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

Anthropic Economic Index report: economic primitives

anthropic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 82 posts

Re: Anthropic Economic Index report: economic primitives

#61

Post by sinnsro »

PunchyHamster wrote: post #60
adverbly wrote: post #4

This is very cool but it's not quite what I expected out of economic primitives. I expected to see measures of the economic productivity generated as a result of artificial intelligence use. Instead, what I'm seeing is measures of artificial intelligence use. I don't really see how this is measuring the most important economic primitives. Nothing related to productivity at all actually. Everything about how and where…

I think we can surmise how bad that looked from the omission..

I wonder if it is even possible to get such measurements. With so many things affecting output, how can one establish a baseline or avoiding to compare apples to oranges?

Re: Anthropic Economic Index report: economic primitives

#62

Post by PunchyHamster »

reactordev wrote: post #56
janwirth wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't seem to like agile, whatever that word even means.

On the contrary. I like agile for when you don’t know exactly what you’re building but you can react quickly to change and try to capture it. Moving fast and breaking things, agile. On the other hand. When you know what you want to build but it’s a very large endeavor that takes careful planning and coordination across departments, traditional waterfall method still works best. You can break that down into an agile-f…

Knowing exactly what you want to build is pretty rare and is pretty much limited to "rewriting existing system" or some pretty narrow set of projects

In general, delaying infrastructure decisions as much as possible in process usually yields better infrastructure because the farther you are the more knowledge you have about the problem.

...that being said I do dislike how agile gets used as excuse for not doing any planning where you really should and have enough information to at least pick direction.

Re: Anthropic Economic Index report: economic primitives

#63

Post by w10-1 »

adverbly wrote: post #4

This is very cool but it's not quite what I expected out of economic primitives. I expected to see measures of the economic productivity generated as a result of artificial intelligence use. Instead, what I'm seeing is measures of artificial intelligence use. I don't really see how this is measuring the most important economic primitives. Nothing related to productivity at all actually. Everything about how and where…

"wantin' ain't gettin'": you might find productivity more important, but they didn't sign up for that.

They define primitives as "simple, foundational measures of how Claude is used". They're not signing up to measure productivity, which would combine usage with displacement, work factoring, and a whole host of things outside their data pool.

What's the point? They're offering details on usage patterns relative to demographics that can help people assessing Anthropic's business and the utility of LLM-based AI. Notably, tasks and usage are concentrated in some industries (notably software) and localities (mainly correlated with GDP and the Gini index). This enables readers to project how much usage growth can be expected.

As far as I know, no one publicly offers this level of data on their emerging businesses - not google, ebay, apple, microsoft, amazon, nvidia or any of the many companies that have reshaped our technical and economic landscape in the last 30 years.

Normally we measure value with price and overall market (productivity gains is but one way that clients can recoup their price paid). But during this the build-out of AI, investors (of all stripes) are subsidizing costs to get share, so until we have stable competitive markets for AI services, value is an open question.

But it's clear some businesses feel that AI could be a strategic benefit, and they don't want to be left behind. So there is a stampede, as reflected in the neck-and-neck utilization of chat vs API.

Re: Anthropic Economic Index report: economic primitives

#64

Post by blackqueeriroh »

aisuxmorethanhn wrote: post #47
nl wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In general it will match the language style you use. If you ask a sophisticated question (lots of clauses, college reading level or above) it will respond in kind. You are basically moving where the generation happens in the latent space. By asking in a sophisticated way you are moving the latent space away from say children's books and towards say PhD dissertations.

I don’t find this to be true at all. You can ask it in text speech with typos and then append how you’d like the response to be phrased and it will follow the instructions.

Yeah, because you told it explicitly how you would like the response to be phrased, which is the same thing you’re doing implicitly when you simply talk to it in a certain way.

Come on, this is human behavior 101, y’all.

