown in the mix does not help and the pot of where to find decent and real jobs is getting slimmer. You see, there are all these people that claim that SEEK is the real deal, but consider that they have (today) 9,761 technical support jobs and 484 UNIX jobs in ONE metropolitan area, do you think that adds up? I can give you a guarantee that it does not, I used SEEK in 2012-2014 and I got ZERO returns, not one job was real, they were all recruiters gathering resumes, a fail rate of 100%, pretty impressive is it not?

As I see it, when these ‘providers’, who came in from nothing and offer a decent service, they need to make sure that their service is clean, if not their value goes straight into the basement and it has larger repercussions. So when I see messages that they cannot find people with Digital experience and some people have been applying for years, I merely giggle. One is not looking in the right place (the one who cannot find applicants), they all claim to be in a global economy and they see “Today’s top 1000+ And Digital jobs in Saffron Walden, England, United Kingdom” someone is clearly losing the plot and it is not me, it really is not. For me that part lighted up as my great grandfather came from Saffron Walden and for the viewers, see the image below. Do you really think that place has 1000 jobs to offer?

Saffron Walden

So when is a job offer not a job offer? As I see it when it is a ruse, a scam or mere data (CV) collection. That is my view on the matter. 

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