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AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

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Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#4
There is probably a threshold effect above which the technology begins to be very useful for production (other than faking school assignments, one-off-scripts, spam, language translation, and political propaganda), but I guess we're not there yet. I'm not counting out the possibility of researchers finding a way to add long term memory or stronger reasoning abilities, which would change the game in a very disorienting way, but that would likely mean a change of architecture or a very capable hybrid tool.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#5

If you include microsoft copilot trials in fortune 500s, absolutely. A lot of major listed companies are still oblivious to the functionality of AI, their senior management don't even use it out of laziness

it turns out it's really hard to get a man to fish with a pole when you don't teach them how to use the reel

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#6

If you include microsoft copilot trials in fortune 500s, absolutely. A lot of major listed companies are still oblivious to the functionality of AI, their senior management don't even use it out of laziness

100% All of the people who are floored by AI capabilities right now are software engineers, and everyone who's extremely skeptical basically has any other office job. On investigating their primary AI interaction surface, it's Microsoft Co-Pilot, which has to be the absolute shittiest implementation of any AI system so far. As a progress-driven person, it's just super disappointing to see how few people are benefiting from the productive gains of these systems.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#7
My company’s behind the curve, just got nudged today that I should make sure my AI use numbers aren’t low enough to stand out or I may have a bad time. Reckon we’re minimum six months from “oh whoops that was a waste of money”, maybe even a year. (Unless the AI market very publicly crashes first)

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#8

If you include microsoft copilot trials in fortune 500s, absolutely. A lot of major listed companies are still oblivious to the functionality of AI, their senior management don't even use it out of laziness

100% All of the people who are floored by AI capabilities right now are software engineers, and everyone who's extremely skeptical basically has any other office job. On investigating their primary AI interaction surface, it's Microsoft Co-Pilot, which has to be the absolute shittiest implementation of any AI system so far. As a progress-driven person, it's just super disappointing to see how few people are benefitin…

This isn't my experience. I see many non-software people using AI regularly. What you may be seeing is more: organizations with no incentive to do things better never did anything to do things better. AI is no different. They were never doing things better with pencil and paper.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#9
My compsci brain suggests large orgs are a distributed system running on faulty hardware (humans) with high network latency (communication). The individual people (CPUs) are plenty fast, we just waste time in meetings, or waiting for approval, or a lot of tasks can't be parallelized, etc. Before upgrading, you need to know if you're I/O Bound vs CPU Bound.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#10

If you include microsoft copilot trials in fortune 500s, absolutely. A lot of major listed companies are still oblivious to the functionality of AI, their senior management don't even use it out of laziness

100% All of the people who are floored by AI capabilities right now are software engineers, and everyone who's extremely skeptical basically has any other office job. On investigating their primary AI interaction surface, it's Microsoft Co-Pilot, which has to be the absolute shittiest implementation of any AI system so far. As a progress-driven person, it's just super disappointing to see how few people are benefitin…

I think anthropic will succeed immensely here because when integrated with Microsoft365 and especially Excel it basically does what co-pilot said it would do.

The moment of realisation happen for a lot of normoid business people when they see claude make a DCF spreadsheet or search emails

claude is also smart because it visually shows the user as it resizes the columns, changes colours, etc. Seeing the computer do things makes the normoid SEE the AI despite it being much slower

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