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AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

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Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#411

Post by nkrisc »

seanhunter wrote: post #365
fdefitte wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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)? Producti…

Mmm I can’t wait to get home and grill up some Productivity for dinner. We’ll have so much Productivity and no jobs. Hopefully our billionaire overlords deign to feed us.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#412

Post by kilroy123 »

aurareturn wrote: post #232
tabs_or_spaces wrote: post #218

My experience has been * If I don't know how to do something, llms can get me started really fast. Basically it distills the time taken to research something to a small amount. * if I know something well, I find myself trying to guide the llm to make the best decisions. I haven't reached the state of completely letting go and trusting the llm yet, because the llm doesn't make good long term decisions * when working a…

The future of work is fewer human team members and way more AI assistants. I think companies will need fewer engineers but there will be more companies. Now: 100 companies who employ 1,000 engineers each What we are transitioning to: 1000 companies who employ 10 engineers each What will happen in the future: 10,000 companies who employ 1 engineer each Same number of engineers. We are about to enter an era of explosiv…

I think we were headed that way before LLMs came on to hunt scene.

LLMs just accelerated this trend.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#413

Post by jacquesm »

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]

And the fact that you can make it 3x faster substantially increases the chances that nobody will read it in the first place.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#414

Post by nkrisc »

wiseowise wrote: post #221
fdefitte wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[dead]

Not a phase, I’d argue that 90% of modern jobs are bullshit to keep cattle occupied and economy rolling.

You know, that would almost be fine if everyone could afford a home and food and some pleasures.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#415

Post by sigmoid10 »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #353
sigmoid10 wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you are describing is a failure to integrate AI into said company systems. I have seen quite a few companies now that buy MS AI products with great hopes only to be severely disappointed, because they may as well have just used vanilla ChatGPT (in fact then they would at least get newer models faster). But there are counter examples too. If you can pull all your company documentation into a vector db and build a…

I have been using vector based RAG for about two years now, I am not knocking the tech, but last year I started experimenting with going way back in time and also in parallel trying BM25 search (or hybrid BM25 and vector). So: not even a very good example use case of LLMs, the tech is not always applicable. EDIT: I am on a mobile device and don’t have a reference handy but there have been good papers on RAG scaling i…

Depends on your use case. A system that can do full text and semantic search across a vast archive, open files based on that search to retrieve detail and generate an answer after sifting through hundreds of pages is pretty powerful. Especially if you mange to pair it with document link generation and page citation.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#416

Post by nkrisc »

Retric wrote: post #251
wiseowise wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a phase, I’d argue that 90% of modern jobs are bullshit to keep cattle occupied and economy rolling.

Jobs you don’t notice or understand often look pointless. HR on the surface seems unimportant, but you’d notice if the company stopped having health insurance or sending your taxes to the IRS etc etc. In the end when jobs are done right they seem to disappear. We notice crappy software or a poorly done HVAC system not clean carpets.

This just highlights the absurdity of having your employer responsible for your health insurance and managing your taxes for you.

These should be handled by the government, equally for all.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#417

Post by amelius »

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]

> The real gains from AI show up when it changes what work gets done, not just how fast existing work happens.

Sadly AI is only capable of doing work that has already been done, thousands of times.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#418

Post by LunaSea »

XenophileJKO wrote: post #397
overgard wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think "results don't match promises" is the same as "not knowing how to use it". I've been using Claude and OpenAI's latest models for the past two weeks now (probably moving at about 1000 lines of code a day, which is what I can comfortably review), and it makes subtle hard-to-find mistakes all over the place. Or it just misunderstands well known design patterns, or does something bone headed. I'm fine with…

If you know good architecture and you are testing as you go, I would say, it is probably pretty damn close to being able to build a company without looking at the code. Not without "risk" but definitely doable and plausible. My current project that I started this weekend is a rust client server game with the client compiled into web assembly. I do these projects without reading the code at all as a way to gauge what…

Security auditor and criminals have a bright future ahead of them.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#419

Post by roncesvalles »

aurareturn wrote: post #232
tabs_or_spaces wrote: post #218

My experience has been * If I don't know how to do something, llms can get me started really fast. Basically it distills the time taken to research something to a small amount. * if I know something well, I find myself trying to guide the llm to make the best decisions. I haven't reached the state of completely letting go and trusting the llm yet, because the llm doesn't make good long term decisions * when working a…

The future of work is fewer human team members and way more AI assistants. I think companies will need fewer engineers but there will be more companies. Now: 100 companies who employ 1,000 engineers each What we are transitioning to: 1000 companies who employ 10 engineers each What will happen in the future: 10,000 companies who employ 1 engineer each Same number of engineers. We are about to enter an era of explosiv…

By and large "AI assistant" is not a real thing. Everyone talks about it but no one can point you to one, because it doesn't exist (at least not in a form that any fair non-disingenuous reading of that term would imply). It's one big collective hallucination.
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