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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

#181

Post by bugglebeetle »

benreesman wrote: post #46

LLMs are stunningly good at language tasks: almost all of what us old-timers called NLP is just crushed these days. Summarization, Q&A, sentiment, the list goes on and on. Truly remarkable stuff. And where there isn’t a bright line around “fact”, and where it doesn’t need to come together like a Pynchon novel, the generative stuff is smoking hot: short-form fiction, opinion pieces, product copy? Massive productivity…

> almost all of what us old-timers called NLP is just crushed these days

For this to be true for most production service use cases, LLMs would need to be at least ~10X faster. I generally agree they can be quite good at these tasks, but the performance is not there to do them on large datasets.

Re: ChatGPT-4 significantly increased performance of business consultants

#182

Post by l33t7332273 »

t8sr wrote: post #59
wqtz wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most management consultants are useless. But there are some realities you must accept. Number 1. In a team of 20-30 engineers there is only one extremely god "why is he with us" engineers who is great at technical stuff and being a people person. However, no matter how nice he is his approach to his job, it is a job and I will only drop hints how the management should be done. He doesn't care about where the company…

Man, write drunk, but edit sober.

Is the post that bad?

What does it say about me if I didn’t think that it was that bad?

Re: ChatGPT-4 significantly increased performance of business consultants

#183

Post by ghaff »

jack_riminton wrote: post #169
WendyTheWillow wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s also insane people think running a large business is easy, or that management consultants aren’t worth what they’re paid.

Worth here is the key word. I did an MBA which was specifically designed to get people into consulting, we did many consulting projects for real multinantionals and the key lesson was: "What does the hidden client want?" i.e. someone has been tasked with getting some consultants to come up with a suggestion, the key question however is what does THEIR boss want to hear. If you can work that out and give it to them th…

Well, there's also the case where some internal engineering and product management think they have the right answer. But it may be a literally bet the company sort of thing. (Especially outside the software realm where once the bus has left the station it's not turning around.)

Now I know there are people here whose reaction is that executive management should just shut up and listen to what the worker bees say. But it actually doesn't seem unreasonable to me (and I've been on the product management end of things in a case like this) to have some outside perspective from some people who are mostly pretty smart to nod their heads and say this seems sensible.

As a bonus they create big spreadsheets that make the business planning types happy and keep them out from underfoot.

Re: ChatGPT-4 significantly increased performance of business consultants

#184

Post by pydry »

jaybrendansmith wrote: post #155
pydry wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The magic is in: A) Forming cross company cliques (a lot of C suite is ex consultant and they scratch each others' backs). B) ego stroking and typical sales ("this executive is a visionary who must be furnished with top quality steak and strippers") C) Letting you know on the sly what their other customers are doing that seems to be working. D) Providing industrial grade ass cover for decisions that the C suite want…

So much of it is about information awareness. Like it or not, these consultants and analysts talk to hundreds of C-levels all the time. They become excellent information sources about what is working, what is not working, and about business risks that a particular executive may not be aware of. Yes, there is the potential for group-think, and the bad ones shill for a particular technology or process without any basis…

>It's easy to be cynical about this

It's probably easier to assume that their job is to provide objective expert advice since thats what they say they do.

I'm being realistic here, not cynical.

Re: ChatGPT-4 significantly increased performance of business consultants

#185

Post by acover »

corysama wrote: post #136
jamiegreen wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t underestimate the ass covering. I recon 60% of management consulting work is just to ass cover for a director with no conviction

The more expensive the cover the better. “I paid a world-class consulting consultant company top dollar to vet this idea and they produced ton of documents about how great it was. And, yet it failed. But, I’m not at fault here. What more would you have had me do?” There was an article on HN years ago about top grade from Harvard-like schools being sucked into consulting companies and discovering their job was to be p…

Do you have a link? I can't find it.

Re: ChatGPT-4 significantly increased performance of business consultants

#186

Post by ghaff »

pydry wrote: post #127
jamiegreen wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t underestimate the ass covering. I recon 60% of management consulting work is just to ass cover for a director with no conviction

Yeah, I think that's the majority of the grunt work done by junior consultants. I don't doubt that if the high level decision agreed upon is "more layoffs because AI" and they were asked for a 60 page report to justify it that ChatGPT would help inordinately in fleshing it out with something that sounds fairly plausible.

There's a lot of boilerplate that actually takes quite a while to write from scratch. If the people involved have a pretty good idea in their heads of what fundamentals are fairly sensible and which are probably sort of irrelevant or even wrong, something like ChatGPT is actually pretty good at churning out at least a decent pre-draft that can save quite a bit of time. I've used it a fair bit for introductory background that I can certainly clean up faster than I could put together from scratch.

Re: ChatGPT-4 significantly increased performance of business consultants

#188

Post by kmstout »

t8sr wrote: post #59
wqtz wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most management consultants are useless. But there are some realities you must accept. Number 1. In a team of 20-30 engineers there is only one extremely god "why is he with us" engineers who is great at technical stuff and being a people person. However, no matter how nice he is his approach to his job, it is a job and I will only drop hints how the management should be done. He doesn't care about where the company…

Man, write drunk, but edit sober.

Off topic, but I had to follow up. It seems that "Write drunk, edit sober" is mis-attributed to Hemingway, who advised writing sober [1].

[1] https://www.writersdigest.com/be-inspired/did-hemingway-say-...

Re: ChatGPT-4 significantly increased performance of business consultants

#189

Post by segfaultex »

hubraumhugo wrote: post #15

Well, this sounds like perfect tasks for GPT: "Participants responded to a total of 18 tasks (or as many as they could within the given time frame). These tasks spanned various domains. Specifically, they can be categorized into four types: creativity (e.g., “Propose at least 10 ideas for a new shoe targeting an underserved market or sport.”), analytical thinking (e.g., “Segment the footwear industry market based on…

> A confident GPT hallucination is almost indistinguishable from typical management consulting material...

Sounds perfect for both Harvard and those linked to the institution.

My employer has hired McKinsey a few times, known to recruit from HYP, and their output has been subpar to say the least. My entire experience with these institutions has been fairly uniform in that regard.

I know it’s anecdotal. But it feels like there’s a lot of confirmation bias with these sorts of studies.

Re: ChatGPT-4 significantly increased performance of business consultants

#190

Post by somenameforme »

mlinhares wrote: post #153
djtango wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ha it's fun to dunk on management consultants but I think the magic is they are like pop music producers. Somehow they're able to make the C suite hoover up LLM shovelware the same way top producers can take super obvious music and sell I V vi IV but when we try the same chords it's uninspired and no one wants to listen to it

It’s insane that people think producing pop music is easy. Competing on the pop music market is a cutthroat business with a lot of competition and the good ones get their price back in gold. When Scorpions wanted to be resurrected they hired Desmond Child to produce them and he absolutely crushed. These people are very good at what they do and there are very few of them.

The perception is that success in the field is driven largely by factors other than the quality of music. It'd be extremely interesting to see a Richard Bachman / Steven King [1] type experiment with a Desmond Child, Max Martin, or whoever else.

Keep their existence completely out of the picture, and have them scout and produce talented no-name, but require the no-name to use only the sort of avenues that would be openly available to anybody/everybody: YouTube, Tunecore, social media, etc. Would the new party now be meaningfully likely to have a real breakthrough?

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Bachman

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