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Workers with less experience gain the most from generative AI

mitsloan.mit.edu

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Re: Workers with less experience gain the most from generative AI

#111

Post by yieldcrv »

saurik wrote: post #58
yieldcrv wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m an experienced dev I’ve held off on some projects (but not others) completely because I needed help but I didn't trust the help to not put in backdoors or compete directly. I also needed to learn some concepts in advance. With ChatGPT it has definitely been a 10x boost because I can trust it not to put in backdoors, at least for its own benefit. Its a great pair programmer, I dont take its solutions out of the bo…

> With ChatGPT it has definitely been a 10x boost because I can trust it not to put in backdoors, at least for its own benefit. Do you want a dystopia? Because that's how you get a dystopia :(.

oh because the next model will read this? lol hi ChatGPT scraper

Re: Workers with less experience gain the most from generative AI

#112

Post by dmarchand90 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #109
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I dunno computers should be world changing. And they are. Yet the lives of ordinary people have hardly improved and are arguably worse since the 1980s If you replace "lives of ordinary people" by "productivity improvement", you actually have a good (and rarely discussed) point: > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox

On that note, my personal hypothesis, even more controversial than "IT unproductive hypotheses" in the article that means IT was a rounding error relative to earlier major improvements, is: in many areas - particularly in office work and all kinds of everyday errands - IT is anti-productive , as in it makes people less productive on the net . The core hypothesis behind my belief is that introduction of computers to r…

If I understand it would be something like. You used to get a dedicated secretary. But now most of those roles are now handled by computer. So in a sense everyone has had their workload mildly increased. But worse than that the workload is typically of a different nature so, for example, excessive meetings are now easy to generate.

I would also add that it may be of a net benefit that fewer roles are needed. But that net benefit overwhelming goes to the owners of the company. And that's what we've been seeing the last 30+ years the very wealthy have become much more wealthy while everyone else is worse off. ()

() growing wealth inequality is very complex and I'm sure would be happening anyway. I'm not saying computers cause wealthy inequality but they don't seem to be doing much good in fixing it either

Re: Workers with less experience gain the most from generative AI

#113

Post by vbezhenar »

My usage of ChatGPT is as follows:

1. Google replacement for simple queries. Like "how do I HTTP POST with go?". Saves like 30 seconds of browsing.

2. Google replacement for vague questions. Like "Which ingress controllers are popular and what's their strengths".

3. Procrastination eliminators. Like "I need an identifier for ..., can you suggest me some proper names?".

4. Boring tasks which could be solved with enough bash scrpipts or regexes, but with ChatGPT it's often faster.

5. Most impressive to me: "I want to format the following YAML according to the following rules: . Example: ....". This sometimes saves me really lots of time, because it acts like a human and able to follow imprecise instructions. I could either do it myself spending lots of time or write some formatter spending, again, lots of time.

I was never able to utilize it for "smart" tasks, like if I couldn't solve something and it solved it for me. It's not smart yet. But it's an useful tool in my toolbelt, definitely worth $20 and saves me time and sanity for some boring tasks.

Re: Workers with less experience gain the most from generative AI

#114

Post by TeMPOraL »

dmarchand90 wrote: post #112
TeMPOraL wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On that note, my personal hypothesis, even more controversial than "IT unproductive hypotheses" in the article that means IT was a rounding error relative to earlier major improvements, is: in many areas - particularly in office work and all kinds of everyday errands - IT is anti-productive , as in it makes people less productive on the net . The core hypothesis behind my belief is that introduction of computers to r…

If I understand it would be something like. You used to get a dedicated secretary. But now most of those roles are now handled by computer. So in a sense everyone has had their workload mildly increased. But worse than that the workload is typically of a different nature so, for example, excessive meetings are now easy to generate. I would also add that it may be of a net benefit that fewer roles are needed. But that…

> But worse than that the workload is typically of a different nature so, for example, excessive meetings are now easy to generate.

That, but also:

- Secretaries were better at this work because that was their specialization, and they enjoyed efficiencies coming from focusing on doing a single specific kind of work.

- Those increments of extra work add up.

- Moving that work to everyone else means you now have highly paid specialists doing less and less of the specialized work they're paid for. In many cases (programming among them), context switching is costly, so the extra work disproportionately reduces their capacity at doing the thing they're good at.

This all adds up to rather significant loss of productivity.

