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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

#361

Post by beAbU »

Esophagus4 wrote: post #68
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…

I always assumed that with inference being so cheap, my subscription fees were paying for training costs, not inference.

Is inference really that cheap? Why can't I do it at home with a reasonable amount of money?

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#362

Post by lnsru »

aurareturn wrote: post #273
lnsru wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That means the system will collapse in the future. Now from bunch of people some good programmers are made. Rest go into marketing, sales, agile or other not really technical roles. When the initial crowd will be gone there will be no experienced users of AI. Crappy inexperienced developer will make more crap without prior experience and ability to judge the design decisions. Basically no seniors without juniors.

This implies that writing code by hand will remain the best way to create software. The seniors today who have got to senior status by writing code manually will be different than seniors of tomorrow, who got to senior status using AI tools. Maybe people will become more of generalists rather than specialists.

Generalist is not automatically bad. I design digital high speed hardware and write (probably crappy) Qt code. The thing is that I have experience to judge my work. Greenhorns can’t and this will lead to crapification of the whole industry. I often ask AI tools for an advice. Sometimes it’s very useful, sometimes it’s complete hallucination. On average it definitely makes me better developer. Having rather abstract answer I can derive exact solution. But that comes from my previous experience. Without experience it’s a macabre guessing game.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#363

Post by beAbU »

noosphr wrote: post #237
al_borland wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When my company first started pushing for devs to use AI, the most senior guy on my team was pretty vocal about coding not being the bottleneck that slowed down work. It was an I/O issue, and maybe a caching issue as well from too many projects going at the same time with no focus… which also makes the I/O issues worse.

Ironically using Ai on records of meetings across an org is amazing. If you can find out what everyone is talking about you can talk to them. Privacy is non existent, every word said and message sent at the office is recorded but the benefits we saw were amazing.

Yep. Previous org I was at had the fancy copilot integrated into teams. All meetings were auto transcribed and you could chat with copilot about the meeting directly in the chat. It was absolutely magical at extracting action points, decisions and other salient points. It was like having a secretary for each and every meeting.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#364

Post by KellyCriterion »

wiseowise wrote: post #309
KellyCriterion wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, these people ("managers, engineers" etc.) do just not work in tech & IT but in other fields and they do not read tech news in your country etc. Most people are just "not that deep in there" as most people on HN.

> “Tech news” A guy attached Claude to his socials, groundbreaking tech.

Once I was working for a consulting & development company; they were trying to enter sector ABC by stuffing up a team of people, so I was told, who had interest in sector ABC stuff and want to do some projects there.

While they were deep in software development in general, no body of them read any of the essential/required daily industrial news (also not that one related to doing software development in sector ABC)

:-)

So no, even people somehow attached to a topic are not necessarily somehow deeper involved.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#365

Post by seanhunter »

fdefitte wrote: post #175
abraxas wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if LLMs are optimizing the average office worker's productivity but the work itself simply has no discernable economic value? This is argued at length in Grebber's Bullshit Jobs essay and book.

[dead]

What happens if (and I suspect this to be increasingly the case now) you make someone 3x faster at producing a report that nobody reads and those people now use LLMs to not read the report whereas they were not reading it in person before?

Then everyone saves time, which they can spend producing more things which other people will not read and/or not reading the things that other people produce (using llms)?

Productivity through the roof.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#366

Post by dns_snek »

inglor_cz wrote: post #356
dns_snek wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of that is inherent to socialism. There can be good and bad management, freedom and authoritarianism in any economic system.

Socialist economies larger than kibbutzes could only be created and sustained by totalitarian states. Socialism means collective ownership of means of production . And people won't give up their shops and fields and other means of production to the government voluntarily, at least not en masse. Thus they have to be forced at a gunpoint, and they always were. All the subsequent horror is downstream from that. This is…

This is exactly what I meant, a centrally-planned economy where the state owns everything and people are forced to give everything up is just one terrible (Soviet) model, not some defining feature of socialism.

Yugoslavia was extremely successful, with economic growth that matched or exceeded most capitalist European economies post-WW2. In some ways it wasn't as free as western societies are today but it definitely wasn't totalitarian, and in many ways it was more free - there's a philosophical question in there about what freedom really is. For example Yugoslavia made abortion a constitutionally protected right in the 70s.

I don't want to debate the nuances of what's better now and what was better then as that's beside the point, which is that the idiosyncrasies of the terrible Soviet economy are not inherent to "socialism", just like the idiosyncrasies of the US economy aren't inherent to capitalism.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#367

Post by matsemann »

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…

Is this like the hotels first jumping on the wifi bandwagon? Spent lots of money up front for expensive tech. Years later, anyone could buy a cheap router and set up, so every hotel had wifi. But the original high-end hotels that were first out with wifi and paid much for it, has the worst and old wifi and charge users for it, still trying to recoup the costs.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#368

Post by gzread »

aurareturn wrote: post #314
gzread wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Casey Muratori says that every programmer should understand how computers work and if you don't understand how computers work you can't be a good programmer.

I might not be a good programmer but I've been a very productive one. Someone who is good at writing code isn't always good at making money.

AI slop books made more money than JK Rowling, too.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#369

Post by simonask »

emp17344 wrote: post #90
abraxas wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if LLMs are optimizing the average office worker's productivity but the work itself simply has no discernable economic value? This is argued at length in Grebber's Bullshit Jobs essay and book.

The thesis of Bullshit Jobs is almost universally rejected by economists, FYI. There’s not much of value to obtain from the book.

As a layman, I have to say the collective credibility of economists does not inspire confidence.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#370

Post by cadamsdotcom »

Many people are using AI as a slot machine, rerolling repeatedly until they get the result they want..

Once the tools help the AI to get feedback on what its first attempt got right and wrong, then we will see the benefits.

And the models people use en masse - eg. free tier ChatGPT - need to get to some threshold of capability where they’re able to do really well on the tasks they don’t do well enough on today.

There’s a tipping point there where models don’t create more work after they’re used for a task, but we aren’t there yet.

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