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AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

fortune.com

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Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#41

Post by kamaal »

8note wrote: post #30
Herring wrote: post #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.

operationally, i think new startups have a big advantage on setting up to be agent-first, and they might not be as good as the old human first stuff, but theyll be much cheaper and nimble for model improvements

Start ups mostly move fast skipping the necessary ceremony which large corps have to do mandatorily to prevent a billion dollar product from melting. Its possible for start ups because they don't have a billion dollar to start with.

Once you do have a billion dollar product protecting it requires spending time, money and people to keep running. Because building a new one is a lot more effort than protecting existing one from melting.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#42

Post by torben-friis »

crazygringo wrote: post #21

Just to be clear, the article is NOT criticizing this. To the contrary, it's presenting it as expected , thanks to Solow's productivity paradox [1]. Which is that information technology similarly (and seemingly shockingly) didn't produce any net economic gains in the 1970's or 1980's despite all the computerization. It wasn't until the mid-to-late 1990's that information technology finally started to show clear benef…

The comparison seems flawed in terms of cost.

A Claude subscription is 20 bucks per worker if using personal accounts billed to the company, which is not very far from common office tools like slack. Onboarding a worker to Claude or ChatGPT is ridiculously easy compared to teaching a 1970’s manual office worker to use an early computer.

Larger implementations like automating customer service might be more costly, but I think there are enough short term supposed benefits that something should be showing there.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#44

Post by meager_wikis »

torben-friis wrote: post #42
crazygringo wrote: post #21

Just to be clear, the article is NOT criticizing this. To the contrary, it's presenting it as expected , thanks to Solow's productivity paradox [1]. Which is that information technology similarly (and seemingly shockingly) didn't produce any net economic gains in the 1970's or 1980's despite all the computerization. It wasn't until the mid-to-late 1990's that information technology finally started to show clear benef…

The comparison seems flawed in terms of cost. A Claude subscription is 20 bucks per worker if using personal accounts billed to the company, which is not very far from common office tools like slack. Onboarding a worker to Claude or ChatGPT is ridiculously easy compared to teaching a 1970’s manual office worker to use an early computer. Larger implementations like automating customer service might be more costly, but…

If anything, the 'scariness' of an old computer probably protected the company in many ways. AI's approachability to the average office worker, specifically how it makes it seem like it easy to deploy/run/triage enterprise software, will continue to pwn.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#46

Post by gruez »

torben-friis wrote: post #42
crazygringo wrote: post #21

Just to be clear, the article is NOT criticizing this. To the contrary, it's presenting it as expected , thanks to Solow's productivity paradox [1]. Which is that information technology similarly (and seemingly shockingly) didn't produce any net economic gains in the 1970's or 1980's despite all the computerization. It wasn't until the mid-to-late 1990's that information technology finally started to show clear benef…

The comparison seems flawed in terms of cost. A Claude subscription is 20 bucks per worker if using personal accounts billed to the company, which is not very far from common office tools like slack. Onboarding a worker to Claude or ChatGPT is ridiculously easy compared to teaching a 1970’s manual office worker to use an early computer. Larger implementations like automating customer service might be more costly, but…

How viable are the $20/month subscriptions for actual work and are they loss making for Anthropic? I've heard both of people needing to get higher tiers to get anything done in Claude Code and also that the subscriptions are (heavily?) subsidized by Anthropic, so the "just another $20 SaaS" argument doesn't sound too good.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#47

Post by DaedalusII »

sheeshkebab wrote: post #25
DaedalusII wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

No one wants a chatbot “integrated” with excel and office365 crap, it’s clippy 2.0 bullshit. Replace excel and office stuff with ai model entirely then people will pay attention.

that only works if you can oneshot. but nobody can oneshot.

iterating over work in excel and seeing it update correctly is exactly what people want. If they get it working in MSWord it will pick up even faster.

If the average office worker can get the benefit of AI by installing an add-on into the same office software they have been using since 2000 (the entire professional career of anyone under the age of 45), then they will do so. its also really easy to sell to companies because they dont have to redesign their teams or software stack, or even train people that much. the board can easily agree to budget $20 a head for claude pro

the other thing normies like is they can put in huge legacy spreadsheets and find all the errors

Microsoft365 has 400 million paid seats

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#48

Post by yoyohello13 »

throwawaysleep wrote: post #18
SilverElfin wrote: post #14

These surveys don’t make sense. Ask the forward thinking companies and they’ll say the opposite. The flood of anti AI productivity articles almost feel like they’re meant to lull the population into not seeing what’s about to happen to employment.

Eh, try using Microsoft Copilot in Word or PowerPoint. It is worthless. If your experience with AI was a Microsoft product, you would think it was a scam too.

Yeah Microsoft has consistently been bragging about how so much code is written by AI, yet their products are worse than ever. Seems to indicate “using AI” is not enough. You have to be smart about when and where.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#49

Post by amrocha »

Herring wrote: post #35
amrocha wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then where are all the amazing open source programs written by individuals by themselves? Where are all the small businesses supposedly assisted by AI?

> 4% of GitHub public commits are being authored by Claude Code right now. At the current trajectory, we believe that Claude Code will be 20%+ of all daily commits by the end of 2026. https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/claude-code-is-the-inf...

There’s lots of slop out there, that doesn’t mean it’s actually good or useful code.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#50

Post by canyp »

kjellsbells wrote: post #33
Herring wrote: post #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.

Maybe experienced people are the L2 cache? And the challenge is to keep the cache fresh and not too deep. You want institutional memory available quickly (cache hit) to help with whatever your CPU people need at that instant. If you don´t have a cache, you can still solve the problem, but oof, is it gonna take you a long time. OTOH, if you get bad data in the cache, that is not good, as everyone is going be picking t…

L2? I'm hot L1 material, dude.

But I like your and OP's analogy. Also, the productivity claims are coming from the guys in main memory or even disk, far removed from where the crunching is taking place. At those latency magnitudes, even riding a turtle would appear like a huge productivity gain.

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