So I have three thoughts about this: The first thought is this is likely mostly survivorship bias. Yes, the claims that get to the humans are the ones that went wrong, and the mode of failure for LLMs is less that they get within 99% all of the time, it's more like 1% of the time they do something insanely dumb. At which point your customers are pissed off. That's kind of obvious, and it sucks for the humans who have to clear up the situation. But it's still a win for the vast majority of cases.
Secondly, does anyone actually know how much of your insurance premium is going on the call centre staff? most people don't claim, those that do mostly have simple claims. The actual cost for insurance companies is actually paying out claims, so even if you automated all of this it likely doesn't change your economics. Historically "New" Insurance companies only really succeed by mis-pricing risk and gaining market share that way - they often then fail when that risk materializes. Lemonade sounds a lot like that.
Finally, they haven't engaged with the tidal wave that's coming. Sure, AI agents handling claims is happening now. Just you wait. In a couple of years time it'll be AI agents making the claims for you and suddenly there'll be bots filing claims with infinite patience and a direct mandate to try and get as big a payout as possible. That is when it's going to get really hairy.
This is kind of a "I'm not here to tell you about Jesus he either lives in your heart or he doesn't".
I am an engineer, I have about 15 years of experience. I have been using AI in my job since mid 2025. Over that time it has gone from being an interesting toy that could kind of help but would often hinder, to being an absolutely explosively powerful tool. Just from personal experience it is the thing that has improved the most of any of my tools in career. And over that time my spend on AI has sky rocketed.
You don't have to believe me, it's obviously just anecdotal, but for anyone in the same position as me (And there really are lots of us), to claim model capability peaked in 2024 is just staggeringly dumb. It'd be like claiming electric cars peaked in 2008. I don't know how further to convey this to you.
It may very well be the case that the financial side is a bubble that horribly bursts. But the technology is real and the claims Ed has made are just wrong.
I'm the same as you sans 10 years of working experience, with similar experiences using LLMs. The distinction I would like to make is that it's not the models that are improving, but rather the infrastructure around them. It started with prompt engineering, then chain-of-thought, then mixture-of-experts, now harness engineering etc. These, I think are what's driving LLM complexity, not the model.
To bring back to your electric car analogy, the electric motor peaked early on, but was not quite useful as a car until advancements in battery density, charging technology, regenerative braking were made. These are all the infrastructure needed to improve the viability of owning electric cars, just like the infrastructure was needed to make the models useful.
To be honest, I'm much more excited to see development of infrastructure around local models than seeing the arms race between AI labs. At least the former benefits the end user in a transparent way.
For someone who falls in the middle of this a really good read is Quoth the Raven[1]. He essentially makes the argument that proposition 1 is probably true, but that before proposition 2 happens there'll be a massive bubble burst. Analogous to the dotcom boom where yes, eventually Amazon became Amazon, but before that there was a massive collapse. And he does this in a way that Dan Luu would really like because he's giving a very clear and specific time line for his prediction. I haven't been reading him long so I can't guarantee there's not going to be some goal post moving 6 months down the line though.
Just so I'm clear, Grok bot snags your credentials and then pretends to be you whilst surfing the web. If it uses your account to post of X (ie, the social network), is it adhering to X terms of service or is that violating policy by using a bot?
It’s been pretty clear for a while that Nikita has been looking at the ways twitter is bad- foreign accounts stoking hatred in the west for cash.
He started putting in ways to change it and put in better incentives (not monetizing this rage baiters, disclosing country of origin). The problem is, the people he screws by doing that are the exact accounts Elon Musk loves, do every time he wanted to make a change cat turd would go screaming to daddy. Hence why I find it so unsurprising he’s quitting.
What do you mean for the sake of Apple? This didn't benefit Apple. He screwed with this guy for months because of a mistaken idea that the guy should have somehow known Apple's attitude towards secrecy without being told, and after months of messing him about sent him back the signed contract the second he had given up. There was no benefit to Apple here. In fact he harmed Apple by limiting their music collection in the initial stages. It's also not on the limits of ethics. It's unethical.
> should have somehow known Apple's attitude towards secrecy
I have to assume you and the author (at that time) aren't familiar enough with the corporate world to realize all discussions containing privileged information (contract details that would never get a press release) are confidential by default.
Of course Apple would never think they'd have to explain this. It's a reasonable expectation for them to have.
