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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

#561

Post by psychoslave »

vjk800 wrote: post #306
alexwennerberg wrote: post #278

Large firms are extremely bureaucratic organizations largely isolated from the market by their monopolistic positions. Internal pressures rule over external ones, and thus, inefficiency abounds. AI undeniably is a productive tool, but large companies aren't really primarily concerned with productivity.

Indeed. Most large companies don't need AI to increase productivity - they just need to stop wasting time on stupid bullshit. However, figuring out what is stupid bullshit and what is not seems to be an impossible task, and I don't think AI is going to help here at all.

What are you talking about, if there is one thing on which LLM shine, it’s generating vast amount of bullshit. That’s extreme productivity gains.

Also flame-wars can be autofed ad nauseam now, so there’s going to be less and less interest in engaging into them. In an act of desperation, idle trolls will turn to tasks tracked by KPIs.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#562

Post by 46493168 »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #92
46493168 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I think there are enough short term supposed benefits that something should be showing there. As measured by whom? The same managers who demanded we all return to the office 5 days a week because the only way they can measure productivity is butts in seats?

Productivity is the ratio of outputs to inputs, both measured in dollars.

What is the definition of input, what is the definition of output, and who is responsible for measuring them?

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#563

Post by mikkupikku »

cucumber3732842 wrote: post #465
weatherlite wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is an underrated take. If you make someone 3x faster at producing a report nobody reads, you've improved nothing In the private market are there really so many companies delivering reports no one reads ? Why would management keep at it then ? The goal is to maximize profits. Now sure there are pockets of inefficiency even in the private sector but surely not that much - whatever the companies are doing - someo…

>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…

Best description of America's biggest long term problem I've read. This shit is exactly the reason we can't build anything in America anymore.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#564

Post by mikkupikku »

cucumber3732842 wrote: post #487
b40d-48b2-979e wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

The cost is it taking America a billion dollars to build what China can for 50 million. That's ultimately where the waste accumulates.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#566

Post by akkanzn »

aurareturn wrote: post #249
itake wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah, I agree. When Engineering Budget Managers see their AI bills rising, they will fire the bottom 5-10% every 6-12 months and increase the AI assistant budget for the high performers, giving them even more leverage.

In my case, over the last 3 years, every dev who left was not replaced. We are doing more than ever. Our team shrunk by 50% but we are serving 200% more customers. Every time a dev left, we thought we're screwed. We just leveraged AI more and more. We are also serving our customers better too with higher retention rates. When we onboard a customer with custom demands, we used to have meetings about the ROI. Now we ju…

Could you provide some details on your company, code base, etc? These are wild claims and don’t match the reality I’m seeing everywhere else.

How big is your team? How many customers? What’s your product? Can we see the code? How do you track defects? Etc.

Part of the reason I’m struggling with this is because we’d be seeing OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. plastering these case studies everywhere if they existed. Instead, I’m stuck using CC and all its poorly implemented warts.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#567

Post by t43562 »

naasking wrote: post #438
t43562 wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Code may have to compile but that's a lowish bar and since the AI is writing the tests it's obvious that they're going to pass. In all areas where there's less easy ways to judge output there is going to be correspondingly more value to getting "good" people. Some AI that can produce readable reports isn't "good" - what matters is the quality of the work and the insight put into it which can only be ensured by lookin…

> since the AI is writing the tests it's obvious that they're going to pass That's not obvious at all if the AI writing the tests is different than the AI writing the code being tested. Put into an adversarial and critical mode, the same model outputs very different results.

IMO the reason neither of them can really write entirely trustworthy tests is that they don't have domain knowledge so they write the test based on what the code does plus what they extract from some prompts rather than based on some abstract understanding of what it should do given that it's being used e.g. in a nuclear power station or for promoting cat videos or in a hospital or whatever.

Obviously this is only partially true but it's true enough.

It takes humans quite a long time to learn the external context that lets them write good tests IMO. We have trouble feeding enough context into AIs to give them equal ability. One is often talking about companies where nobody bothers to write down more than 1/20th of what is needed to be an effective developer. So you go to some place and 5 years later you might be lucky to know 80% of the context in your limited area after 100s of meetings and talking to people and handling customer complaints etc.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#568

Post by bryanlarsen »

46493168 wrote: post #562
bryanlarsen wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Productivity is the ratio of outputs to inputs, both measured in dollars.

What is the definition of input, what is the definition of output, and who is responsible for measuring them?

The answer is different depending on your target -- are you measuring the productivity of a firm, a country or some other sort of entity?

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#569

Post by illiac786 »

whynotminot wrote: post #143
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…

It’s also pretty wild to me how people still don’t really even know how to use it. On hacker news, a very tech literate place, I see people thinking modern AI models can’t generate working code. The other day in real life I was talking to a friend of mine about ChatGPT. They didn’t know you needed to turn on “thinking” to get higher quality results. This is a technical person who has worked at Amazon. You can’t expec…

> On hacker news, a very tech literate place, I see people thinking modern AI models can’t generate working code.

I am completely flooded with comments and stories about how great LLMs are at coding. I am curious to see how you get a different picture than this? Can you point me to a thread or a story that supports your view? At the moment, individuals thinking AI cannot generate working code seem almost inexistent to me.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#570

Post by famouswaffles »

sensanaty wrote: post #542
famouswaffles wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not the be all end all and there are obviously issues with using it alone, but it's rather silly going the other extreme and pretending it isn't a major factor. >If I made a python script that everyone started using and all it did was create a repo, commit a README and push it every 5 seconds we'd be seeing 1. Well you can't do that 2. Something like that won't register as Claude Code (or any other AI tool) usag…

> Well you or anyone else can't do that... But that's what these tools are doing, in a large number of cases? At least the end result is basically the same, like that Clawdbot or whatever name they've decided to try ride the coattails of guy who has 70k commits in the last few months that I saw being touted as an impressive feat on HN the other day. How much broken, unusable code exists within those 70k commits that…

>But that's what these tools are doing, in a large number of cases?

I mean No not really. I'm not sure why you think that.

>How much broken, unusable code exists within those 70k commits that ultimately would've had the same effect as if he had just pushed a `--allow-empty` commit thousands of times?

How much stable usable code exists within those 70k commits ?

This is pretty much exactly why I said the original question was not a great ask. You have your biases. Show an example and the default response for some almost like a stochastic parrot is, 'Must be slop!". How do you know ? Did you examine it? No, you didn't. That's just what you want to believe so it must be true. It makes for a very frustrating conversation.

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