250: The Chat Interface Debate: Is Text Really the Future?

Hi, I'm Eric Dotz. And I'm John Wessel. Welcome to The Data Stack Show. The Data Stack Show is a podcast where we talk about the technical, business, and human challenges involved in data work. Join our casual conversations with innovators and data professionals to learn about new data technologies and how data teams are run at top companies.

Before we dig into today's episode, we want to give a huge thanks to our presenting sponsor, Rudder Sack. They give us the equipment and time to do this show week in, week out, and provide you the valuable content. Ruddersack provides customer data infrastructure and is used by the world's most innovative companies to collect, transform, and deliver their event data wherever it's needed, all in real time. You can learn more at ruddersack.com.

All right, welcome back to the Data Stack Show. We've got Matt here with me, Cynical Data Guy, and we're going to do a little segment on LinkedIn posts. So Matt, welcome back to the show. Thanks for having me. We're going to miss our... fearless leader today so i don't know we'll see how this goes we got we we got it we got it all right we're gonna start out with this one you're gonna love this one matt because i have yet to see

A LinkedIn post that has to do with data that does not have the word dashboard in it for at least a month. That's true. Yeah, it's, I don't know. I don't know what's going on with that. Okay, ready? Yep. And this is a meme, so I can't give you the full context here. Maybe Matt can help out. It's a Futurama meme. Futurama meme, okay. So here's the meme. If you have to...

If you have to set up each answer in advance, is it a chatbot or a dashboard? Sounds like we're getting to the, like, it's not a dashboard because it's just text. Oh, so it's worse than a dashboard. but yeah and i think and by chat but like i think obviously like ai chatbot is what we're going here and i do think we're going to get into this thing where

To get consistent outputs, you're going to have chat interface that end up with very deterministic results. Yeah. It's going to be picking deterministic. Right. Yeah. Right. And it's going to be like, wait. did we need ai to do this and then it's also going to be should this be a chatbot yeah i mean the biggest thing it makes me think of is like what's one of the uses of the dashboard i can look at multiple things and compare them at the same time

Now I have to ask multiple questions and use it to get like, why am I doing more work at this point? Yeah. So this was a really interesting moment. For those of you, we've had a couple of shows recently released from Data Council. that we attended. And one of the, one of the really interesting moments for one of the talks is there was, it wasn't a standing ovation, but it was one of the only like, just kind of spontaneous cheering. It would be a good way to put it.

When one of the presenters said that the chat interface is not the interface for the future. It's not the interface that every AI thing needs to use. Yeah, I think that's true right there. I mean, it serves a good purpose in a lot of. places. If you're asking questions and you need to, you know, text back, but yeah, the let's harangue everything into a chat interface is a bit much though. It might also be proving that Ben

His thing that he posted on multiple times in his blog, which is that everything becomes BI. Everything becomes a dashboard. All companies eventually become a BI company. So there you go. it's yet ai companies are becoming a bi yeah i mean yeah and it is funny because all of modern sass right is if you break it down really really is

some kind of like web form storing some kind of information and presenting it back. Almost all of it is that. Well, no, it gets real bad when they, when you start having able to have the, when it starts asking you, would you want to export this to Excel? that's when you've truly gone to you're just the bi yeah yeah well and the other thing that i think is funny and obviously the

I mean, the chat is a good interface for LLMs in their current form. But if we actually look at like the most engaging, and you actually have a, you have a post you're going to share in a minute that's somewhat related to this, is if you look at the most engaging apps and the highest. whatever the it used to be dwell time like now it's you know engagement time or whatever right it's video and picture yeah so to say that like oh everything's gonna be chat it's like well

Not so far. We are a visual species, though. I mean, maybe there'll be something involved with this. All right. You've got one for us. Okay. So this is, this was posted by Tom Goodwin on LinkedIn. So thanks, Tom. This is every person alive. I really need to check my phone less and spend less time online. Every tech company alive. Wouldn't it be great if you could strap the internet to your face and have notifications as tiny electric shocks?

of every person alive. I wish I didn't have to get my kid a smartphone. These things are amphetamines to the eyes and essentially rob our kids of childhood. Every tech company alive. Why don't we make Tinder but for kids and like use AI so you're not actually talking to a sociopath. It's just AI pretending to be your friend. And that would lower our cost base and increase TAM. And then he followed that up with a quick comment here where he said,

I have said this many times before, but there are absolutely no more poorly equipped people to lead us into a wonderful future than the people generally leading technology companies. They exist to optimize lives away against poorly conceived KPIs. John, your thoughts? See, when you pick the post like this and you get to read them, that means I have to respond to them first. So I don't feel like that's fair. But I'll play. Now I have to look like what?