I work in the corporate world, I have detailed confidential discussions about technical details of upcoming products and contract details. The first thing we do in those situations is we all sign NDAs. The idea that you'd do a presentation to a hundred people and expect that information to stay confidential without specifically informing them is just absurd. Which is part of the reason Jobs just screwed him around rather than doing what you're meant to do - get the person to sign an NDA and then sue them if they break it.
I don't doubt you, but my experience is different.
Every company I've worked for (mostly F500s) has had an onboarding document you sign in which you're notified that everything inside the company is confidential by default. It doesn't expire.
Most of these companies also had annual training (the usual corporate policy refresher stuff) and this was mentioned during that as well.
I've worked on some very hush-hush projects. In my experience, NDAs were for people outside the corporation...partners, vendors, etc. Everyone who was employed by the corporation was under an NDA by default. I don't think I've ever signed a subsequent NDA for something my employer was working on, because I was already under one.
And even if they didn't do all this formally...it's a reasonable expectation. I would never think I'm allowed to discuss anything that wasn't publicly announced with outsiders.
Pricing details in contracts are trade secrets. You don't even need an NDA to sue someone for leaking that.
They're lucky Apple found a quick remediation. They delayed signing the contract because they had to wait and see if any damage was caused. Next steps would have been renegotiating or lawsuit.
lol, if you don’t put an NDA (or otherwise make it clear it’s a trade secret and try to protect it), you lose the protection the moment you start sending that out. Including in contracts.
Is this not a common trait among most of the high-level tech CEOs? We hear of lack of humanity across much of the tech industry when you get up to that level. All the stuff that is said about Musk, and all the others.
"In animals with hierarchical societies, aggressive behavior is thought to help individuals gain and maintain higher social status. It has been shown that aggressive behavior, especially the experience of winning, has rewarding properties in animals and repeated aggressive experience may lead to compulsive, pathological aggression that is highly reinforcing."
From the 2017, uh, molecular neuroimmunosociobiology survey paper Aggression, Social Stress, and the Immune System in Humans and Animal Models by Takahashi, Flanigan, McEwen & Russo – https://doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2018.00056
(These are serious, credentialed people. The tl;dr is that "losing" is proinflammatory and subjugating others is antiinflammatory. In the brain. Which is behavior-modifying.)
> The main think I hear about Musk is that he supported a candidate people didn't like and has a lot of different mothers for his children.
You missed a word there.
`The main NEGATIVE things I hear about Musk is that he supported a candidate people didn't like and has a lot of different mothers for his children.`
> Compared to making EVs mainstream,
He didn't do that, although he contributed. I can credit him with raising the consumer demand for in-vehicle assistance.
> helping paralyzed people interact with the world,
I also helped someone carry their groceries yesterday. That's a personality trait. The results of one of his many business efforts is not a personal act...although he likes to take credit.
> reducing traffic in LV,
That was a selling point for funding a different boring technology (that wasn't realized) and hopefully a better transportation system (which also wasn't realized) for a convenience tunnel. SR-99 is a commuter highway tunnel, with double the traffic, and the Seattle Tunnel Partners is not considered a magnate for the same reason Elon's tunnel isn't. It's just boring (literally and figuratively).
I missed no words, the things being negative are implied by the parent comment "All the stuff that is said about Musk, and all the others."
If this degree of pettiness is how you start your comment I'm not looking forwaerd to the rest, but here goes.
> > Compared to making EVs mainstream,
> he contributed
So you agree, but wanted to make another petty point.
> > helping paralyzed people interact with the world
> I also helped someone carry their groceries yesterday.
What a bizarre and silly comparison. Why would you write that?
> The results of one of his many business efforts is not a personal act...although he likes to take credit.
Nobody was saying they were a solo act, merely that he deserves credit. Which he does.
> That's not what happened.
Yes, it was. You provided zero supporting arguments. Here's 30 seconds of research, let me know if you want links.
