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Anthropic Economic Index report: economic primitives

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Re: Anthropic Economic Index report: economic primitives

#41

Post by futuraperdita »

ossa-ma wrote: post #18
brap wrote: post #5

All of this performative bullshit coming out of Anthropic is slowly but surely making them my least favorite AI company. We get it guys the very scary future is here any minute now and you’re the only ones taking it super seriously and responsibly and benevolently. That’s great. Now please just build the damn thing

These are economic studies on AI's impact on productivity, jobs, wages, global inequality. It's important to UNDERSTAND who benefits from technology and who gets left behind. Even putting the positive impacts of a study like this aside - this kinda due diligence is critical for them to understand developing markets and how to reach them.

But the thing is that they really aren't rigorous economic studies. They're a sort of UX research-like sociological study with some statistics, but don't actually approach the topic with any sort of econometric modeling or give more than loose correlations to past economic data. So it does appear performative: it's "pop science" using a quantitative veneer to push a marketing message to business leaders in a way that looks well-optimised mathematically.

Note the papers cited are nearly all ones about AI use, and align more closely with management case studies vs. economics.

Re: Anthropic Economic Index report: economic primitives

#42

Post by hazyc »

p1necone wrote: post #31
adverbly wrote: post #4

This is very cool but it's not quite what I expected out of economic primitives. I expected to see measures of the economic productivity generated as a result of artificial intelligence use. Instead, what I'm seeing is measures of artificial intelligence use. I don't really see how this is measuring the most important economic primitives. Nothing related to productivity at all actually. Everything about how and where…

> I expected to see measures of the economic productivity generated as a result of artificial intelligence use. >Instead, what I'm seeing is measures of artificial intelligence use. Fun fact: this is also how most large companies are measuring their productivity increases from AI usage ;), alongside asking employees to tell them how much faster AI is making them while simultaneously telling them they're expected to g…

productivity is such a nebulous concept in knowledge work - an amalgamation of mostly-qualitative measures that get baked into quantitative measures that are mostly just bad data

Re: Anthropic Economic Index report: economic primitives

#43

Post by reactordev »

hazyc wrote: post #42
p1necone wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I expected to see measures of the economic productivity generated as a result of artificial intelligence use. >Instead, what I'm seeing is measures of artificial intelligence use. Fun fact: this is also how most large companies are measuring their productivity increases from AI usage ;), alongside asking employees to tell them how much faster AI is making them while simultaneously telling them they're expected to g…

productivity is such a nebulous concept in knowledge work - an amalgamation of mostly-qualitative measures that get baked into quantitative measures that are mostly just bad data

You can thank agile for that

Re: Anthropic Economic Index report: economic primitives

#44

Post by storystarling »

siliconc0w wrote: post #21

Skimmed, some notes for a more 'bear' case: * value seems highly concentrated in a sliver of tasks - the top ten accounting for 32%, suggesting a fat long-tail where it may be less useful/relevant. * productivity drops to a more modest 1-1.2% productivity gain once you account for humans correcting AI failure. 1% is still plenty good, especially given the historical malaise here of only like 2% growth but it's not li…

I've found that architecting around that reliability wall is where the margins fall apart. You end up chaining verification steps and retries to get a usable result, which multiplies inference costs until the business case just doesn't work for a bootstrapped product.

Re: Anthropic Economic Index report: economic primitives

#45

Post by janwirth »

reactordev wrote: post #43
hazyc wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

productivity is such a nebulous concept in knowledge work - an amalgamation of mostly-qualitative measures that get baked into quantitative measures that are mostly just bad data

You can thank agile for that

You don't seem to like agile, whatever that word even means.

Re: Anthropic Economic Index report: economic primitives

#46

Post by b00ty4breakfast »

TrainedMonkey wrote: post #15
mlsu wrote: post #6

> This also highlights the importance of model design and training. While Claude is able to respond in a highly sophisticated manner, it tends to do so only when users input sophisticated prompts. If the output of the model depends on the intelligence of the person picking outputs out of its training corpus, is the model intelligent? This is kind of what I don't quite understand when people talk about the models bein…

Humans also respond differently when prompted in different ways. For example, politeness often begets politeness. I would expect that to be reflected in training data.

that seems like something you wouldn't want from your tools. humans have that and that's fine, people are people and have emotions but I don't want my power-drill asking me why I only call when I need something.

Re: Anthropic Economic Index report: economic primitives

#47

Post by aisuxmorethanhn »

nl wrote: post #39
zozbot234 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is a "sophisticated prompt"? What if I just tack on "please think about this a lot and respond in a highly sophisticated manner" to my question/prompt? Anyone can do this once they're made aware of this potential issue. Sometimes the UX layer even adds this for you in the system prompt, you just have to tick the checkbox for "I want a long, highly sophisticated answer".

In general it will match the language style you use. If you ask a sophisticated question (lots of clauses, college reading level or above) it will respond in kind. You are basically moving where the generation happens in the latent space. By asking in a sophisticated way you are moving the latent space away from say children's books and towards say PhD dissertations.

I don’t find this to be true at all. You can ask it in text speech with typos and then append how you’d like the response to be phrased and it will follow the instructions.

Re: Anthropic Economic Index report: economic primitives

#48

Post by retsibsi »

felixgallo wrote: post #36
mlsu wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ofc what I'm getting at is, you can't get something from nothing. There is no free lunch. You spend energy distilling the intelligence of the entire internet into a set of weights, but you still had to expend the energy to have humans create the internet first. And on top of this, in order to pick out what you want from the corpus, you have to put some energy in: first, the energy of inference, but second and far mor…

the same place an increase in power comes from when you use a lever.

> the same place an increase in power comes from when you use a lever.

I don't understand the analogy. A lever doesn't give you an increase in power (which would be a free lunch); it gives you an increase in force, in exchange for a decrease in movement. What equivalent to this tradeoff are you pointing to?

Re: Anthropic Economic Index report: economic primitives

#49

Post by salynchnew »

adverbly wrote: post #4

This is very cool but it's not quite what I expected out of economic primitives. I expected to see measures of the economic productivity generated as a result of artificial intelligence use. Instead, what I'm seeing is measures of artificial intelligence use. I don't really see how this is measuring the most important economic primitives. Nothing related to productivity at all actually. Everything about how and where…

So.... motivated reasoning makes the world go 'round?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivated_reasoning

Re: Anthropic Economic Index report: economic primitives

#50

Post by xkcd-sucks »

p1necone wrote: post #31
adverbly wrote: post #4

This is very cool but it's not quite what I expected out of economic primitives. I expected to see measures of the economic productivity generated as a result of artificial intelligence use. Instead, what I'm seeing is measures of artificial intelligence use. I don't really see how this is measuring the most important economic primitives. Nothing related to productivity at all actually. Everything about how and where…

> I expected to see measures of the economic productivity generated as a result of artificial intelligence use. >Instead, what I'm seeing is measures of artificial intelligence use. Fun fact: this is also how most large companies are measuring their productivity increases from AI usage ;), alongside asking employees to tell them how much faster AI is making them while simultaneously telling them they're expected to g…

When your OKRs for the past year include "internal adoption of ai tools"
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