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ChatGPT-4 significantly increased performance of business consultants

d3.harvard.edu

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Re: ChatGPT-4 significantly increased performance of business consultants

#91

Post by genman »

flir wrote: post #81
iterminate wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A confident GPT hallucination is almost indistinguishable from typical management consulting material... If you're measuring based on output, sure, but... the value of any knowledge worker is primarily driven by the input, that is, a client doesn't want "10 ideas" they want "10 [valuable] ideas [informed by the understanding of the business and the market they're operating in]". If a management consultant said "boa…

So you ask for 20 ideas and filter. Even if you throw away 19, it's still useful.

Not necessarily if the remaining one idea is still garbage.

Re: ChatGPT-4 significantly increased performance of business consultants

#93

Post by airstrike »

bryancoxwell wrote: post #9
awestroke wrote: post #5

Not surprised. It's frighteningly good, and a perfect match for programming. I often ask GPT4 to write code for something, and try if it works, but I seldom copy and paste the code it writes - I rewrite it myself to fit into the context of the codebase. But it saves me a lot of time when I am unsure about how to do something. Other times I don't like the suggestion at all, but that's useful as well, as it often clari…

I’ve also found the act of describing my problem to GPT4 is sometimes just a helpful as the answer itself. It’s almost like enhanced rubber duck debugging.

So true. I've written entire prompts with several lines worth of explanation, only to realize what my issue was and never hit the "send" button. Guess I should do that more often in life, in general

Re: ChatGPT-4 significantly increased performance of business consultants

#94

Post by refurb »

olalonde wrote: post #50

HN is so bad at predictions. Just a few months ago HN was awash with comments that confidently claimed LLMs were no more than stochastic parrots and unlikely to amount to anything. > I can't help but think the next AI winter is around the corner. [0] Yeah, right. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23886325

I'm not sure this paper is proof of much? Regurgitating press releases is sort of a stochastic parrot task.

Re: ChatGPT-4 significantly increased performance of business consultants

#95

Post by lagrange77 »

mgaunard wrote: post #2

Says more about how useless BCG consultants are.

As I understand it, they have a very specific purpose. The customer needs someone to blame in making difficult decisions. The difficult decision process itself is secondary.

Re: ChatGPT-4 significantly increased performance of business consultants

#96

Post by genman »

AdamCraven wrote: post #78

Well, they buried the lede with this one. Using LLMs were better for some tasks and actually made it worse for others. The first task was a generalist task ("inside the frontier" as they refer to it), which I'm not surprised has improved performance, as it purposely made to fall into an LLM's areas of strength: research into well-defined areas where you might not have strong domain knowledge. This also is the mainsta…

Comparing LLM to journalists is good insight.

Re: ChatGPT-4 significantly increased performance of business consultants

#97

Post by refurb »

fragmede wrote: post #25
chaosbolt wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies like BCG and McKinsey are mostly about liability, as a CEO you call them, pay them the big bucks, have them make up plans and strategies, if it works out you get the credit, if it doesn't then well "we worked tightly with experts from McKinsey, etc. so the blame isn't on me"

The frustrating one is when you've been telling management something for months (if not years), and the consultant comes in, and their report says what you been saying, and only then does the company finally do what you've been saying all along! Coulda saved the company 5-figures just listening to me. sigh politics.

Not sure why this would frustrate you.

People have ideas all the time internally. I'm going to assume the idea you had was one of many.

The issue is getting the real decision makers to buy into it. They aren't going to take the word of someone who works in some division. They want some rigor to it.

Bringing in someone who isn't tainted by the groupthink of the company, can actually take a sober view of the situation, has puts some weight to the recommendation.

Re: ChatGPT-4 significantly increased performance of business consultants

#98

Post by sarchertech »

olalonde wrote: post #50

HN is so bad at predictions. Just a few months ago HN was awash with comments that confidently claimed LLMs were no more than stochastic parrots and unlikely to amount to anything. > I can't help but think the next AI winter is around the corner. [0] Yeah, right. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23886325

That comment also said:

>If we're looking for a cost-effective way to replace content marketing spam... great! We've succeeded!

And if you read the article that’s almost exactly the level of output that we’re talking about.

   - Propose at least 10 ideas for a new shoe targeting an underserved market or sport.

   - Segment the footwear industry market based on users.

   - Draft a press release marketing copy for your product.

   - Pen an inspirational memo to employees detailing why your product would outshine competitors.
Also for the 2nd task the non LLM group performed significantly better.

Re: ChatGPT-4 significantly increased performance of business consultants

#99

Post by refurb »

_pferreir_ wrote: post #4

Maybe this tells more about BCG consultants than its does about GPT-4?

Meh.. I mean a lot of consulting is tasks like writing or idea generation. Using something like chat GPT to do it [faster, better] doesn't negate the value in what they do, since they are hired to do those tasks, those tasks are required for the broader work.

Re: ChatGPT-4 significantly increased performance of business consultants

#100

Post by Dudeman112 »

awestroke wrote: post #36
dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one step removed from "try different things until it works" style of programming. Not to say you're of of those programmers, but it certainly enables those sorts of programmers.

And what's the harm in that? That's how I first started out programming decades ago.

Absolutely bonkers algorithms that no one can make sense of unless they dedicate time to study and debug it

Also, it will have to be scrapped when anyone wants to tweak it a little. Sure monkeys randomly typing on a typewriter will eventually write the greatest novel in existence... but most of it will be shit

May $entity have mercy on your soul if the business starts bleeding tons of money due to an issue with the code, because the codebase won't

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