Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

fortune.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 783 posts

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#231

Post by KellyCriterion »

whynotminot wrote: post #143
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…

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…

A neighbour of me has a PhD and is working in research at a hospital. He is super smart.

Last time he said: "yes yes I know about ChatGPT, but I do not use it at work or home."

Therefore, most people wont even know about Gemini, Grok or even Claude.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#232

Post by aurareturn »

tabs_or_spaces wrote: post #218

My experience has been * If I don't know how to do something, llms can get me started really fast. Basically it distills the time taken to research something to a small amount. * if I know something well, I find myself trying to guide the llm to make the best decisions. I haven't reached the state of completely letting go and trusting the llm yet, because the llm doesn't make good long term decisions * when working a…

The future of work is fewer human team members and way more AI assistants.

I think companies will need fewer engineers but there will be more companies.

Now: 100 companies who employ 1,000 engineers each

What we are transitioning to: 1000 companies who employ 10 engineers each

What will happen in the future: 10,000 companies who employ 1 engineer each

Same number of engineers.

We are about to enter an era of explosive software production, not from big tech but from small companies. I don't think this will only apply to the software industry. I expect this to apply to every industry.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#233

Post by KellyCriterion »

wiseowise wrote: post #219
mrtksn wrote: 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 if anyone heard of twitter vaporware and only 3 people heard of it from influencers, none used it. Shocking results, I say!

No, these people ("managers, engineers" etc.) do just not work in tech & IT but in other fields and they do not read tech news in your country etc.

Most people are just "not that deep in there" as most people on HN.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#234

Post by yoyohello13 »

wiseowise wrote: post #221
fdefitte wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[dead]

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

Your claim and the claims that all white collar jobs are going to disappear in 12-18 months cannot both be true. I guess we will see.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#235

Post by simonw »

amrocha wrote: post #71
simonw wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keep moving those goal posts.

[flagged]

Here are a few of mine from the past month - for all of them 90%+ of the code written by Claude Code:

- https://github.com/simonw/sqlite-history-json

- https://github.com/simonw/sqlite-ast

- https://github.com/simonw/showboat - 292 stars

- https://github.com/simonw/datasette-showboat

- https://github.com/simonw/rodney - 290 stars and 4 contributors who aren't me or Claude

- https://github.com/simonw/chartroom

Noting the star counts here because they are a very loose indication that someone other than me has found them useful.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#236

Post by wiseowise »

nradov wrote: post #133
abraxas wrote: 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.

Bullshit Jobs is one of those "just so" stories that seems truthy but doesn't stand up to any critical evaluation. Companies are obviously not hesitant to lay off unproductive workers. While in large enterprises there is some level of empire building where managers hire more workers than necessary just to inflate their own importance, in the long run those businesses fall to leaner competitors.

> Companies are obviously not hesitant to lay off unproductive workers.

Companies are obviously not hesitant to lay off anyone, especially for cost saving. It is interesting how you think that people are laid off because they’re unproductive.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#237

Post by noosphr »

al_borland wrote: post #141
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.

When my company first started pushing for devs to use AI, the most senior guy on my team was pretty vocal about coding not being the bottleneck that slowed down work. It was an I/O issue, and maybe a caching issue as well from too many projects going at the same time with no focus… which also makes the I/O issues worse.

Ironically using Ai on records of meetings across an org is amazing. If you can find out what everyone is talking about you can talk to them.

Privacy is non existent, every word said and message sent at the office is recorded but the benefits we saw were amazing.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#238

Post by KellyCriterion »

slopinthebag wrote: post #169
whynotminot wrote: post #143

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 see people thinking modern AI models can’t generate working code. Really? Can you show any examples of someone claiming AI models cannot generate working code? I haven't seen anyone make that claim in years, even from the most skeptical critics.

Scroll up a few comments where someone said Claude is generating errors over and over again and that Claude cant work according to code guidelines etc :-))

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#239

Post by krainboltgreene »

overgard wrote: post #187
simonw wrote: 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…

There's an argument to be made that a "return on investment by way of eliminating all workers" is a reasonable result for the capitalists.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#240

Post by wiseowise »

thesmtsolver2 wrote: post #177
bubblewand wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What counts as “concretely”? And I don’t recall it calling sales bullshit. It identified advertising as part of the category that it classed as heavily-bullshit-jobs for reason of being zero-sum—your competitor spends more, so you spent more to avoid falling behind, standard red queen’s race. (Another in this category was the military, which is kinda the classic case of this—see also, the Missile Gap, the dreadnought…

How does that make advertising a bullshit job? The only way advertising won't exist or won't be needed is when humanity becomes a hive mind and removes all competition.

Best product should be picked according to requirements by LLM without bullshit advertising.
Post reply on HN