okay business like okay he isn't consulting it looks like but yeah i mean i would say compare like the end of it is like what compared to what They exist to optimize lives against poorly conceived. Poorly conceived what? Are they optimizing shareholder value? Yes. Is that what every for-profit company is doing? Yes. Could they do a better job and be more socially responsible, etc.?

yeah yeah probably well yes definitely i think he's probably going off of the engagement or the usage or those metrics you know but i mean and i think there's merit to that it's also like you know that's tv and radio right and all that is we have it just on you know even growth hormone now so yeah here's a funny term i hadn't heard until recently you're familiar with vibe vibe revenue

vibe revenue yes okay i've heard vibe i don't know if i've heard of vibe revenue so the concept i guess here is essentially like a lot of these like rocket ship fast-growing ai companies yeah that have like

Oh, I'm curious revenue. Or, hey, what is this revenue? That would be revenue. Going to repeat very long revenue. Right. And there's probably other categories of vibe. But the interesting thing... is i do think the kpis are going to change like i think he has a point with the poorly conceived kpis is that there are going to need to be more like better ways of tying

kpis is a business metrics essentially where before it was just like user engagement in general like we need to better understand what are they doing how does that transform their business or their lives or whatever like business you're in until they figure out how to stick advertising into all of this then it'll just go back to the same whole thing yeah well fair well

Yeah, I mean, it's all going to optimize around whatever the monetization of it is. To go back to the first part of his post, I do think we've seen this where like... I don't know if you've talked to any like really like what's called in the bubble tech people. Right. Their answer to everything is like a social network. You know, it's like, no, nobody wants that. It's like we have a loneliness crisis.

What if we created another website with AI that could interact with you? And it's like, no, stop. Don't go that way. You're going in the wrong direction. So I think there's something there, but yeah, I also just. It just hits that nice little cynical side of me. We're going to take a quick break from the episode to talk about our sponsor, Rudderstack. Now, I could say a bunch of nice things as if I found a fancy new tool.

but John has been implementing RutterStack for over half a decade. John, you work with customer event data every day, and you know how hard it can be to make sure that data is clean and then to stream it everywhere it needs to go. Yeah, Eric, as you know, customer data can get messy. And if you've ever seen a tag manager, you know how messy it can get.

so rudder stack has really been one of my team's secret weapons we can collect and standardize data from anywhere web mobile even server side and then send it to our downstream tools Now, rumor has it that you have implemented the longest running production instance of Rudderstack at six years and going. Yes, I can confirm that. And one of the reasons we picked Rudderstack was that it does not store the data and we can live stream data to our downstream tools.

One of the things about the implementation that has been so common over all the years and with so many RudderStack customers is that it wasn't a wholesale replacement of your stack. It fit right into your existing tool set. Yeah, and even with technical tools, Eric, things like Kafka or PubSub, but you don't have to have all that complicated customer data infrastructure. Well, if you need to stream clean customer data to your entire stack, including your data infrastructure tools,

Head over to ruddersack.com to learn more. All right. So this one, this one's from Joe Reese. He's been on the show before. So shout out to Joe. Joe! Love it. I really like this take, especially just because it brings back memories. So you ready for this? All right. With AI, we are still in the AOL, CompuServe, Earthlink, etc. days. Wall Gardens.

or bbs2 walled gardens like today's ai at that point the web browser was very new so think like netscape right yes it had changed everything then there was mobile you know etc perspective matters it's very early in this game no idea what happens but it's likely going to be cool scary and very unexpected the fact that i know what all those things are does that mean we're getting old at this yeah okay you've got mail

I actually never had an AOL account. I did, but you know why I had it? Why? AOL Instant Messenger. Ah, yeah. yeah i think i did have that but i didn't actually use the mail i had a hot yeah yeah i don't remember using the mail very long but i had it because of instant messenger yeah that for those of you that's slack but different slack but

It's more basic. Yeah. But I actually like this perspective a lot in that it's easy to go... down the well-trodden paths of like of course it's gonna like be multimodal and there's gonna be like better video things and better photo things and you know all those things because which is the path internet traveling which

But I don't think it is that deterministic. I don't think it's like, well, of course, AI is going to do video, then it's going to do photo, then it's going to do this. I think it's different enough there'll be novel things that come out of it, just like with the internet. Yeah.

will legitimately surprise people. Well, I also think, you know, if we're going through this stage of it, we're probably also going through the, you know, internet bubble stage too. Right. There was a lot of like, you just put it on the internet, put it on the internet.