- $550 million decade-long bribery scheme: USAID contracting officer steered 14+ contracts for bribes (cash, homes, luxury perks); pleas in 2025
- Tens of billions estimated to “scam” NGOs via no-control funding loophole (Musk/DOGE claim: one of the biggest sources of fraud)
- ~$10.3 million for male circumcision programs in Mozambique
- ~$17.5 million for male circumcision and condom programs (broader Africa)
- ~$9 million humanitarian aid diverted to al-Qaeda-affiliated groups in Syria
- Hundreds of thousands to non-profits linked to designated terrorist organizations (even after IG probes)
- $11–20 million for Middle Eastern “Sesame Street” (Iraq/Ahlan Simsim)
- $1.5 million to advance DEI in Serbia workplaces
- $70,000 for DEI musical in Ireland
- $47,000 for transgender opera in Colombia
- $32,000 for transgender comic book in Peru
- Millions to EcoHealth Alliance (Wuhan lab collaborator)
- Funding for drag shows, LGBTQ programs, and related cultural projects abroad
- $6 million for tourism in Egypt
- Electric vehicles for Vietnam and other low-priority development spends
- Broader pattern of unaccountable grants and contracts flagged as systemic waste/fraud enabling the above
I have no idea about your points about the Las Vegas tunnel. You might be right but you're rude and disrespectful so I don't want to spent more time interacting with you unless you apologize.
- pointing out that I didn't explicitly say 'negative things' rather than 'things' is a bizarre and immature nitpick
- pointing out that other people also share credit for Elon's innovations - my comment never made stated that Elon deserves exclusive credit for this, this is a straw man
- including zero supporting arguments for their assertion that fraud and abuse wasn't discovered
- equating helping disabled people interact with the world to helping a single disabled person with a task.
...as the comment you're responding to points out.
OK. I wouldn't call this rude, much less "incredibly rude," perhaps the word I'd use is "blunt." But whatever. I continue to wish there was a "block this user" feature on this site.
Some people just want to frame every statement as an argument, which is not a compelling approach to a discussion. This understanding cannot be accepted by many people, because they are always considered more informed or competent by their peers. It's rarely worth engaging in replies to people on forums for this reason. It's especially true of randoms who demand their own personal standards of respect.
If someone writes a detailed reply, replying ‘no’ is rude. Straw man arguments are incredibly disrespectful, and most people would do better if they had participated in a high school debating class.
> If someone writes a detailed reply, replying ‘no’ is rude.
100% disagree, and that’s not what happened here anyway.
> Straw man arguments are incredibly disrespectful, and most people would do better if they had participated in a high school debating class.
HN is not a formal debate, and even if it were, I’m not sure that what the other poster said is a strawman. My unsolicited advice would be to dial back your expectations of the level of discourse you’ll get from others on this site (I had to do the same, a while back!)
It’s a technical site. It’s reasonable for technical discussions to have professionalism and adult behaviour. Judging by moderation on angoragoats comment it seems that others feel the same way.
> It’s reasonable for technical discussions to have professionalism and adult behaviour.
I agree. My point is that I believe the comment you got upset about was in fact not as rude or childish as you’re making it out to be, and perhaps looking at it through that lens would mean you’d come off as less reactionary in the future. Have a good day.
What if I told you I’ve been on HN since approximately when your account was created? Would that change your opinions at all? (Hint: ideally it shouldn’t, because basing your opinion on the age of my account when you have no other information about me is sloppy argumentation.)
And FWIW, your comments are full of unsupported accusations of logical fallacies and unsupported assertions like “If someone writes a detailed reply, replying ‘no’ is rude,” so I was replying in kind.
It wouldn't, I'd be saddened that you don't know how to to have a civil discussion with others on a technical site after two decades, but I'd still feel that you should know that.
> unsupported accusations of logical fallacies
There's no point in writing something that can be be disproven by scrolling up the thread. Where I accused the other person of a logical fallacy, I wrote:
"pointing out that other people also share credit for Elon's innovations - my comment never made stated that Elon deserves exclusive credit for this, this is a straw man
You're welcome to acknowledge the error.
> unsupported assertions like “If someone writes a detailed reply, replying ‘no’ is rude,”
All positions are expected to have supporting arguments in a debate with peers. 'No' does not include supporting arguments. You should have learnt this from high school debating, civics etc. as a teenager, of failing that, adult discussion in your workplace, or failing that, participating in technical discussions on sites like HN.
> It wouldn't, I'd be saddened that you don't know how to to have a civil discussion with others on a technical site after two decades, but I'd still feel that you should know that.
Are you saying that I've been uncivil in my discussions with you? If so, please do not falsely accuse me of something I didn't do. I've been civil this entire time (and just in case you missed it, I am not @Supermancho, the user who originally replied to your comment). Note that civil/uncivil and blunt/sensitive are two different axes. My posts may have been blunt but they have been civil.
