Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence

anthropic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 584 posts

Re: Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence

#221

Post by msvana »

throwaw12 wrote: post #154

People who are saying they're not seeing productivity boost, can you please share where is it failing? Because, I am terrified by the output I am getting while working on huge legacy codebases, it works. I described one of my workflow changes here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47271168 but in general compared to old way of working I am saving half of the steps consistently, whether its researching the codebas…

I work as an ML engineer/researcher. When I implement a change in an experiment it usually takes at least an hour to get the results. I can use this time to implement a different experiment. Doesn't matter if I do it by hand or if I let an agent do it for me, I have enough time. Code isn't the bottleneck.

I also heard an opinion that since writing code is cheap, people implement things that have no economic value without really thinking it through.

Re: Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence

#222

Post by Karrot_Kream »

pinkmuffinere wrote: post #209
onion2k wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A/B tests are a statistical tool, and outliers will mess with any statistical measure. If your data is especially prone to that you should be using something that accounts for them, and your prompt to Opus should tell it to account for that. A good way to use AI is to treat it like a brilliant junior. It knows a lot about how things work in general but very little about your specific domain. If your data has a partic…

I did tell it that I expect to see something like a power-law distribution in order value, so I think I pretty much followed your instructions here. Btw, if you do know the right thing to do in my scenario, I'd love to figure it out. This is not my area of expertise, and just figuring it out through articles so far.

I recommend reading Wikipedia and talking to LLMs to get this one. Order values do follow power-law distributions (you're probably looking for an exponential or a Zipf distribution.) You want to ask how to perform a statistical test using these distributions. I'm a fan of Bayesian techniques here, but it's up to you if you want to use a frequentist approach. If you can follow some basic calculus you can follow the math for constructing these statistical tests, if not some searching will help you find the formulas you need.

Re: Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence

#223

Post by apsurd »

msvana wrote: post #221
throwaw12 wrote: post #154

People who are saying they're not seeing productivity boost, can you please share where is it failing? Because, I am terrified by the output I am getting while working on huge legacy codebases, it works. I described one of my workflow changes here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47271168 but in general compared to old way of working I am saving half of the steps consistently, whether its researching the codebas…

I work as an ML engineer/researcher. When I implement a change in an experiment it usually takes at least an hour to get the results. I can use this time to implement a different experiment. Doesn't matter if I do it by hand or if I let an agent do it for me, I have enough time. Code isn't the bottleneck. I also heard an opinion that since writing code is cheap, people implement things that have no economic value wit…

+1 on the economic value line. Not everything needs to be about money but if you get paid to ship code it's about money. And now we have coworkers shipping insane amounts of "features" because it's all free to ship and being an engineer, it ends there.

Only it doesn't, there's product positioning, UX, information architecture, onboarding and training, support, QA, change management, analytics, reporting… sigh

Re: Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence

#224

Post by laurentiurad »

yoyohello13 wrote: post #187
threatofrain wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are words without weights. At some point the put money into software option will max out. Perhaps what we should all be doing is hiring more lawyers, there's always more legal work to be done. When you don't have weights then you can reason like this.

I don’t know what kind of software your used to but software is pretty much universally dog shit these days. I could probably count on one hand the number of programs that I actually like using. There is an astronomical room for improvement. I don’t think we are hitting diminishing returns any time soon.

I talk about this at length in one of my previous posts here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39963058. I definitely share your opinion and I think this will be exacerbated by vibe coding and having LoC as the main KPI for engineering teams.

Re: Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence

#225

Post by aurareturn »

monksy wrote: post #220
ido wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even the $200 claude max monthly subscription is peanuts compared to salary cost.

Tell that to the company that I was just at that cut Intelij licenses as cost cutting measures.

If they really want to cut cost, fire the worst dev on the team and use that money to give everyone a Codex subscription.

