> Worse, they were putting an untrustworthy AI summary in the exact place that users expect to see an email subject, with no mention of it being AI-generated
This seems like one of the greater sins here. Why in the world would you ever replace the actual subject that people have been expecting to see in that location for older than I've been alive?
Same thing happens with Apple Intelligence. You might join a waitlist for dinner reservations and get a text that says you'll be notified when your table is available. And then the summary will say something like "Your table is available"!
I'm the kind of person who is posting on HN about AI - I know this stuff isn't perfect and take AI summaries with the appropriate grains of salt. But I have to imagine it's insanely confusing/frustrating for a pretty sizable fraction of people.
> As an on-call engineer, this is the point when you start questioning your life choices. You know that the issue is affecting thousands of users, but the offending phrase doesn’t appear anywhere in EQL’s codebase, aside from some very old launches several years ago.
Aside from the AI angle, there’s actually another way this weird bug can manifest.
If you’re following best practices and sending plaintext alternatives with your HTML email, then some mail clients will use the plaintext for the summary snippet and render the HTML when you open the email. So if a developer copies the success templates to the failure templates but only updates the HTML and forgets to update the plaintext alternative, then you will see this exact behaviour. It’s also pretty tricky to catch when manually testing because not all mail clients act this way.
I don't know how these things are deployed, but I imagine they are using sub billion parameter count models?
It doesn't make sense to use high parameter count ones at least due to costs.
But then I feel there is a disconnect in adopting AI. We are accustomed to chatgpt, claude, etc being really good at following instructions and summarize content, but in reality those are too expensive to host, so we end up with really dumb ai being integrated everywhere.
Maybe I'm wrong here? I know a fair bit about the landscape of local ai models for personal use, but I'm not sure how this is done when you need to summarize a billion emails a day.
pavel_lishin ·18 hours ago
This seems like one of the greater sins here. Why in the world would you ever replace the actual subject that people have been expecting to see in that location for older than I've been alive?
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extr ·18 hours ago
I'm the kind of person who is posting on HN about AI - I know this stuff isn't perfect and take AI summaries with the appropriate grains of salt. But I have to imagine it's insanely confusing/frustrating for a pretty sizable fraction of people.
Show replies
djohnston ·17 hours ago
Dark days indeed.
JimDabell ·18 hours ago
If you’re following best practices and sending plaintext alternatives with your HTML email, then some mail clients will use the plaintext for the summary snippet and render the HTML when you open the email. So if a developer copies the success templates to the failure templates but only updates the HTML and forgets to update the plaintext alternative, then you will see this exact behaviour. It’s also pretty tricky to catch when manually testing because not all mail clients act this way.
Show replies
CapsAdmin ·18 hours ago
It doesn't make sense to use high parameter count ones at least due to costs.
But then I feel there is a disconnect in adopting AI. We are accustomed to chatgpt, claude, etc being really good at following instructions and summarize content, but in reality those are too expensive to host, so we end up with really dumb ai being integrated everywhere.
Maybe I'm wrong here? I know a fair bit about the landscape of local ai models for personal use, but I'm not sure how this is done when you need to summarize a billion emails a day.
Show replies