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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

#121

Post by SoftTalker »

mr_toad wrote: post #38
bubblewand wrote: post #7

My company’s behind the curve, just got nudged today that I should make sure my AI use numbers aren’t low enough to stand out or I may have a bad time. Reckon we’re minimum six months from “oh whoops that was a waste of money”, maybe even a year. (Unless the AI market very publicly crashes first)

So management basically have no clue and want you to figure out how to use AI? Do they also make you write your own performance review and set your own objectives?

> Do they also make you write your own performance review and set your own objectives?

Not to get off on a tangent but this has got to be a "tell" for how much a company is managed by formula and how much it's actually got thinking people running things. Every time I've had to write my own review I fill out the form with some corporatese bullshit, my supervisor approves it and adds some more bullshit, it disappears into HR and I never hear anything about it until it's time for the next review, and it starts over again. There isn't even reference to any of my "objectives" from the last review, because that review has simply disappeared.

But I'm sure some HR exec is checking boxes for following "best practices" in employee evaluation.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#122

Post by ragall »

LPisGood wrote: post #31
sebmellen wrote: post #12

The thing with a lot of white collar work is that the thinking/talking is often the majority of the work… unlike coding, where thinking is (or, used to be, pre-agent) a smaller percentage of the time consumed. Writing the software, which is essentially working through how to implement the thought, used to take a much larger percentage of the overall time consumed from thought to completion. Other white collar busines…

I’m confused what kind of software engineer jobs there are that don’t involve meeting with people, “aligning expectations”, getting consensus, making slides/decks to communicate that, thinking about market positioning, etc? If you weren’t doing much of that before, I struggled to think of how you were doing much engineering at all, save some more niche extremely technical roles where many of those questions were alre…

> I’m confused what kind of software engineer jobs there are that don’t involve meeting with people, “aligning expectations”, getting consensus, making slides/decks to communicate that, thinking about market positioning, etc?

The vast majority of software engineers in the world. The most widespread management culture is that where a team's manager is the interface towards the rest of the organization and the engineers themselves don't do any alignment/consensus/business thinking, which is the manager's exclusive job.

I used to work like that and I loved it. My managers were decent and they allowed me to focus on my technical skills. Then, due to those technical skills I'd acquired, I somehow got hired at Google, stayed there nearly a decade but hated all the OKR crap, perf and the continuous self-promotion I was obliged to do.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#123

Post by sowbug »

cmiles8 wrote: post #28

I like AI and use it daily, but this bubble can’t pop soon enough so we can all return to normally scheduled programming. CEOs are now on the downside of the hype curve. They went from “Get me some of that AI!” after first hearing about it, to “Why are we not seeing any savings? Shut this boondoggle down!” now that we’re a few years into bubble, the business math isn’t working, and they only see burning piles of cash…

"return to normally scheduled programming" is probably not the exact phrasing you want to use. :)

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#124

Post by jurschreuder »

Workers may see the LLM as a productivity boost because they can basically cheat a their homework.

As a CEO I see it as a massive clog up of vast amounts of content that somebody will need to check. A DDoS of any text-based system.

The other day I got a document of 155 pages in Whatsapp. Thanx. Same with pull requests. Who will check all this?

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#125

Post by joering2 »

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…

> And so we should expect AI to look the same

Is that somewhat substantiated assumption? I recall learning on University in 2001 the history of AI and that initial frameworks were written in 70's and that prediction was we will reach human-like intelligence by 2000. Just because Sama came up with this somewhat breakthrough of an AI, it doesn't mean that equal improvement leaps will be done on a monthly/annual basis going forward. We may as well not make another huge leaps or reach what some say human intelligence level in 10 years or so.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#126

Post by killingtime74 »

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…

productivity may rise with time, and costs may come down. The money is already spent

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#128

Post by bccdee »

DaedalusII wrote: post #3

If you include microsoft copilot trials in fortune 500s, absolutely. A lot of major listed companies are still oblivious to the functionality of AI, their senior management don't even use it out of laziness

There's a lot of rote work in software development that's well-suited to LLM automation, but I think a lot of us overestimate the actual usefulness of a chatbot to the average white-collar worker. What's the point of making Copilot compose an email when your prompt would be longer than the email itself? You can tell ChatGPT to make you a slide deck, but slide decks are already super simple to make. You can use an LLM as a search engine, but we already have search engines. People sometimes talk about using a chatbot to brainstorm, but that seems redundant when you could simply think, free from the burden of explaining yourself to a chatbot.

LLMs are impressive and flexible tools, but people expect them to be transformative, and they're only transformative in narrow ways. The places they shine are quite low-level: transcription, translation, image recognition, search, solving clearly specified problems using well-known APIs, etc. There's value in these, but I'm not seeing the sort of universal accelerant that some people are anticipating.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#129

Post by noddingham »

HWR_14 wrote: post #103
calvinmorrison wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's helping lots of people, but it's also costing an extraordinary amount of money Is it fair to say that wall street is betting America's collective pensions on AI...

Very few people have pensions anymore. People now direct their own retirement funds.

That's what he was saying. Wall Street (the stock market) are people's "pensions" now because everyone has a 401k or equivalent so their retirement is tied to the market. Thus, these companies are betting America's collective retirement on AI...

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#130

Post by brandensilva »

tverbeure wrote: post #104
simonw wrote: 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…

Nobody questions that Anthropic makes revenue from a $20 subscription. The opposite would be very strange.

Yeah it's the caching that's doing the work for them though honestly. So many cached queries saving the GPUs from hard hits.
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