I am loathe to accuse others of logical fallacies, especially since, as I stated previously, this is not a formal debate, but "Your account is also new, so I (and it seems others) don’t think you should be giving advice about how to interact on HN" is the most textbook ad hominem fallacy I've read on the internet in some time.
> > It wouldn't, I'd be saddened that you don't know how to to have a civil discussion with others on a technical site after two decades, but I'd still feel that you should know that.
> Are you saying that I've been uncivil in my discussions with you?
This is one of the many reasons why I replied "100% disagree" when you originally wrote "if someone writes a detailed reply, replying ‘no’ is rude." I wasn't even sure why you wrote that in the first place, since the other commenter you were referring to did nothing of the sort.
I'm happy that you agree that your assertion, as originally written, is false. I'd encourage you to think more about nuance before making blanket statements in the future.
If you read news outside of what you personally agreed with, you would know that Musk is a lot worse than just "supporting a candidate people like". That's the thing that got all the low-information California liberals who weren't paying attention to stand up and listen, but Musk has been a problem for a lot longer. My personal moment of disillusionment was when a bunch of kids got trapped in a cave in Thailand in 2018, Musk suggested a rescue sub that wouldn't work, and Musk's answer to the rescue diver pointing this out was to call him a pedophile. And even then, I'm kind of a johnny-come-lately.
But even if you don't care about Musk's personal attitude, and just like his results... his results absolutely, positively suck. I'll go point by point, as all of them are overstated and fall apart when you look at the details:
- Making EVs mainstream: He bought the founder seat of an EV company (and sued the actual founders over who's allowed to use the word "founder"). The one car that was a clean-sheet Musk design, the Cybertruck, was a huge flop you can't even take into a car wash without remembering to put into "Car Wash mode". Also, Tesla as a company engages in comically owner-hostile parts pairing, their cars have some of the worst fit-and-finish issues I've ever seen, they feel a constant need to reinvent how cars work to make them seem "futuristic", and the only thing stopping BYD from handing them their ass on a silver platter is the fact that the US government engages in shittons of domestic car company protectionism.
- Helping paralyzed people interact with the world: In clinical trials on a handful of human subjects, many of which already have had complications due to the BCI device failing. I admit I don't know enough about medical devices to know where Musk hid the bullshit here, but I do know other companies are doing similar things already.
- Reducing traffic in LV: I genuinely do not understand how you could come to this conclusion about the Vegas Loop unless you have never stepped foot in Vegas. The Loop is a god damned joke of a service. The tunnels only exist between one convention center and about two integrated resort hotels; everywhere else the Loop is just a glorified taxi service with an app that barely works.
What he should have built was an actual underground train line, but all these techbros that want to solve traffic don't want to touch trains with a 100 foot pole, because that costs real money and Musk just wanted to aurafarm.
- Cutting government fraud: He eviscerated USAID for being in SpaceX's way, punched a bunch of security holes in critical government IT infrastructure, and made a bunch of really tiny penny-pinching cuts that were almost immediately undone by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act dramatically increasing government spending. Oh, and because of the DOGE cuts, America has new world screwworm again.
The entire premise of DOGE - that there's an exorbitant amount of unidentified waste and fraud that is primarily contained in small-scale discretionary spending programs - is nearly bullshit. I say nearly, because there IS waste and fraud - it's just that the waste and fraud is in the form of well-paid McKinsey consultants and military contractors. Both of which have lobbyists that can get Congress to pass all sorts of bills to enshrine their waste and fraud as politically untouchable, including and especially by DOGE[0]. Ergo, DOGE was doomed from the start to only be able to deal with insignificant amounts of fraud.
- Making reusable rockets: SpaceX's rockets are only partially reusable (the second stage is still disposed of) and they have to spend a lot extra for the equipment to make the first stage and cone able to land. Also, every launch and landing must be paired with an expensive refurbishment process as landing is extremely stressful. In other words, reusable rockets are really dumb.
The reason why SpaceX is doing this really dumb thing is because they run a satellite ISP, Starlink. The problem with satellite Internet is that going up into space increases your latency (thanks, Einstein) and having a lot of people hitting the same satellite lowers the bandwidth it can push. Musk's solution is to put the satellites into a lower orbit - but the problem is, at Low Earth Orbit you can't stay locked to one position on Earth. And satellites are a shared medium: the more people using the service, the worse it gets. So you need a lot more satellites to provide service equivalent to wired ISPs. All these extra satellites in low-Earth orbit create light pollution that makes terrestrial astronomy impossible, and also pollute the orbits they're in with junk if they get damaged.