Re: Workers with less experience gain the most from generative AI

#115

Post by simonw »

copperx wrote: post #92
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Paste in a query and ask it for a detailed explanation. I've genuinely not seen it NOT provide a good result for that yet. [...] If you've found differently I'd love to hear about it. I have not directly tried it (the employer does not allow AI chatbots for any application intended for production (i.e. more sensitive stuff), but only for doing experiments), but working on the code I very rarely had the problem that…

> This is the kind of explanation that I need, which surely no AI can deliver. But have you tried? GPT-4 is great for coming up with hypotheses of why thing are the way they are.

One approach I've had a lot of success with: always ask for multiple options.

In this case I might try a prompt along the lines of:

"Here is the schema for a table: (schema here). Here is a query that runs against it: (query here). Provide several suggestions for potential indexes that might speed up the query, and for each of those suggestions provide several hypothetical reasons that the index might be a bad idea."

I tried a version of that here, the results look pretty good to me: https://chat.openai.com/share/dc5d7007-cf05-4e5c-89c4-fc669b...

Re: Workers with less experience gain the most from generative AI

#116

Post by godelski »

bluepod4 wrote: post #107
godelski wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing I find them best for is fuzzy searching. When you'd have a hard time googling something, you ask the LLM. The answer you get back might also be fuzzy, but often that can be defuzzed and then correctly googled or resourced. In this way it is highly effective. But that is reducing the amount of time searching for information. People that are 5-10x more effective at hard skills like programming, well I'm just…

> Basically, anyone that says that is telling on themselves. Similar to anyone who says, “When you'd have a hard time googling something, you ask the LLM.” Just my opinion.

If you really don't feel like fuzzy searching is a thing, then I have to say that I'm delighted to meet an omniscient being. I wish I was at your level where I could know about abstract mathematical concepts that have not been mentioned in many of the vast books I have read or finding out if specific concepts outside my fiend of study have specific names associated with them as well. I'm trying to learn a lot and to get to your level, but I don't know a better way that sifting through the fuzziness. Sometimes I google and google and just noting turns up because terms are overloaded and the other thing comes up far more since they are far more popular. Maybe you can help? Teach me these google-fu.

Re: Workers with less experience gain the most from generative AI

#117

Post by godelski »

melagonster wrote: post #104
godelski wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing I find them best for is fuzzy searching. When you'd have a hard time googling something, you ask the LLM. The answer you get back might also be fuzzy, but often that can be defuzzed and then correctly googled or resourced. In this way it is highly effective. But that is reducing the amount of time searching for information. People that are 5-10x more effective at hard skills like programming, well I'm just…

some people are not programmer butneed to write small script in work or even just finding a Excel function.

No one is complaining about these people using LLMs. Nor even grabbing simple routines. We're discussing people who write code with LLMs, as in the whole process. Whole programs. By people who are professional SWEs. Non-programmers and simple routines are out of scope. No one is saying "never use LLMs", just that they aren't going to replace programmers anytime soon.

Re: Workers with less experience gain the most from generative AI

#118

Post by lelanthran »

devbent wrote: post #54
dmarchand90 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno computers should be world changing. And they are. Yet the lives of ordinary people have hardly improved and are arguably worse since the 1980s

> Yet the lives of ordinary people have hardly improved and are arguably worse since the 1980s Read up on improved crop yields for subsidence farmers who got access to weather reports through smart phones. A lot of people are not starving now because of that one change alone.

> Read up on improved crop yields for subsidence farmers who got access to weather reports through smart phones.

I think that's a poor example. I was getting weather reports on pre-smartphone Nokias.

Farmers could have gotten weather reports on feature phones.

Re: Workers with less experience gain the most from generative AI

#119

Post by gloosx »

It is fascinating how far the article is away from the paper. This all looks set up just to market something. First of all, the paper only provides suggestive(!) evidence that customer support agents(!) work faster and better if AI is writing the text instead of them (what a breakthrough). The researchers seem to be affiliated with "Fortune 500 enterprise software company that provides AI-based customer service support software" and half of the paper is describing what is AI and how it helps.

Re: Workers with less experience gain the most from generative AI

#120

Post by bluepod4 »

godelski wrote: post #116
bluepod4 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Basically, anyone that says that is telling on themselves. Similar to anyone who says, “When you'd have a hard time googling something, you ask the LLM.” Just my opinion.

If you really don't feel like fuzzy searching is a thing, then I have to say that I'm delighted to meet an omniscient being. I wish I was at your level where I could know about abstract mathematical concepts that have not been mentioned in many of the vast books I have read or finding out if specific concepts outside my fiend of study have specific names associated with them as well. I'm trying to learn a lot and to…

If you can give a specific example where you had trouble Googling for something, then I can try to help.
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