you had companies that had you know we're losing tens of millions of dollars a year as public companies and have no basis for how they were ever going to make money and yet their stock went up in the late 90s before it all came crashing down so there's you know we're starting to see i think a little bit of a pullback on some of the like worst excesses of the like kind of ai like expansion let's call it

And I do think he makes a good point there, and I agree with, which is nobody really knows what it's going to look like. Of all the things that mainstream people were predicting, mobile was not something that people saw in 1998, particularly because... mobile phones were not a big thing right and then they were just making calls they didn't hook up to anything there was no green on right really so you know you had all those things that like it's just it's a good reminder to have just

We don't actually know what's going to happen. And while everyone loves to try to make straight line predictions, the future is almost never a straight line prediction from any moment you're in right now.

yeah did you see the announcement with open ai and donny ives group for the hardware company i don't know if you read about something about i didn't read any of the details on it There were very few details. Oh, so I basically did read the details. The details. No, I mean, it's interesting, right? Like for, you know, pretty much all of you know, like it's like, all right, let's take the guy who...

you know, was instrumental to all of these, like, really, like, truly transformational devices, you know, through his time at Apple and, like, let's collaborate with OpenAI and the best of AI and then creating hardware. Like, cool, yeah, good concept, but it's... quite hard to imagine and apparently they have like a prototype and like people use it there's no details about the prototype that i'm aware of there's some sort of device but here's my question to you where do you

What do you think you do? So as far as like, is this metaglasses style? Is this some kind of handheld device style? Where do you think you go with that? They didn't say this. Maybe there's rumors I don't know about, but I think we have essentially zero information. Where would that, I don't know. So if you're trying to do something, because like, so obviously with Ives there, very instrumental in a lot of Apple's designs and how they work.

I got to think it's going to be something voice related. Yeah. But like exactly what, I mean, glasses feels, I mean, obvious or whatever. I don't know. I mean, that would be a tough one. I really hope it's not like a pin. Yeah. I just, that is of no interest to me. The like, let's put an Alexa button on your chest. Right. No thanks. Well, I mean, I don't know. What was that company that like did the pin that I think.

already is like have they already like called it yeah it was like humane or something yeah yeah they're already they're already done yeah because it was weird and dumb yeah i mean i think here's my thing with voice that's i now that you say that i do think i read some predictions and i actually even talked to somebody earlier today it was like it's got to be voice personally yeah okay i think i see that professionally though like what if

all of the interfaces in the office and your office like changed to be more voice heavy like i don't know that just feels weird it would have to be through headphones at that point you'd have to yeah up to like you know to some type of like airpod or something i guess i mean yeah it's but i don't know but all this stuff i mean it's even okay so you're gonna do something with that it's like for it to really work well there's gonna have to be something heavy somewhere on you

right and that's i think one of the biggest problems yeah like like some kind of battery some kind of power source yeah i mean even if you look at like apple's you know like vr yeah stuff right it still had that rick of a battery that you like put in your back pocket or something right But I also think one of the things that people forget is because I think there's always like, oh, because Apple did this. And it's like, hey, guys, you gotta remember, Apple started as a hardware company.

It has been a hardware company ever since. Consistently, yeah. None of these other people who try to copy them have ever been hardware companies. They've been software companies. And there's a big difference between those. So I always view these types of things with a bit of a skeptical eye just because hardware is hard. Right. There's only a few people who do it really well and it takes a long time to get. And it's still super capital intensive, super capital intensive, which.

I think like, you know, the Zuckerbergs of the world have found that out the hard way. Right. And it's just, you know, it requires a lot of expertise that you can't. Like it's not going to exist internally with you. You have to go out and get it worked. It's not something you can train up in six months. Right. Right. This is a, you know, you need people with decades of experience. Right. This stuff. Right. Okay. I think you had another one.

All right. So here's my other one. This is another LinkedIn post. I'll leave the name off for the moment. And it says R is completely dead as a language. And I say that as someone who was once a strong proponent of it. The only use case I can think of for R at this point is to verify that my Python or sometimes node.js code is correct. That is literally it. If you are building an R, you should stop and switch to a mainstream staff.

Making this change will allow you to go at least 10 times and probably a hundred times faster. Bold take. I have thoughts on this, but you need me to anchor you. Need me to start.

