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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

#461

Post by PowerElectronix »

gsf_emergency_6 wrote: post #142
_aavaa_ wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For more on this exact topic and an answer to Solow’s Paradox, see, the excellent, The Dynamo and the Computer by Paul David [0]. [0]: https://www.almendron.com/tribuna/wp-content/uploads/2018/03...

Stanford prof rebutts David's idea[0] that it's difficult to extract productivity from the data https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w25148/w251... I don't agree that real GDP measures what he thinks it measures, but he opines > Data released this week offers a striking corrective to the narrative that AI has yet to have an impact on the US economy as a whole. While initial reports suggested a year of ste…

GDP growth measurements have a big bias due to tariffs on, tariffs off, tariffs on again policies wrecking imports and exports numbers. Consumer spending is up, too, so I too fail to see that gdp growth while jobs are not as up as expected is due to AI making us more productive and not just people spending more after months of increased savings due to tariffs.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#462

Post by mold_aid »

anon-3988 wrote: post #360
Stromgren wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if you make someone 3x faster at producing a report that 100 people has to read, but it now takes 10% longer to read and understand, you’ve lost overall value.

You are forgetting that they are now going to use AI to summarize it back.

So a circular economy in which you add mistakes

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#463

Post by brazzy »

KoftaBob wrote: post #376
palmotea wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not a phase, I’d argue that 90% of modern jobs are bullshit to keep cattle occupied and economy rolling. Cattle? You actually think that about other people?

It seems more like they're implying it's those at the top think that about other people.

Nope, the entire statement betrays a combination of ignorance and arrogance that is best explained by them seeing most everyone else as beneath them.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#464

Post by aurareturn »

alternatex wrote: post #268
itake wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah, I agree. When Engineering Budget Managers see their AI bills rising, they will fire the bottom 5-10% every 6-12 months and increase the AI assistant budget for the high performers, giving them even more leverage.

Now if only companies knew how to correctly assess actual impact and not perceived impact.

Acquisition rate, retention rate, revenue, profit margin?

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#465

Post by cucumber3732842 »

weatherlite wrote: post #451
fdefitte wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[dead]

> This is an underrated take. If you make someone 3x faster at producing a report nobody reads, you've improved nothing In the private market are there really so many companies delivering reports no one reads ? Why would management keep at it then ? The goal is to maximize profits. Now sure there are pockets of inefficiency even in the private sector but surely not that much - whatever the companies are doing - someo…

>In the private market are there really so many companies delivering reports no one reads ?

Just this month the hospital in my municipality submitted an application to put in a new concrete pad for a new generator beside the old one that they, per the application, intend to retire/remove and replace with a storage shed on it's pad once the new one is operational.

Full page intro about how the hospital is saving the world, such a great thing for the community and all manner of vapid buzzword bullshit. dozens of pages of re-hashing bullshit about the environmental conditions, water flows down hill, etc, etc, (i.e. basically reiterating stuff from when they built the facility), etc, etc.

God knows how many people and hours it took to compile it (we'll ignore the labor wasted in the public sector circulating and reading it).

All for a project that 50yr ago wouldn't have required 1/100th of the labor expenditure just to be kicked off. All that labor, squandered on nothing that makes anyone any richer. No goods made. No services rendered.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#466

Post by inglor_cz »

dns_snek wrote: post #406
inglor_cz wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"just one terrible (Soviet) model" It is the model, introduced basically everywhere where socialism was taken seriously. It is like saying that cars with four wheels are just one terrible model, because there were a few cars with three wheels. Yugoslavia was a mixed economy with a lot of economic power remaining in private hands. You cannot point at it and say "hey, successful socialism". Tito was a mortal enemy of S…

You've created a tautology: Socialism is bad because bad models are socialism and better models are not-socialism. > You cannot point at it and say "hey, successful socialism" Yes I can because ideological purity doesn't exist in the real world. All of our countries are a mix of capitalist and socialist ideas yet we call them "capitalist" because that's the current predominant organization. > Tito was a mortal enemy…

" no socialist or communist nation has been allowed to exist without interference from the US through oppressive economic sanctions that would cripple and destroy any economy regardless of its economic system"

That is what COMECON was supposed to solve, but if you aggregate a heap of losers, you won't create a winning team.

"Socialism is not synonymous with Marxist-Leninist doctrine. It's a fairly simple core idea that has an infinite number of possible implementations, one of them being market socialism with worker cooperatives."

Of that infinite number, the violent Soviet-like version became the most widespread because it was the only one that was somewhat stable when implemented on a countrywide scale. That stability was bought by blood, of course.

No one is sabotaging worker cooperatives in Europe and lefty parties used to given them extra support, but they just don't seem to be able to grow well. The largest one is located in Basque Country and it is debatable if its size is partly caused by Basque nationalism, which is not a very socialist idea. Aside from that one, worker cooperatives of more than 1000 people are rare birds.

"The system has been teaching and conditioning people to do that for decades, but we should really be more conscious and stop doing that."

No one in the former socialist bloc will experiment with that quagmire again. For some reason, socialism is a catnip of intellectuals who continue to defend it, but real-world workers dislike it and defect from various attempts to build it at every opportunity.

We should stop trying to ride dead horses. Collective ownership of means of production on a macro scale is every bit as dead as divine right of kings to rule. There are still Curtis Yarvin types of intellectual who subscribe to the latter idea, but it is pining for the fjords. So is socialism.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#467

Post by simonw »

vrighter wrote: post #313
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.

Models are fixed. They do not learn post training. Which means that training needs to be ongoing. So the revenue covers the inference? So what? All that means is that it doesn't cover your costs and you're operating at a loss. Because it doesn't cover the training that you can't stop doing either.

Training costs are fixed. Inference costs are variable. The difference matters.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#468

Post by steveBK123 »

I think we are entering the phase where corporate is expecting more ROI than they are getting, but want to remain in the arms race.

The firmwide AI guru at my shop who sends out weekly usage metrics and release notes started mentioning cost only in the last few weeks. At first it was just about engaging with individual business heads on setting budgets / rules and slowing the cost growth rate.

A few weeks later and he is mentioning automated cost reporting, model downgrading and circuit breaking at a per-user level. The daily spend where you immediately get locked within 24 hours is pretty low.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#469

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

weatherlite wrote: post #451
fdefitte wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[dead]

> This is an underrated take. If you make someone 3x faster at producing a report nobody reads, you've improved nothing In the private market are there really so many companies delivering reports no one reads ? Why would management keep at it then ? The goal is to maximize profits. Now sure there are pockets of inefficiency even in the private sector but surely not that much - whatever the companies are doing - someo…

The implication is that companies in a private market can't possibly be hugely inefficient for irrational reasons that can ultimately be self-harming.

An interesting take.

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