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ChatGPT-4 significantly increased performance of business consultants

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Re: ChatGPT-4 significantly increased performance of business consultants

#201
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your docs and PR descriptions can be generated off file diffs everyone's time could be better spent scanning the diff to come to the same conclusions. Consider using your PRs and docs to capture the answers to the usual why questions which LLM won't be able to do.

The why is largely in the ticket and the what in the pr.

I've seen code bases survive three different ticket management systems. Meanwhile, the tickets never made it between the different systems, so if the 'why' isn't in the commit message, then it got lost to time.

I will admit that a lot of the really old decisions don't have much relevance to the current business, but the historical insight is sometimes nice.

Re: ChatGPT-4 significantly increased performance of business consultants

#202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) Your ideas are bad. 2) Spreadsheets exist. 3) No-one cares about your marketing copy. 4) No-one finds your c-suite babble inspirational. This is almost perfect input to an LLM exactly because of how low value it is in the first place.

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

Sounds like you are tunnel visioning in your analysis of the music? There are so many more things to it than the chord progression.

On the songwriting side, there's the lyrics which have both a phonetic and a semantic component. There's also the fact that many people will mishear the lyrics and their evaluation of them will be based on the mishearing. There's the melody. Does it work together with the chords to highlight the key parts of the lyrics?

Then there's the performance where there are a million ways to stand out or flop. Loudness, timbre, timing and even detuning can all be used for expression.

Re: ChatGPT-4 significantly increased performance of business consultants

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The why is largely in the ticket and the what in the pr.

Huh, your tickets aren't just a single vague title sentence and no description body?

Sometimes this is the case but most tickets have a detailed info of the bug or links to a confluence page of design specs.

Re: ChatGPT-4 significantly increased performance of business consultants

#204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Well, if it was that hard, chatGPT wouldn't be able to help them.

Re: ChatGPT-4 significantly increased performance of business consultants

#205
post #142

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…

> Target: Dog Walkers > Features: Built-in waste bag dispenser I'm not yet sure whether I hate it or love it. > Target: Visually Impaired Individuals > Features: Haptic feedback Haptic shoes, how revolutionary!

I’m just imagining stepping in dog poop and my only way to help myself is also covered in dog poop.

The shoes seem to give you two options for cleaning up your dogs poop: (1) Bend down twice, once for the bag, once for the poop. (2) Bend down once nice and close to the poop and get a bigger whiff than otherwise.

I’m just not looking for ways to interact manually with my shoes more than I have to…

Re: ChatGPT-4 significantly increased performance of business consultants

#206

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…

> their job was to be paid tons of money writing reports that support whatever the exec of the moment wanted to hear

Sounds like an extremely nice job.

Re: ChatGPT-4 significantly increased performance of business consultants

#207

There is a lot of office work that will overtime be optimized over time using gpt like services. I was tech savvy enough to know that a lot of office work that I do is repeatable and can be done using scripts but not good enough to write those scripts myself. Using Chat gpt allowed me to write those scripts it took me I think 15-20hrs to get the scripts working perfectly. I knew just a little bit of python scripting…

Couldn't agree more. I've gone multiple times now from "I wonder if X is possible/how would you do X" to hacking out a crude proof of concept to a problem that I wouldn't even know how to google.

Re: ChatGPT-4 significantly increased performance of business consultants

#208
post #197

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.

I hope someone builds a management consultant gpt to find out. Until then, our leaders, experts and institutions were few of those things during the pandemic. How large businesses are built and run has changed faster and more in the past few years than the principled predictions of a business’ future vector that are based on lagging indicators. It also depends on how cookie cut the management consultant frameworks an…

Mangement consultants get comparatively small money from (large) firms. The total revenues going to McK, BCG, and Bain are only about $30B annually.

Re: ChatGPT-4 significantly increased performance of business consultants

#209
post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

the comment might be spot-on for some companies and industry, but really.. not all business culture is the same. By painting "all management" in this light you are showing the same one-dimensional thinking that is being criticized here..

Re: ChatGPT-4 significantly increased performance of business consultants

#210

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…

I wonder how long it takes AI to get good at law. Right now the verbal tasks it excels at are similar to the artistic ones: namely, solving problems with enormous solution spaces that are robust to small perturbations. That is, change a good picture of an angry tree man slightly and it's still probably a good picture of an angry tree man.

Isn't ChatGPT getting progressively better scores on medical and law exams? It will probably pass the USMLE and the bar one day. If it doesn't already.

It's gonna be interesting.

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