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Workers with less experience gain the most from generative AI

mitsloan.mit.edu

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Re: Workers with less experience gain the most from generative AI

#61

Post by andai »

camhart wrote: post #6

My experience with Bard/ChatGPT has been that you'll easily shoot your foot off if you don't know what you're doing. Dangerous for workers with less experience. I see claims that it makes you 7-8x more effective. That hasn't been my experience. Maybe 5-10% improvement at best. Instead of Googling myself, LLMs can sometimes give me the answer more quickly than I could find it. Once you ask it anything not easily scrap…

Are you using GPT-3.5 or GPT-4?

GPT-4 is not immune to these issues, but it does much, much better.

Whenever I exceed GPT-4 quota (OpenAI has a hardware shortage) and switch to GPT-3 I remember how useless it is and I'm better off waiting a few hours for more GPT-4 quota.

Re: Workers with less experience gain the most from generative AI

#62

Post by afro88 »

camhart wrote: post #6

My experience with Bard/ChatGPT has been that you'll easily shoot your foot off if you don't know what you're doing. Dangerous for workers with less experience. I see claims that it makes you 7-8x more effective. That hasn't been my experience. Maybe 5-10% improvement at best. Instead of Googling myself, LLMs can sometimes give me the answer more quickly than I could find it. Once you ask it anything not easily scrap…

Looks like they were talking mostly about call / contact centers.

I'm assuming you are talking more about coding, in which case I agree.

Re: Workers with less experience gain the most from generative AI

#63

Post by aleph_minus_one »

dmarchand90 wrote: post #22
skepticATX wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The funny thing about the 10x claims (I've even seen folks say 100x) is that results like these would be readily apparent. Even a broad 1.5x productivity increase would be world changing. And yet, we clearly are not seeing this currently. I'm not saying it will never happen, just that it will be very obvious if it does. 5-10% sounds about right to me.

I dunno computers should be world changing. And they are. Yet the lives of ordinary people have hardly improved and are arguably worse since the 1980s

> I dunno computers should be world changing. And they are. Yet the lives of ordinary people have hardly improved and are arguably worse since the 1980s

If you replace "lives of ordinary people" by "productivity improvement", you actually have a good (and rarely discussed) point:

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox

Re: Workers with less experience gain the most from generative AI

#64

Post by mediaman »

calvinmorrison wrote: post #31
camhart wrote: post #6

My experience with Bard/ChatGPT has been that you'll easily shoot your foot off if you don't know what you're doing. Dangerous for workers with less experience. I see claims that it makes you 7-8x more effective. That hasn't been my experience. Maybe 5-10% improvement at best. Instead of Googling myself, LLMs can sometimes give me the answer more quickly than I could find it. Once you ask it anything not easily scrap…

It is not intelligent. Let's just accept it. Ask what happens if you go due east exactly from NYC in a boat. Eventually you'll hit land where does it hit? Totally collapses with false information. Of course you can ask what parallel NYC is at and ask the western most point of Europe at the same parallel and it'll maybe get it right. Give it basic directions. I'm in my car turning right on spring garden onto Broad str…

Every time someone posts something like this, it’s amusing because they clearly don’t try it in GPT4 before they post.

GPT4 nails your question about going east from New York in a boat, even though I think that’s a very poor test of ‘intelligence.’

I have no idea what you’re asking with your second question (what city are you talking about? There is no context), so I guess I, too, am not intelligent.

Re: Workers with less experience gain the most from generative AI

#65

Post by teaearlgraycold »

camhart wrote: post #6

My experience with Bard/ChatGPT has been that you'll easily shoot your foot off if you don't know what you're doing. Dangerous for workers with less experience. I see claims that it makes you 7-8x more effective. That hasn't been my experience. Maybe 5-10% improvement at best. Instead of Googling myself, LLMs can sometimes give me the answer more quickly than I could find it. Once you ask it anything not easily scrap…

I concur. Sometimes it’s 15%. Normally closer to 5-10%. That’s still worth paying for IMO.

