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The Anthropic Economic Index

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171–180 of 238 posts

Re: The Anthropic Economic Index

#171
post #6

AI companies: But don't worry, AI chatbots will create a UBI utopia where we will not do any work and we will have a future that will give us more time back and would never have to pay for work or food again! /s Here's the reality: You are getting displaced. Companies like Anthropic and OpenAI screaming about AGI are repeatedly lying to you as they raise more money while Meta (who are laying off staff today), Salesfo…

It’s time to take up socialism, folks.

Yup. If you disagree that's fine, I'm 99% sure you just disagree about the words -- it's time to take up whatever "real" democracy means to you! A democracy where increased productivity doesn't make people worry that they'll paradoxically have less. A democracy where power is neither hereditary nor selfish, but rather a civic sacrifice. A democracy where human flourishing is the goal, not a side hustle.

Re: The Anthropic Economic Index

#173

This more or less confirms what I imagine most of us thought, AI is mostly used by engineers, or for engineering tasks. Makes sense, I wonder how much traffic comes from automated tasks (co-pilot, etc). Every time I read a report like this I do wonder if we'll ever see an ROI on LLMs. HUNDREDS of billions of dollars of spend, and 3 years in its still primarily the same crowd using it, and has yet to create a "killer"…

I don't think it's necessarily because of lack of generalizability. We (SWEs) built it, so we naturally have the most intimate knowledge of how to dogfood/use it. And so the cycle intensifies (use, provide feedback, improve). There's many positive examples of LLMs being useful in document based workflows in other domains as well!

Maybe! But you could say the inverse of lots of things that SWE's built. SWE's built the bloomberg terminal! SWE's built CRMs! I think its at least possible that LLMs are VERY useful for SWEs and a small number of other professions, but is unlikely to massively scale beyond that

Re: The Anthropic Economic Index

#174

This more or less confirms what I imagine most of us thought, AI is mostly used by engineers, or for engineering tasks. Makes sense, I wonder how much traffic comes from automated tasks (co-pilot, etc). Every time I read a report like this I do wonder if we'll ever see an ROI on LLMs. HUNDREDS of billions of dollars of spend, and 3 years in its still primarily the same crowd using it, and has yet to create a "killer"…

Claude is mostly used by software engineers. That's an important distinction to make. I love Claude, but let's not ignore that in the LLM race, they're not exactly the leading player.

Fair, but do you think OpenAI and Gemini are going to be like directionally similar? How much of OpenAI's traffic is from Co-Pilot and other related tools, for example. My local IDE probably generates more queries a day than (pick a profession, idk, nurse? insurance sales? construction worker?) does in a month!

Re: The Anthropic Economic Index

#175

This more or less confirms what I imagine most of us thought, AI is mostly used by engineers, or for engineering tasks. Makes sense, I wonder how much traffic comes from automated tasks (co-pilot, etc). Every time I read a report like this I do wonder if we'll ever see an ROI on LLMs. HUNDREDS of billions of dollars of spend, and 3 years in its still primarily the same crowd using it, and has yet to create a "killer"…

> I fear the economic reality on the backside of this kind of spend. Minor nitpick. Use of the word 'spend' as a noun is not widespread and not well known.

Yeah fair, I forget HN is very international, this may read as just straight up weird

Re: The Anthropic Economic Index

#176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you are talking about people who are actual licensed engineers, this is a distinction without a difference. Thing is, I’ve never met someone in software with a professional license.

I didn't mean the professional license, rather the ensemble of practices, tools, etc. It is practiced in safety critical domains.

I'm self-taught and had a job in the autonmous vehicle industry writing software that included safety-critical functionality.

I had about 12 YoE at the time, and my manager didn't realize I didn't have a degree until after I was hired. Apparently it hadn't affected my offer, and he was more impressed than anything.

You say:

> SE is the set of techniques, practices, tools that we have collected over decades for producing multi-versioned software that meets a certain reliability rating. Not all of these is freely available online.

The same way there's no single guide on the internet on how to be the kind of engineer who builds reliable or extensible software, I don't think there's a guide hiding in the average CS curriculum.

Most of it consists of getting repetitions building software that involves the least predictable building block in all of software engineering (people), in all its various forms: from users, to other developers, to yourself (in the future), to "stakeholders", etc.

Learning how to predict and account for the unpredictability in all the people who will intersect with some facet of your software is the closest I've seen to a "universal method" for creating software that meets the criteria you defined.

And honestly I'd be concerned if someone told me you can just be taught some blessed set of tools and practices to get around it... that sounds a lot like not having actually internalized why they work in the first place, and the "why" is arguably more valuable than the tools and practices themselves.

Re: The Anthropic Economic Index

#177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has to be a meme. Costco is peak hypercapitalism lol.

Could you say more?

It's a 500B company that undercuts everyone else with incredible efficiency, just like Amazon. It's an example of how capitalism can be great. If you really want to get of out of capitalism, you can just buy directly from farmers or grow your own food.

The whole thing about no ethical consumption under capitalism is a just a way to enjoy the conveniences of capitalism on a moral high ground. It's totally doable, you just might not enjoy it haha.

Re: The Anthropic Economic Index

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry but that mentor has a small practical imagination, a pot can be so large that the top 3 feet that you reach with that spoon could be all oil

to push this analogy too far, that's because you didn't stir it well, not because the spoon is too small.

Have to sample to see if it’s stirred well enough.

Re: The Anthropic Economic Index

#179
post #82

Their promise not to train on the conversations seemed to imply that conversations were private. It is disconcerting that they were not. The extent to which you need to look for loopholes in privacy guarantees these days is amazing.

They explained the privacy-preserving mechanism they use for this in detail a few months ago: https://www.anthropic.com/research/clio

Re: The Anthropic Economic Index

#180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I listened to an interview a while back with the researchers did this analysis. They developed privacy-preserving techniques, avoiding having to read user conversations directly. This is Anthropic we're talking about, they're rightly recognized as the 'ethical' AI company.

Words I typed into a service I paid for are now in a huggingface repo. Fuck that.

Are they?
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