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The Anthropic Economic Index

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Re: The Anthropic Economic Index

#211

Post by lblume »

asadotzler wrote: post #158
lblume wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's say I can't fully disclose the details because it is an area I am actively working on, but I had an algorithmical problem that was already solved in an ancient paper, but after a few hours of research I could find no open implementation of it anywhere. I thus spent quite some time re-implementing this algorithm from scratch, but it kept failing in quite a few edge cases that should have been covered by the orig…

clearly NOT novel as you so clearly explained, "an algorithmical problem that was already solved in an ancient paper"

Well, of course. Realistically, I would not expect AI systems like this to be very useful for novel cutting-edge scientific results, proving mathematical theorems etc. in the next few years.

But this is not the majority of what software developers are doing and working on today. Most have a set of features or goals to implement using code satisfying certain constraints, which is what current reasoning AI models seem to be able to do very well. Of course, this test was not rigorous in any meaningful way, but it really changed my mind on the pace of this technology.

Re: The Anthropic Economic Index

#212

Post by willturman »

roncesvalles wrote: post #206
esperent wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> something you can almost self-teach from widely available free online content. I think you massively underestimate just how much data is online for everything , especially once you include books which are freely available on every possible subject (illegally, perhaps, but if Meta can download them for free then so can everyone else). There's less noise for many other subjects than for software engineering, there's…

A significant chunk of human knowledge is not publicly accessible. You cannot self-teach how to make a modern aircraft, jet engine, nuclear reactor, radar tech, advanced metallurgy etc. Similarly, I would wager most of the useful economics and financial theory that humans have come up with is only known to hedge or prop trading firms. For some subjects, the entire journal-published academic body of knowledge for it i…

Taylor Wilson built a nuclear reactor at his home when he was 14. People build jet engines and put them on modern model aircraft every day.

If the instructions aren’t immediately available, the internet provides connections and forums to find anything your heart desires.

Information wants to be free.

Arbitraging micro-opportunities (or far more likely, deploying insider information masked as HFT or some secret sauce arbitrage) is not economically useful.

Re: The Anthropic Economic Index

#213

Post by saagarjha »

rvnx wrote: post #83
Eextra953 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I cancelled my chatgpt subscription and moved to claude. Its kinda silly, but I feel like the products are about equivalent for my use case so I'd rather do business with a company that is acting in good (better?) faith.

In the case they don't get high salaries from this activity, there is also a solution. The next step in ~10 years could be to offer their services to governments to offer "automated court decisions". Then the people who funded / trained this "justice" out of their good heart, would actually have leverage, in terms of concrete power. It's a much more subtle way to capture power, if you can replace the judges with your…

Anthropic pays their engineers pretty well. They're doing just fine, at least for as long as people are pouring money into their company. But that's everyone in this space, isn't it?

Re: The Anthropic Economic Index

#214

Post by dzonga »

AI, just like crypto - exposes narrow minded tech bro's who live in some tech utopia where tech rules the world.

before it was smart contracts will replace lawyers & contracts. DeFI will replace traditonal finance.

now it's AI will replace jobs - because it can autocomplete Javascript and guess the next sequence of english / {{whatever}} lang words.

hell AI won't even replace CRUD software engineers who make software based on some business rules.

Re: The Anthropic Economic Index

#215

Post by aqueueaqueue »

noah_buddy wrote: post #41
brap wrote: post #13

Seems like Anthropic has too much money on their hands and are looking for ways to spend it. It’s surprising to see lean AI startups accumulate fat so quickly. Usually this sort of wheel spinning is reserved for large corporations. And it’s not just them. To me this trend screams “valuations are too high”, and maybe hints at “progress might start to stagnate soon”.

I am inclined to agree. If you’re at the precipice of automating or transforming knowledge work and the value for being the first is nearly infinite (due to “flywheel effects”), why would you dedicate any energy to studying the impact of AI on jobs directly? The thesis is everything changes. I think AI in its current iteration is going to settle into being like a slightly worse version of Wikipedia morphed with a sli…

A lot of assumptions there. Why isn't Ford the only motor company?

