Who Is Swimming Naked as AI Hype Fades: The Comeback of Unsexy AI

Last week in Shenzhen, the CIO of a consumer electronics company with annual revenue of 5 billion RMB complained to me: last year they spent 3 million RMB on a certain large model platform to build an intelligent customer service system, but after launch, customer satisfaction actually dropped by 3 percentage points. The reason was that the model's answers were too "smart"—not only verbose, but also frequently recommending irrelevant product features to customers. Eventually, they removed the large model and switched back to an old system based on rule engines and simple classifiers, and satisfaction recovered.