I'm noticing a bit of a pattern here: Musk suggests something really stupid and thinks we can just engineer our way around the stupidity, because the stupid thing is there specifically to get around an essential expense of the problem. Why is the Vegas Loop a bunch of Teslas and a tunnel that only covers like a quarter of the system? Because the obvious solution - a train - is too expensive to build, and people like Musk want car-like social isolation[1] on every mode of transportation. Why is SpaceX so obsessed with reusable rockets? Because it'll let them spam LEO with satellites, which they need in order for Starlink to work, because just building a wired ISP or a traditional cellular ISP is expensive and fundamentally unsexy work.
At least when Steve Jobs reinvented the wheel, his wheel was usually rounder and smoother.
[0] If there is a theme of the second Trump administration, it is the concept of impoundment. The thing is, this is explicitly unconstitutional; the President cannot refuse to spend money Congress tells them to spend. And corporate interests generally tend to win bigly in court against Trump. So if DOGE had done the smart thing and went after McKinsey, they probably still would have lost.
[1] As an autistic person, I'd accuse this of being an anti-social autistic tendency, but we also really like trains.
I read a variety of sources with differing opinions: the WSJ is in front of me right now and generally dislikes Musk. I’m familiar with Musk calling the man that lived in Thailand a pedophile: he shouldn’t have done that, but realistically, a lot of people would consider an old European man living alone in Pattaya a pedophile - you can’t do that if you’re well known and Musk paid for that.
This discussion about Musk's DOGE comes up time and time again, trying to rationalize his mandate of destroying regulations to eliminate waste. This was not the stated goal, nor was it the immediately result. The post-hoc rationalization is now "DOGE accidentally caught some waste, this was the point" - which is laughable, if it wasn't so sad that the realtime history of what was done wasn't so public.
The people who convince themselves that Musk was doing this as a favor or out of some sense of justice is delusional. From court filings, to reporting at the time, it's clear it was a smash and grab as a favor from Trump, conveniently relieving Musk of pesky regulation while trumpeting DEI.
hyperbole. a few years earlier, the story was every 6 months since that was the california dmv limit to get plates.
i was there. his mercedes sl often just had the mercedes barcode that sits under where plates would be mounted, with no plates. rationale unknown, but perhaps to make a stubborn point?
I remember back then cars just purchased had NO tags until they came in the mail.
I think you had to have registration information taped to the front windshield with the VIN facing outward and usually the person's name folded inside so it couldn't be read.
What OP might be (crudely) referring to is that Jobs had a rare (~1% of cases IIRC) curable form of pancreatic cancer, and ignored his doctors' advice to have it treated and removed in favor of some kind of special diet. By the time he accepted actual medical treatment, the cancer had spread and it was too late.
Maybe the press his story got might convince other people with the same diagnosis to have it treated in a timely fashion.
I don't know that I can blame him though. Having been involved in friends and family members with medical problems, there are SO many people that muddle through understanding, and then deciding what to do. Conflicting advice will come from all directions.
It seems only doctors, usually with a lifetime of experience, have medical directives ready and they are usually DNR type decisions.
If I was diagnosed with cancer, I would follow the advice of my medical team, _especially_ and without question if they told me that the cancer was curable in a high percentage of cases if I act now to have surgery.
It doesn’t make sense to me why someone would see the numbers in a case like this and decide not to act.
> I could make a counterargument that it could've gone to an alcoholic who wasted his liver
If you're still an alcoholic, you're not getting a new liver. There is required sobriety and testing first. You may have had issues that caused you to get there, but you will be sober before you get the liver.
Not the same thing. Jobs example (and I don't inherently agree with the GP, just saying) would be more like being able to drink up to the point of your transplant and then keep on going like you've just had a pit stop.
The biography regarding how NeXT came to be is quite relevant in how it all went, and how lucky it was that Apple ended up going with NeXT instead of Be.
Haven't read that book, but I am Listening to the Audiobook of "Steve Jobs in Exile: The Untold Story of NeXT and the Remaking of an American Visionary" on commutes etc. Really like the book, and you get a another view of Steve Jobs, the people behind NeXT and the industry at that time.
There is actually a Youtube video from The Computer History Museum on the book with the author and key figures from NeXT’s history [Recorded May 26, 2026] (haven't seen it yet, but looking forward to):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnNdb2wa_NE
Having met Jeff Bezos personally once (ex Amazon employee), he seemed very down to earth. His mannerisms were almost awkward nerdy guy like, you definitely didn't feel like he was above you in any form and way. I dunno if that changed at all since then, but this was back in early 2010s.