Re: Anthropic Economic Index report: economic primitives

#65

Post by reactordev »

PunchyHamster wrote: post #62
reactordev wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the contrary. I like agile for when you don’t know exactly what you’re building but you can react quickly to change and try to capture it. Moving fast and breaking things, agile. On the other hand. When you know what you want to build but it’s a very large endeavor that takes careful planning and coordination across departments, traditional waterfall method still works best. You can break that down into an agile-f…

Knowing exactly what you want to build is pretty rare and is pretty much limited to "rewriting existing system" or some pretty narrow set of projects In general, delaying infrastructure decisions as much as possible in process usually yields better infrastructure because the farther you are the more knowledge you have about the problem. ...that being said I do dislike how agile gets used as excuse for not doing any p…

If someone comes to you and says: "I want to build a platform that does WhizzyWhatsIt for my customers, it has to be on AWS so it's mingled with my existing infrastructure. It needs to provide an admin portal so that I can set WhizzyWhatsIt prices and watch user acquisition make my bank account go brrrrrtt. It needs the ability for my quazi-illegal affiliate marketing ring to be able to whitelabel and brand it as their own for a cut of the profits."

This is obviously satire but there's a clear ask, some features, from there you know what you need to have to even achieve those features, what project management process would you employ? Agile? Waterfall? Agile-fall? Kanban? Call me in 6 months?

Re: Anthropic Economic Index report: economic primitives

#66

Post by mr_toad »

adverbly wrote: post #58
hazyc wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

productivity is such a nebulous concept in knowledge work - an amalgamation of mostly-qualitative measures that get baked into quantitative measures that are mostly just bad data

economic productivity is absolutely not nebulous. Its a measure of GDP per hour worked. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/labor-productivity-per-ho...

And in a business you can easily measure total profit and divide by total hours worked.

When you try and break it down to various products and cost centers is where it comes unstuck. It’s hard to impossible to measure the productivity of various teams contributing to one product, let alone a range of different products.

Re: Anthropic Economic Index report: economic primitives

#67

Post by mr_toad »

johnrob wrote: post #30
adverbly wrote: post #4

This is very cool but it's not quite what I expected out of economic primitives. I expected to see measures of the economic productivity generated as a result of artificial intelligence use. Instead, what I'm seeing is measures of artificial intelligence use. I don't really see how this is measuring the most important economic primitives. Nothing related to productivity at all actually. Everything about how and where…

Until AI is used to generate new revenue streams (i.e. acquire new customers), I don’t think the economic impact is going to impress. My two cents.

People used to say the same things about computers. Even back in the early 90s people still questioned the value of computers in the workplace.

Re: Anthropic Economic Index report: economic primitives

#68

Post by BobbyJo »

xkcd-sucks wrote: post #50
p1necone wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I expected to see measures of the economic productivity generated as a result of artificial intelligence use. >Instead, what I'm seeing is measures of artificial intelligence use. Fun fact: this is also how most large companies are measuring their productivity increases from AI usage ;), alongside asking employees to tell them how much faster AI is making them while simultaneously telling them they're expected to g…

When your OKRs for the past year include "internal adoption of ai tools"

It is weird right? I don't remember any other time in my career where I've been measured based on how I'm doing the work.

In my experience, "good management" meant striving to isolate measurements as much as possible to output/productivity.

Re: Anthropic Economic Index report: economic primitives

#69

Post by chasd00 »

mlsu wrote: post #28
TrainedMonkey wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans also respond differently when prompted in different ways. For example, politeness often begets politeness. I would expect that to be reflected in training data.

If I, a moron, hire a PhD to crack a tough problem for me, I don't need to go back and forth prompting him at a PhD level. I can set him loose on my problem and he'll come back to me with a solution.

Unless your problem fits the very narrow but very deep area of expertise of the PhD you’re not going to get anything. The phds I have worked with can’t tie their shoes because that wasn’t in their dissertation.

Re: Anthropic Economic Index report: economic primitives

#70

Post by reppap »

xiphias2 wrote: post #24
siliconc0w wrote: post #21

Skimmed, some notes for a more 'bear' case: * value seems highly concentrated in a sliver of tasks - the top ten accounting for 32%, suggesting a fat long-tail where it may be less useful/relevant. * productivity drops to a more modest 1-1.2% productivity gain once you account for humans correcting AI failure. 1% is still plenty good, especially given the historical malaise here of only like 2% growth but it's not li…

,,1% is still plenty good, especially given the historical malaise here of only like 2% growth but it's not like industrial revolution good.'' You can't compare the speed of AI improvements to the speed of technical improvements during the industrial revolution. ChatGPT is 3 years old.

As long as people claim it's revolutionary it's fair to compare it to other revolutions.
Post reply on HN