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AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

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Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#221
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if LLMs are optimizing the average office worker's productivity but the work itself simply has no discernable economic value? This is argued at length in Grebber's Bullshit Jobs essay and book.

[dead]

Not a phase, I’d argue that 90% of modern jobs are bullshit to keep cattle occupied and economy rolling.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s also pretty wild to me how people still don’t really even know how to use it. On hacker news, a very tech literate place, I see people thinking modern AI models can’t generate working code. The other day in real life I was talking to a friend of mine about ChatGPT. They didn’t know you needed to turn on “thinking” to get higher quality results. This is a technical person who has worked at Amazon. You can’t expec…

I don't think "results don't match promises" is the same as "not knowing how to use it". I've been using Claude and OpenAI's latest models for the past two weeks now (probably moving at about 1000 lines of code a day, which is what I can comfortably review), and it makes subtle hard-to-find mistakes all over the place. Or it just misunderstands well known design patterns, or does something bone headed. I'm fine with…

Prompting LLMs for code simply takes more than a couple of weeks to learn.

It takes time to get an intuition for the kinds of problems they've seen in pre-training, what environments it faced in RL, and what kind of bizarre biases and blindspots it has. Learning to google was hard, learning to use other peoples libraries was hard, and its on par with those skills at least.

If there is a well known design pattern you know, thats a great thing to shout out. Knowing what to add to the context takes time and taste. If you are asking for pieces so large that you can't trust them, ask for smaller pieces and their composition. Its a force multiplier, and your taste for abstractions as a programmer is one of the factors.

In early usenet/forum days, the XY problem described users asking for implementation details of their X solution to Y problem, rather than asking how to solve Y. In llm prompting, people fall into the opposite. They have an X implementation they want to see, and rather than ask for it, they describe the Y problem and expect the LLM to arrive at the same X solution. Just ask for the implementation you want.

Asking bots to ask bots seems to be another skill as well.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#223
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anthropic and OpenAI are both well documented as losing billions of dollars a year because their revenue doesn't cover their R&D and training costs, but that doesn't mean their revenue doesn't cover their inference costs.

Does it matter if they can't ever stop training though? Like, this argument usually seems to imply that training is a one-off, not an ongoing process. I could save a lot of money if I stopped eating, but it'd be a short lived experiment. I'll be convinced they're actually making money when they stop asking for $30 billion funding rounds. None of that money is free! Whoever is giving them that money wants a return on…

It matters because as long as they are selling inference for less than it costs to serve they have a potential path to profitability.

Training costs are fixed at whatever billions of dollars per year.

If inference is profitable they might conceivably make a profit if they can build a model that's good enough to sign up vast numbers of paying customers.

If they lose even more money on each new customer they don't have any path to profitability at all.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#225
post #197
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am confident that Anthropic make revenue from that $20 than the electricity and server costs needed to serve that customer. Claude Code has rate limits for a reason: I expect they are carefully designed to ensure that the average user doesn't end up losing Anthropic money, and that even extreme heavy users don't cause big enough losses for it to be a problem. Everything I've heard makes me believe the margins on in…

>make revenue from that $20 than the electricity and server costs needed to serve that customer Seems like a pretty dumb take. It’s like saying it only takes $X in electricity and raw materials to produce a widget that I sell for $Y. Since $Y is bigger than $X, I’m making money! Just ignore that I have to pay people to work the lines. Ignore that I had to pay huge amounts to build the factory. Ignore every other cost…

See comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47057874

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#227
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if LLMs are optimizing the average office worker's productivity but the work itself simply has no discernable economic value? This is argued at length in Grebber's Bullshit Jobs essay and book.

> but the work itself simply has no discernable economic value? This is argued at length in Grebber's Bullshit Jobs essay and book. That book was very different than what I expected from all of the internet comment takes about it. The premise was really thin and did't actually support the idea that the jobs don't generate value. It was comparing to a hypothetical world where everything is perfectly organized, everyon…

> They exist because the company gets more benefit out of the job existing than it costs to employ those people.

Not necessarily, I’ve seen a lot of jobs that were just flying under the radar. Sort of like a cockroach that skitters when light is on but roams freely in the dark.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s also pretty wild to me how people still don’t really even know how to use it. On hacker news, a very tech literate place, I see people thinking modern AI models can’t generate working code. The other day in real life I was talking to a friend of mine about ChatGPT. They didn’t know you needed to turn on “thinking” to get higher quality results. This is a technical person who has worked at Amazon. You can’t expec…

And it will get worse once the UX people get ahold of it.

You got that right . .. imagine AI making more keyboard shortcuts, "helping" wayland move off X more so, new window transistions, overhauling htmx ... it'll be hell+ on earth.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#229
post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a WhatsApp group full of doctors, managers, journalist and engineers (including software) in age of 30-60 I asked if anyone heard of openclaw and only 3 people heard of it from influencers, none used it. But from my social feed the impression was that it is taking over the world:) I asked it because I am building something similar since some tome and I thought its over they were faster than me but as it appears th…

> I asked it because I am building something similar since some tome and I thought its over they were faster than me If you have been working on a usecase similar to OpenClaw for sometime now I'd actually say you are in a great position to start raising now . Being first to market is not a significant moat in most cases. Few people want to invest in the first company in a category - it's too risky. If there are a cou…

> every company has someone monitoring HN like a hawk.

Monitoring specific user accounts or keywords? Is this typically done by a social media reputation management service?

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#230
post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think that it is a good idea to release it first on iOS, announce on HN and Producthunt? How would you do? On my app the tech is based on running agent generated code on JavaScriptCore to do things like OpenClaw, I’m wrapping the JS engine with the missing functionality like networking, file access and database access so I believe I will not have a problem with releasing it on Apple AppStore as I use their nat…

Who's your persona? How are you pricing and packaging? Who is your buyer? Are you D2C? Consumer? Replacing EAs? Replacing Project Managers? ... You need to answer these questions in order to decide whether a Show HN makes sense versus a much more targeted launch. If you do not know how to answer these questions you need to find a cofounder asap. Technology is commodified. GTM, sales, and packaging is what turns techn…

The persona is, someone who knows what are they doing but need someone to actually automate their work routine. I.e. maybe it’s a crypto trader that makes decisions on signals interpretation so they can create a trading bot that executes on their method. Maybe its a compliance who needs automate some routine like checking details further when some conditions arise. Or maybe a social media manager that needs to moderate their channels.Maybe someone who needs a tool for monitoring HN that specific way?

Thanks for the advice! I’m at a stage where I want to have such tool and see who else wants it. Not sure yet about it’s viability as a business and what is the exact market. Maybe I will find out by putting it into the wild and that’s why I consider to release it as a mobile app first.

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