I can start if you want. I got thoughts. One, art just has a really special place in my heart, so I would never declare it dead. Two, it's open source so anything that's open source has been around forever and has super high adoption lindy effect like it's not gonna like die because you said it well just you know that that's just not how life works But I think my biggest qualm with the post actually is, and I think this is referring to productivity. Yeah.

as far as like 10 times or 100 times faster i don't think he's talking about code execution i think he's talking about productivity right i do not agree with that i think our at least for the workloads i've used like analytics is

very efficient like i've never had to like wow this is like so verbose like i gotta switch to python that's never been a thought i've had yeah i haven't written a ton of r but like i've never had that thought writing r all right what's your take on it so i've got two levels of takes so one is about r specifically and

One is about the genre of posts. Sure. So the first one about R. So that was the primary language I used for like the first, I mean, I used it as an analyst. I used it as a data scientist. Used it for a long time. so like you it kind of has a special place in my heart with there where i did eventually have to when i was running team switch over to python was

when you wanted to productionize it and you wanted to hook it up to like existing tools, like pre-commits and a lot of the GitHub automation type stuff, GitHub actions. It was so hard to do with R because people just don't build. Right, yeah. Whereas Python was easy. Yeah. And like I was in a Google shop. Everything, they were like, if you use Python, it'll just work. Oh, you want to use R? You want to kind of do that all yourself. Sorry. Yeah.

So like when I was doing that, when I ran a whole department, we switched to Python because I was like, unless you absolutely have to do it in R, if it's gonna go out, this is the fastest. If you're talking about productivity in the sense of like.

can i get it out there and make changes quickly yeah that would be that way i can see going to like a python works just because everything's made to work yeah yeah like that's one of the first things it is yeah but i mean i also i ran a team that we owned production code and it was

you know and it was pricing loans and it was all in our right and it was fine and right now we had a cicd for it but i mean we lost that it was custom built for it right but you could still do it right it wasn't slow or anything like break well as long as you didn't try to do like like dplyr in production. Don't do that. No pipes none of that. Right. I had to give the data scientists on another team. So so like yeah it's not I don't think it's dead. It's also like

I don't know. So when I first started, you know, I had to learn SAS, like SAS. Yeah. And as I was learning that and got certified and everyone was like, SAS is dead. sass is not very much not dead yeah no like bank of america has like over a million lines of code of sass it's not going away right but these things don't go away so that kind of leads to my second one which is kind of the genre of the post which is

I am so tired of this. Why are we still arguing over this stuff? Why are we still trying to like, what's the point of saying, well, it's dead. Really? Don't use it. Who cares? Because none of this stuff dies. No. Cobalt is still out there. Fortran is still out there.

If it got heavily used, it's still out there. And it's like, there's a lot of places and there's a lot of regulatory situations where like, you have to use R because it's the approved language. Sure. It was the same thing with SAS at the time too.

So I just, I get very tired of these. They feel very clickbaity. They feel very like I'm going to, I'm going to rage bait for clicks and stuff like that. It's like, cause I remember the old Python versus R, which one was the right language. There is no right language.

Well, and here's what I think the interesting thing about, because there's a whole circle of sequel is dead post going around again. We had a break. We had a couple month break and they're back. Yeah, I noticed that. I miss the old days.

But here's my take on all the dead is dead post is if you're able to solve a problem completely deterministically with any programming language. Why, from everything we know currently about LLMs, why would you move it to a non-deterministic solution? Yeah.

There are so many things in the world that need to be improved, that need to be automated, that need to be streamlined. If you have a streamlined working deterministic solution, I think those are the very last things to get replaced because we have, if ever, if ever.

And the only reason that people will start replacing them is essentially nobody knows how they work. So they have to write it in this non-deterministic way because they don't know how the deterministic way works. That will happen. That will probably happen. But it's not ideal. But I'll also push back. I wrote an article this morning.

about how there's all of these places that are still running things off of DOS 3.0 and Windows NT and stuff like this, that it's like, you know, like, oh, those are like, you know, those aren't major things. Like, oh, no, that's like in I think it's in Germany. The display panels on all of their trains are still in DOS. Yeah. You know, these things don't go away, particularly because if it works.

Why am I going to replace it? Why am I going to take the time to go deal with that? And to your point with the deterministic thing, there's lots of stuff that. these llms can work on i mean i'm working for a company now that does that it's a lot of things with summarization right going and finding answers and on in unstructured data and stuff like that but you don't it's like a little bit where it's going to replace sequel

Why? There's not a good reason for that. There are deterministic workflows. They probably should be deterministic. The thing I need to do is deterministic. Let's use a tool that's deterministic. For sure. all right i think we're at the buzzer any final words for our listeners no i think we're good we think we did it remember people languages don't really die they just kind of fade away to be fuzz that will try to kill you yeah exactly all right thanks everybody stay cynical

The Data Stack Show is brought to you by Rudder Stack. Learn more at rudderstack.com.