And if the flywheel is that AI begets AI exponentially in an infinite loop then those share certificates you own probably won't be worth much. The AI won.

Coincidentally, Anthropic's mission is AI safety.

Re: The Anthropic Economic Index

#216

Post by castigatio »

brap wrote: post #13

Seems like Anthropic has too much money on their hands and are looking for ways to spend it. It’s surprising to see lean AI startups accumulate fat so quickly. Usually this sort of wheel spinning is reserved for large corporations. And it’s not just them. To me this trend screams “valuations are too high”, and maybe hints at “progress might start to stagnate soon”.

We live in a world where there's a lot of talk about how AI might impact societies and economies - but little actual data. To me it seems very worthwhile to try to add 'any' data to that discussion and track how things change over time. Are reports of economic or labour trends pointless? Should companies not track how people use their products? I don't think it costs Anthropic much to do this - it's work for a couple of people to analyze their database.

Re: The Anthropic Economic Index

#217

Post by Cumpiler69 »

0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #208
azinman2 wrote: post #109

I'd love to see this analysis done for ChatGPT, which has a much bigger 'consumer' marketshare. I'm also very wary of their analysis method, given classifiers-gonna-classify. We already see it in their example of someone asking why their game is crashing and it buckets them into Computer & Mathematical occupation. I'm guessing the original question was not that of a game developer but rather a game player, so can you…

If you look at ChatGPT search volume, you can see massive dips during the summer when school is out: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge... Which suggests that the most common use is as a tutor / cheating on homework.

[dead]

Re: The Anthropic Economic Index

#218

Post by manquer »

esperent wrote: post #210
manquer wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The attempt is commendable, but the agency problem is well understood and none of these alternative structures have really solve for it.

> the agency problem is well understood What is "the agency problem"?

Very generally it is (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble... ) about the conflict of interest between agent( people taking action) and principal (the entity or person on behalf of whom action is taken)

In modern management compensation theory (https://saylordotorg.github.io/text_introduction-to-economic... ) this is key to why executive compensation has increased much faster than workers in the last 50 years.

Stock based compensation mix evolved from this thesis, and quite common in the valley and why almost all OpenAI staff wanted Sam Altman back even though the non profit board did not.

Aligning key talent's compensation to enterprise value is only viable in unrestricted for profit entities any other structure with limits (capped profit, public benefit corporation, non profit, trust, 501c's etc) does not work as well.

Talent will then leave to a for-profit entity who can offer better compensation than a restricted entity can because they share a % of their enterprise value which restricted ones either cannot or not have same liquidity/value [1] etc.

---

[1]This is why public companies are more valuable for RSU/options than private companies, and why cash flow positive companies like Stripe still raise private money to just give liquidity to employees .

Re: The Anthropic Economic Index

#219

Post by trash_cat »

advael wrote: post #141

Anthropic pivoting to doing economics? Seems about as legit as most economics Probably an overall smart move, since claiming to be doing economics sometimes leads to being positioned to make policy favorable to oneself

I think it's not economics per se, but a responsible outlook on society as a whole. I think it is what sets Anthropic apart, as they do focus more on how AI affects society. That is why they have an emphasis on AI safety.

Re: The Anthropic Economic Index

#220

Post by anshumankmr »

0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #208
azinman2 wrote: post #109

I'd love to see this analysis done for ChatGPT, which has a much bigger 'consumer' marketshare. I'm also very wary of their analysis method, given classifiers-gonna-classify. We already see it in their example of someone asking why their game is crashing and it buckets them into Computer & Mathematical occupation. I'm guessing the original question was not that of a game developer but rather a game player, so can you…

If you look at ChatGPT search volume, you can see massive dips during the summer when school is out: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge... Which suggests that the most common use is as a tutor / cheating on homework.

This ignores people who open ChatGPT.com or use the app
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