Re: Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence

#226

Post by bandrami »

eucyclos wrote: post #200
bandrami wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In glad you made something with it you wanted to make, and as a fan of Aristotle I'm always happy to see the word eudaimonia out there. Best of luck. That said I don't understand what this does or why I would want the tokens it mentions.

Yeah, I gotta make a video walkthrough. Its basically a goal tracker combined with an ad filter - write what you want out of life and block ads, it replaces them with ads that actually align with your long term goals instead of distracting from them. The tokens let you add ads to the network, though you also get some for using the goal tracker.

Though this does suggest one possible answer to me: the new software is largely web applications, and the web is just a space I don't spend much time anymore other than a few retro sites like this

Re: Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence

#227

Post by pinkmuffinere »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #222
pinkmuffinere wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did tell it that I expect to see something like a power-law distribution in order value, so I think I pretty much followed your instructions here. Btw, if you do know the right thing to do in my scenario, I'd love to figure it out. This is not my area of expertise, and just figuring it out through articles so far.

I recommend reading Wikipedia and talking to LLMs to get this one. Order values do follow power-law distributions (you're probably looking for an exponential or a Zipf distribution.) You want to ask how to perform a statistical test using these distributions. I'm a fan of Bayesian techniques here, but it's up to you if you want to use a frequentist approach. If you can follow some basic calculus you can follow the ma…

Thanks for the suggestions! I didn't want to do the math myself, but I did take your suggestion and found some articles discussing ways to make it work even with a non-normal distribution:

- https://cxl.com/blog/outliers/

- https://www.blastx.com/insights/the-best-revenue-significanc...

- (online tool to calculate significance) https://www.blastx.com/rpv-calculator

I'm not checking their math, but the articles make sense to me, and I trust they did implement it correctly. In the end the LLM did get me to the correct answer by suggesting the articles, so I guess I should eat some humble pie and say it _did_ help me. At the same time, if I didn't have the intuition that using rpv as-is in a t-test would be noisy, and the suggestions from this comment thread, I think I could have gone down the wrong path. So I'm not sure what my conclusion is -- maybe something like LLMs are helpful once you ask the right question.

Re: Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence

#228

Post by bandrami »

salawat wrote: post #183
bandrami wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's only certain if investments in tech infrastructure always led to productivity increases. But sometimes they just don't. Lots of firms spent a lot of money on blockchain five years ago, for instance, and that money is just gone now.

Ironically, abstraction bloat eats away any infra gains. We trade more compute to allow people less in tune with the machine to get things done, usually at the cost of the implementation being eh... Suboptimal, shall we say.

I think there's a broad category error where people see that every gain has been an abstraction (true) but conclude from that that every abstraction will be a gain (dubious)

Re: Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence

#229

Post by hdgvhicv »

aurareturn wrote: post #182
salawat wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you are paying for their tokens on top of their salary, right? Right?

You can do a lot with just $20 Codex CLI subscription. Tokens are cheap compared to the $20k we're paying for a dev each month.

Amazes me that people pay 20k a month for a dev rather than paying 2k a month for one in Poland or 1k a month for one from India

There’s obviously a benefit of paying higher rates for US programmers, but does that benefit change when llms are thrown into the mix

Re: Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence

#230

Post by sivanmz »

throwaw12 wrote: post #154

People who are saying they're not seeing productivity boost, can you please share where is it failing? Because, I am terrified by the output I am getting while working on huge legacy codebases, it works. I described one of my workflow changes here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47271168 but in general compared to old way of working I am saving half of the steps consistently, whether its researching the codebas…

It’s been my experience as of recently. I point it at an issue tracker and ask it to investigate, write a test to reproduce the problem and plan a fix together. There’s lots of hand holding from me but it saves me a lot of work and I’ve been surprised by its comfort with legacy code bases. For now I feel empowered, and I’m actually working more intensively, but I was wondering to myself if I’m going run out of work this year. Interestingly, our metrics show that output is slowed by increased workload on reviewers.
Post reply on HN