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

AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

fortune.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

481–490 of 783 posts

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#481

Post by MeteorMarc »

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.

David Graeber is the correct spelling.https://davidgraeber.org/books/

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#482

Post by MSFT_Edging »

torben-friis wrote: post #42
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…

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…

> A Claude subscription is 20 bucks per worker

Only until the loans come due. We're still in the "uber undercutting medalian cabs" part of the game.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#484

Post by datsci_est_2015 »

TimByte wrote: post #390
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…

I suspect the real breakthrough for teams won't be better raw models, but better ways to make the "AI-assisted thinking" legible and shareable across the group, instead of trapped in personal prompt histories

This seems like a problem simply stated but not simply solved. I think Grokipedia or whatever it was called was a real exercise in “no one cares about cached LLM output”. The ephemeral nature of LLM output is somehow a core property of its utility. Kind of like I never share a Google search with a coworker, I share the link I found.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#485

Post by vessenes »

mikem170 wrote: post #198
vessenes wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Amish are skilled at getting cash from the “English” as they call non-Amish. I imagine they also think that the money they receive is roughly tied to value they create. I wasn’t talking valuations, just revenue - money that CFOs and individuals spent so far, and are planning on spending. I also didn’t talk profitable. Upshot, though, I don’t think it’s just a US thing to say that when money exchanges hands, gener…

You did specify revenue. The original comment mentioned benefits. I was thinking that the two are different.

They are, but I was proposing they're closely correlated.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#486

Post by dranudin »

steveBK123 wrote: post #468

I think we are entering the phase where corporate is expecting more ROI than they are getting, but want to remain in the arms race. The firmwide AI guru at my shop who sends out weekly usage metrics and release notes started mentioning cost only in the last few weeks. At first it was just about engaging with individual business heads on setting budgets / rules and slowing the cost growth rate. A few weeks later and h…

I noticed something similar at my work. The CEO is hyping AI, but at the same time free access to the big models was taken away and rate limits seem to be much tighter..

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#487

Post by cucumber3732842 »

b40d-48b2-979e wrote: post #477
cucumber3732842 wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>In the private market are there really so many companies delivering reports no one reads ? Just this month the hospital in my municipality submitted an application to put in a new concrete pad for a new generator beside the old one that they, per the application, intend to retire/remove and replace with a storage shed on it's pad once the new one is operational. Full page intro about how the hospital is saving the w…

Why should hospitals be for-profit organizations? Sounds like all the wrong incentives.

>Why should hospitals be for-profit organizations? Sounds like all the wrong incentives.

You're conflating private ownership with the organizations nominal financial structure. It has nothing to do with the structure model of the organization and everything to do with resources wasted on TPS reports. This waste has to come from somewhere. Something is necessarily being forgone whether that's profit, reinvestment in the organization or competitive edge that benefits the customer (e.g. lower cost or higher quality for same cost). The same is true for a for profit company, or any other organization.

FWIW the hospital is technically nonprofit as is typical for hospitals. And I assure you, they still have all the wrong incentives despite this.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#488

Post by bartread »

vrighter wrote: post #305
hattmall wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find that highly unlikely, coding is the AIs best value use case by far. Right now office workers see marginal benefits but it's not like it's an order of magnitude difference. AI drafts an email, you have to check and edit it, then send it. In many cases it's a toss up if that actually saved time, and then if it did, it's not like the pace of work is break neck anyway, so the benefit is some office workers have a…

Code is much much harder to check for errors than an email. Consider, for example, the following python code: x = (5) vs x = (5,) One is a literal 5, and the other is a single element tuple containing the number 5. But more importantly, both are valid code. Now imagine trying to spot that one missing comma among the 20kloc of code one so proudly claims AI helped them "write", especially if it's in a cold path. You wo…

In my experience the example you give here is exactly the kind of problem that AI powered code reviews are really good at spotting, and especially amongst codebases with tens of thousands of lines of code in them where a human being might well get scrolling blindness when quickly moving around them to work.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#489

Post by bartread »

toraway wrote: post #151
nradov wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs might not save time but they certainly increase quality for at least some office work. I frequently use it to check my work before sending to colleagues or customers and it occasionally catches gaps or errors in my writing.

But that idealized example could also be offset by another employee who doubles their own output by churning out lower-quality unreviewed workslop all day without checking anything, while wasting other people's time.

Yeah, but that's no different from any other aspect of office work, and more conventional forms of automation. Gains by one person are often offset to some extent by the laziness, inattentiveness, or ineptitude of others.

What AI has done is accelerate and magnify both the positives and the negatives.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#490

Post by lelanthran »

birdsongs wrote: post #398
kombookcha wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of my major concerns about people trying to use these tools for 'efficiency'. The only plausible value in somebody writing a huge report and somebody else reading it is information transfer. LLM's are notoriously bad at this. The noise to signal ratio is unacceptably high, and you will be worse off reading the summary than if you skimmed the first and last pages. In fact, you will be worse off than if you…

> 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…

> 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 months with the latest models.

While we're speculating, here's mine: we're in the Windows 7 phase of AI.

IOW, everything from this point on might be better tech, but is going to be worse in practice.

Post reply on HN