Live data from Hacker News

The Anthropic Economic Index

anthropic.com

181–190 of 238 posts

Re: The Anthropic Economic Index

#181

This more or less confirms what I imagine most of us thought, AI is mostly used by engineers, or for engineering tasks. Makes sense, I wonder how much traffic comes from automated tasks (co-pilot, etc). Every time I read a report like this I do wonder if we'll ever see an ROI on LLMs. HUNDREDS of billions of dollars of spend, and 3 years in its still primarily the same crowd using it, and has yet to create a "killer"…

I would agree that the products coming out so far lack imagination, but hard disagree on the impact. LLMs have completely transformed multiple industries already. In SWE, I would estimate that junior positions shrank by 70-80%, but even that is less extreme than what is going on in other industries. In marketing, the entire low-end to mid-tier market is gone. Instead of having teams working on projects for small to m…

Actually I have interacted with multiple translators in multiple industries and I haven't seen any disruption (although I agree with your statement that it was never well paid)

- Synchronous translation at political/economic events still needs a personm as it ever did - LLMs are nowhere near the level to be able to translate fine literature at a high enough quality to be publishable - Translating software is still very hard, as the translator usually needs a ton of context/reference for commonly used terminology - we partnered with a machine translation company, and what they produced sucked balls.

I have friends who work as translators, and we make use of translation services as a company, and I haven't seen the work going away.

Re: The Anthropic Economic Index

#182
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a way to do it as not PR?

Yes, publish a paper or the stats. Putting it on your company blog is marketing, always. The only exception is PornHub insights, because they don't need to advertise and the people reading are there for the insights.

Here's the paper: https://assets.anthropic.com/m/2e23255f1e84ca97/original/Eco...

Re: The Anthropic Economic Index

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you say more?

It's a 500B company that undercuts everyone else with incredible efficiency, just like Amazon. It's an example of how capitalism can be great. If you really want to get of out of capitalism, you can just buy directly from farmers or grow your own food. The whole thing about no ethical consumption under capitalism is a just a way to enjoy the conveniences of capitalism on a moral high ground. It's totally doable, you…

I guess the angle I was coming at it from is that they pay their employees a living wage. I need to buy toilet paper from somewhere, and between Amazon and Costco I would much rather give my money to Costco.

Re: The Anthropic Economic Index

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a 500B company that undercuts everyone else with incredible efficiency, just like Amazon. It's an example of how capitalism can be great. If you really want to get of out of capitalism, you can just buy directly from farmers or grow your own food. The whole thing about no ethical consumption under capitalism is a just a way to enjoy the conveniences of capitalism on a moral high ground. It's totally doable, you…

I guess the angle I was coming at it from is that they pay their employees a living wage. I need to buy toilet paper from somewhere, and between Amazon and Costco I would much rather give my money to Costco.

The secret is buying a bidet so you dont need to buy from either ever again!

Re: The Anthropic Economic Index

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Software engineering is a weird niche that is both a high paying job and something you can almost self-teach If you meant programming, I agree it could be self-taught, but not SE. SE is the set of techniques, practices, tools that we have collected over decades for producing multi-versioned software that meets a certain reliability rating. Not all of these is freely available online.

There are plenty of self-taught people in the open source space making highly reliable software.

...who don't get hired at "real" jobs because they can't produce a bubble sort in 15 minutes on a whiteboard.

I feel very fortunate that the core blender devs had the patience to put up with my stupid amateur mistakes while I learned the skills to become a helpful contributor back in the day.

Re: The Anthropic Economic Index

#186

Feels like a page of graphs where Anthropic team discovers that Claude is the best coding model and is used mostly by devs. And they have no penetration in general population compared to OpenAI

I laughed out loud at their chart showing that Sonnet had a higher share of coding questions, whereas Opus had more writing.

If they would just look at their product, they'd see that it literally says it in the model description that Opus is better for writing. If you advertise one of your models as geared for task X, the insight that people use it more for task X isn't really an insight.

Re: The Anthropic Economic Index

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 35% of a million requests is different than 35% of a billion. Not statistically.

What do you mean by “statistically”? The end results would be like three orders of magnitude apart. Wouldn’t the desired sample size depend on the size of the population itself?

>Wouldn’t the desired sample size depend on the size of the population itself?

No, The most important thing is the distribution of the sample size. You have to make sure it isn't obviously biased in some way (i.e You're only surveying students in a university for extrapolation on the entire population of the country). Beyond that, the desired sample size levels off quickly.

5000 (assuming the same distribution) won't be any more or less accurate for 10M than it is for 1M.

Of course, if you just ask everyone or almost everyone then you no longer need to worry about distribution but yeah

Re: The Anthropic Economic Index

#188
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I cancelled my chatgpt subscription and moved to claude. Its kinda silly, but I feel like the products are about equivalent for my use case so I'd rather do business with a company that is acting in good (better?) faith.

In the case they don't get high salaries from this activity, there is also a solution. The next step in ~10 years could be to offer their services to governments to offer "automated court decisions". Then the people who funded / trained this "justice" out of their good heart, would actually have leverage, in terms of concrete power. It's a much more subtle way to capture power, if you can replace the judges with your…

I guess they can get them to rewrite the US Constitution to remove that pesky "fair trial" bit and, since they would control the narrative, delete 1000+ years of common law.

Brave new world, indeed...

Re: The Anthropic Economic Index

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has to be a meme. Costco is peak hypercapitalism lol.

Could you say more?

Hell, just buy from Wallyworld where you get low, low prices and pseudo-socialism with their employees on the food stamps.

The camel's gotta get its nose in the tent somehow.

Post reply on HN