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AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

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Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#441

Post by mikkupikku »

Zardoz84 wrote: post #252
torben-friis wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The comparison seems flawed in terms of cost. A Claude subscription is 20 bucks per worker if using personal accounts billed to the company, which is not very far from common office tools like slack. Onboarding a worker to Claude or ChatGPT is ridiculously easy compared to teaching a 1970’s manual office worker to use an early computer. Larger implementations like automating customer service might be more costly, but…

And nobody talks that the "20 bucks per worker" it's selling it at loss. I'm waiting to see when they put a price that expects to generate some net income...

20 bucks per worker could easily be profitable, depending on how much the workers actually use it..

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#442

Post by birdsongs »

kombookcha wrote: post #421
birdsongs wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LLM's are notoriously bad at this. The noise to signal ratio is unacceptably high I could go either way on the future of this, but if you take the argument that we're still early days, this may not hold. They're notoriously bad at this so far . We could still be in the PC DOS 3.X era in this timeline. Wait until we hit the Windows 3.1, or 95 equivalent. Personally, I have seen shocking improvements in the past 3 mo…

Personally I strongly doubt it. Since the nature of LLM's does not allow them semantic content or context, I believe it is inherently a tool unsuited for this task. As far as I can tell, it's a limitation of the technology itself, not of the amount of power behind it. Either way, being able to generate or compress loads of text very quickly with no understanding of the contents simply is not the bottleneck of informa…

Yeah, definitely more skeptical for communication pipelines.

But for coding, the latest models are able to read my codebase for context, understand my question, and implement a solution with nuance, using existing structures and paradigms. It hasn't missed since January.

One of them even said: "As an embedded engineer, you will appreciate that ...". I had never told it that was my title, it is nowhere in my soul.md or codebase. It just inferred that I, the user, was one. Based on the arm toolchain and code.

It was a bit creepy, tbh. They can definitely infer context to some degree.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#443

Post by yodsanklai »

david_shaw wrote: post #75
yodsanklai wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a SWE who's been using coding agents daily for the last 6 months and I'm still skeptical. For my team at least, the productivity boost is difficult to quantify objectively. Our products and services have still tons of issues that AI isn't going to solve magically. It's pretty clear that AI is allowing to move faster for some tasks, but it's also detrimental for other things. We're going to learn how to use these…

> I'm a SWE who's been using coding agents daily for the last 6 months and I'm still skeptical. What improvements have you noticed over that time? It seems like the models coming out in the last several weeks are dramatically superior to those mid-last year. Does that match your experience?

Yes, it matches my experience. Now I can throw tasks at the agent and have it write a full PR, with tests, good summary. Or it can review things and make good suggestions that a casual reviewer or non-expert would have missed. It can also take a bunch of logs as input, find the issue, fix the code. I can't deny it's impressive and useful.

What I'm still skeptical about is how much more productive it makes us. In my case, coding is maybe 50% of my job, and I work on complex and novel systems. The agent gives me the illusion I don't need to think anymore, but it's not the case. Agents slow me down in many cases too, I'm not learning and improving as I used to.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#445

Post by mikkupikku »

LunaSea wrote: post #418
XenophileJKO wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For a few years maybe, but I see little reason to think this stuff won't be coming for their jobs as well.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#446

Post by CSSer »

n_u wrote: post #29

Original paper https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w34836/w348... Figure A6 on page 45: Current and expected AI adoption by industry Figure A11 on page 51: Realised and expected impacts of AI on employment by industry Figure A12 on page 52: Realised and expected impacts of AI on productivity by industry These seem to roughly line up with my expectations that the more customer facing or physical product y…

Figure right after A6 is pretty striking. Ask people if they expect to use AI and a vast majority say yes. Ask if they expect to use AI for specific applications and no more than a third say yes in any industry. That should be telling imo. What we have is a tool that looks impressive to any non-SME for a lot of applications. I would caution against the idea that benefits are obvious.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#447

Post by topocite »

simonask wrote: post #369
emp17344 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I love economics but it is a field of study that we don't have the proper tools to properly study the subject yet.

Modern economics is literally a bullshit job generating process or complex system.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#448

Post by NoLinkToMe »

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]

Not necessarily. You could have 100 FTE on reports instead of 300 FTE in a large company like a bank. That means 200 people who'd normally go into reporting jobs over the next decade, will go into something else, producing something else ontop of the reports that continue to be produced. The sum of this is more production.

Looking at job numbers that seems to be happening. A lot less employment needed, freeing up people to do other things.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#450

Post by weatherlite »

abraxas wrote: post #64
torben-friis wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The comparison seems flawed in terms of cost. A Claude subscription is 20 bucks per worker if using personal accounts billed to the company, which is not very far from common office tools like slack. Onboarding a worker to Claude or ChatGPT is ridiculously easy compared to teaching a 1970’s manual office worker to use an early computer. Larger implementations like automating customer service might be more costly, but…

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.

> What if LLMs are optimizing the average office worker's productivity but the work itself simply has no discernable economic value?

I think broadly that's a paradoxical statement; improving office productivity should translate to higher gdp; whatever it is you're doing in some office - even if you're selling paper or making bombs, if you're more productive it means you're selling more (or using less resources to sell the same amount); that should translate to higher gdp (at least higher gdp per worker, there's the issue of what happens to gdp when many workers get fired).

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