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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

#551

Post by o3dd »

Drakim wrote: post #327
simonw wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people believe that Anthropic lose money selling tokens to customers because they are subsidizing it for growth.

But that has zero effect on revenue, it only affects profit.

I wrote awhile ago on here that he should stick to his domain.

I was downvoted big time. Ah, I love it when people provide an example so it can finally be exposed without me having to say anything.

Unfortunately this is a huge problem on here - many people step outside of their domains, even if on the surface it seems simple, but post gibberish and completely mangled stuff. How does this benefit people who get exposed to crap?

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#552

Post by wiseowise »

brazzy wrote: post #532
wiseowise wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard miss. GP is right, and your assumptions say more about you than about me. :^)

My observation is about what your assumptions say about you, and that's not a miss. Nobody really understands a job they haven't done themselves, and "arguing" that 90% of them are "bullshit" has no other possible explanation than a combination of ignorance (you don't understand the jobs well enough to judge whether they are useful) and arrogance (you think you can make that judgement better than the 90% of people do…

> Nobody really understands a job they haven't done themselves, and "arguing" that 90% of them are "bullshit" has no other possible explanation than a combination of ignorance (you don't understand the jobs well enough to judge whether they are useful) and arrogance (you think you can make that judgement better than the 90% of people doing those jobs).

That's fine if you disagree, I'm not aiming to be the authority on bullshit jobs.

This doesn't change the fact that you and I are cattle for corpo/neo-feudals.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#553

Post by palmotea »

wiseowise wrote: post #493
brazzy wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Hard miss. GP is right, and your assumptions say more about you than about me. :^)

> Hard miss. GP is right, and your assumptions say more about you than about me. :^)

No. If that's the case, your statement was unclear: since you didn't specify who else thinks those people were cattle, the implication is that you think it. Especially since you prefaced your statement with "I’d argue."

And the interpretation...

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

...beggars belief. What indication has "the top" given to show they have that kind of foresight and control? The closest is the AI-bros advocacy of UBI, which (for the record) has gone nowhere.

I was half a mind to point that out in my original comment, but didn't get around to it.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#554

Post by wiseowise »

groundzeros2015 wrote: post #522
wiseowise wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Best product should be picked according to requirements by LLM without bullshit advertising.

See what I mean? What you see as a bullshit job is just completely misunderstanding how human beings work. - Which products get included in the candidate list? Every product in existence which claims use? - how many results can it return? And in what order? - which attributes or description of the product is provided to the llm? Who provides it? - how are the claims in those descriptions verified? - what if my busine…

I was replying to:

> The only way advertising won't exist or won't be needed is when humanity becomes a hive mind and removes all competition.

I don't need advertisement to pick the best product for myself. I have a list of requirements that I need fulfilled – why do I need advertisement for it?

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#555

Post by o3dd »

stackbutterflow wrote: post #387
KellyCriterion wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I spend between 1 and 2h a day on hn and I barely know what openclaw is. I've seen it mentioned once or twice and checked their website but that's all. If one lets AI FOMO since the release of chatgpt drive them they'd be glued to their screen 24/7.

What is happening is nonsensical.

OAI wants to keep the hype train going. That is all. OpenClaw is just a project that attracted the interests of people messing about with LLMs. Which as a proportion of economically active people is.... tiny.

They brought him (Pete) over as he seems to have some way of thinking about LLMs in the form of a product. Will he have repeatable success on a large scale? Who knows. I doubt it personally.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#556

Post by cowpig »

NVIDIA is doing circular finance deals with all of the top labs to pump up demand for its products and charging a monopoly rate on those products. Everything in computing is costing more.

Access to capital for everyone else is dropping. And the US economy is being managed by chaos monkeys, causing all kinds of supply chain disruptions. Oligopolies in almost every market are increasingly jacking up prices above market equilibrium rates as they are emboldened by a corrupted FTC.

Despite what Peter Thiel may have led you to believe, Monopolies are not healthy for an economy in aggregate.

Of course the economy is slowing.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#557

Post by ImHereToVote »

nananana9 wrote: post #508
weatherlite wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I don't know what to tell you aside from "just go and work at a large private company and see". I'm not smart enough to understand the macro-economics or incentive structures that lead to this happening, but I've seen many 100+ man teams that output whose output is something you could reasonably expect from a 5 man team.

Many of these companies are fairly close to the mechanisms of credit creation. That distortion can make a market work very counterintuitively.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#558

Post by [deleted] »

kombookcha wrote: post #371
anon-3988 wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This is one of my major concerns about people trying to use these tools for 'efficiency'. The only plausible value in somebody writing a huge report and somebody else reading it is information transfer. LLM's are notoriously bad at this. The noise to signal ratio is unacceptably high, and you will be worse off reading the summary than if you skimmed the first and last pages. In fact, you will be worse off than if you…

[deleted]

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#559

Post by samultio »

jdasdf wrote: post #341
Retric wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jobs you don’t notice or understand often look pointless. HR on the surface seems unimportant, but you’d notice if the company stopped having health insurance or sending your taxes to the IRS etc etc. In the end when jobs are done right they seem to disappear. We notice crappy software or a poorly done HVAC system not clean carpets.

> HR on the surface seems unimportant, but you’d notice if the company stopped having health insurance or sending your taxes to the IRS etc etc. Interesting on how the very example you give for "oh this job isn't really bullshit" ultimately ends up being useless for the business itself, and exists only as a result of regulation. No, health insurance being provided by employers, or tax withholding aren't useful things…

Only result of regulation, that statement invalidates probably a majority of modern work, and like every legal professional.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#560

Post by t43562 »

abraxas wrote: post #64
torben-friis wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

That would be a way to get "the right answer."

i.e. it's not the LLM, it's that they're not being used properly.

I get accused of the no true Scotsman argument because I think agile can be done right, for example. Is work bullshit because an LLM doesn't help it?

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