Re: Workers with less experience gain the most from generative AI

#66

Post by dontupvoteme »

devbent wrote: post #44
camhart wrote: post #6

My experience with Bard/ChatGPT has been that you'll easily shoot your foot off if you don't know what you're doing. Dangerous for workers with less experience. I see claims that it makes you 7-8x more effective. That hasn't been my experience. Maybe 5-10% improvement at best. Instead of Googling myself, LLMs can sometimes give me the answer more quickly than I could find it. Once you ask it anything not easily scrap…

On some tasks I've seen huge gains. I needed to setup a websocket server, chatGPT saved me tons of hours because Google results are now all useless blogspam so even finding simple resources has become hard. I needed a custom ui component built, chatGPT gave me a good base and I was then able to also it to go add accessibility keyboard handlers, something I do not know e how to do myself. I was having some CSS issues…

Ironically it's actually decent at giving you real(!) hallucinated non-hallucinated words to google to find the smart jargonspeakers out there

Re: Workers with less experience gain the most from generative AI

#67

Post by rocho »

camhart wrote: post #6

My experience with Bard/ChatGPT has been that you'll easily shoot your foot off if you don't know what you're doing. Dangerous for workers with less experience. I see claims that it makes you 7-8x more effective. That hasn't been my experience. Maybe 5-10% improvement at best. Instead of Googling myself, LLMs can sometimes give me the answer more quickly than I could find it. Once you ask it anything not easily scrap…

This matches my experience.

I use ChatGPT when form matters but content doesn't, i.e. emails, letters, etc. I tell it the topic or the information that should be present and most of the time it generates a good email or letter.

If I need to find a specific piece of information I use FastGPT by Kagi, I'm consistently surprised by how good it is at finding exactly what I ask it, and it provides real references too.

Re: Workers with less experience gain the most from generative AI

#68

Post by somishere »

Reading the comments here made me think of a dishwashing analogy.

I grew up without a dishwasher (when we asked our parents why we didn't have one my dad responded, "what do you mean? We have six!" referring to us kids). As an adult we have one in the house but it is rarely used. Washing dishes is a menial task but I enjoy it. It's hard to articulate exactly why. Needless to say I'm quite an experienced dish washer, there's an art to it. My process is to collect any dishes that aren't already stacked, fill the sink with just enough water, wash everything well (cutlery in first, out second last, washed individually), then wipe down all the benches and sink. I leave the dishes to drip dry. They get put away later.

When we use the washing machine I still have to do most of the steps above. Except the washing which is 40-120mins of free time for me. But then I have an extra step of checking each dish or piece of cutlery while I'm putting it away. Most things get washed well, but about 10-15% of items have food baked onto them that I then need to soak or rewash (with a more abrasive scrubber than I'd usually use). Maybe this is down to my lack of experience stacking? The whole process takes longer, but it's (arguably) lower touch and (I hear) uses less water.

Which is better? In a commercial kitchen a dishwasher for sure, efficiency at all costs.

But do we need to remove all menial tasks from our workflows? I'm not so sure.

Re: Workers with less experience gain the most from generative AI

#69

Post by ssnistfajen »

camhart wrote: post #6

My experience with Bard/ChatGPT has been that you'll easily shoot your foot off if you don't know what you're doing. Dangerous for workers with less experience. I see claims that it makes you 7-8x more effective. That hasn't been my experience. Maybe 5-10% improvement at best. Instead of Googling myself, LLMs can sometimes give me the answer more quickly than I could find it. Once you ask it anything not easily scrap…

For code snippets it often takes a lot of iterations with ChatGPT prompts to get something that satisfies the demands and doesn't immediately crash due to bugs. Beyond the obvious influencer types, claims of boosted productivity is largely thanks to being spared of most of the mental grunt work required to write these codes, so people can code for longer sessions before temporarily burning out, in my opinion.

Re: Workers with less experience gain the most from generative AI

#70

Post by simonw »

"The co-authors found that contact center agents with access to a conversational assistant saw a 14% boost in productivity, with the largest gains impacting new or low-skilled workers. In other words, the workers were upskilled, not replaced, thanks to the technology."

I don't think the paper matches the assertion made in the title of this article - it's talking about a very specific use-case for generative AI, which won't necessarily generalize to "in all cases, workers with less experience gain the most from these tools".

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