Ah yes, the company the fires warehouse workers and delivery drivers for needing a washroom break. I bet sure is down to earth catching a tan on his giga yacht.
While I don’t love Google (it’s hard to love) I actually think Sundar isn’t an asshole fwiw. Also I’m not sure if you’d put Dario in big tech circles but he seems half decent. A little too AGI pilled perhaps but definitely standing up for what he believes in.
The bar is pretty low among that population, though.
I mean, they gave money to a PAC that is trying to get legislation to control all models. He’s fine with legislation affecting Anthropic as far as I can tell, as long as it’s evenly applied. Open weight models built outside the US are going to be pretty hard to control, though.
Gain of function research is not anywhere near as dangerous as the public believes. In the US, it was very convenient to blame it for the pandemic, even though SARS-CoV-2 is of natural origin and almost certainly spilled over at the Huanan wet market in Wuhan. The threat of viruses comes almost exclusively from nature, which is constantly cooking up new viruses all by itself and exposing people all over the world to them. A few people doing tightly controlled research under high-biocontainment are a drop in the ocean. But their research is the main way we can prepare to deal with future pandemics, not to mention understanding the usual viruses that already afflict humanity.
* pointed out how high-biocontainment is the key here, which obviously wasn't present in this case (and I'd say the vibes for AI research in general are that it's not high-containment)
* correctly argued that AI research is definitely worth doing and holy shit we need to work on alignment
That's an interesting take in 2026, because what I'd read said that SARS_CoV-2 essentially could not have come from a natural origin. They were saying that it was a descendant of a previously know variant, but with a degree of variance that greatly exceeded known rates of natural divergence. Can you share more recent studies refuting that?
SARS-CoV-2 is not descended from any previously known variant. In fact, since the pandemic started, closer cousins of SARS-CoV-2 have been found in the wild in Laos.
The evidence points very strongly to the initial outbreak having been at the Huanan wet market in Wuhan, not anywhere near the lab. All the early cases were near the market, and SARS-CoV-2 RNA was found in the wild animal stalls afterwards.
The beginnings of the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak actually look exactly like the beginnings of the original SARS outbreak - an initial outbreak in a wet market that sells wild animals in a major city.
The "move to the us" thing seems to just be absolute twitter brain. The biggest problem London founders face is raising funding and these guys seemingly raised plenty based on an idea that that didn't seem to understand the market they were targeting.
These buffoons started with a bad idea, raised a lot of money to do the impossible, unsurprisingly failed, and learned basically nothing. Or what they did learn was irrelevant to the reason why they failed.
It's very depressing, but at least I don't work for them. That would square my depression.
I think this is such a great example of misunderstanding a political problem as a technical problem, and misunderstanding twitter as real life.
> the political winds seemed favourable
Sorry. How? Some libertarians on twitter were in favour. But if you have spent any time paying attention to British politics at all you would note the incredible sway the elderly have over politics. Even the people who are pro-building aren't stupid enough to think you're going to achieve that by building on green belt land, so this idea of an uplift of 140x is just farcical. Half of British debate on house building is disingenuously accusing your opposition of concreting over the green belt, whilst disingenuously promising you can build millions of new homes without concreting over the greenbelt.
The problem with building in the UK is mainly planning permission. In the UK is you need approval from the local council and the local council is elected by Nimby pensioners. So you can't get approval. That's it. That's the problem. That's a political problem that you can solve by getting central government to remove local governments ability to block projects. Or by running targeted political campaigns in local areas to get specific things approved. Not by automating the form your fill in to get your planning application rejected.
Secondly, does anyone actually know how much of your insurance premium is going on the call centre staff? most people don't claim, those that do mostly have simple claims. The actual cost for insurance companies is actually paying out claims, so even if you automated all of this it likely doesn't change your economics. Historically "New" Insurance companies only really succeed by mis-pricing risk and gaining market share that way - they often then fail when that risk materializes. Lemonade sounds a lot like that.
Finally, they haven't engaged with the tidal wave that's coming. Sure, AI agents handling claims is happening now. Just you wait. In a couple of years time it'll be AI agents making the claims for you and suddenly there'll be bots filing claims with infinite patience and a direct mandate to try and get as big a payout as possible. That is when it's going to get really hairy.
reply