I cannot read the paper that this article is based on, but it seems that it refers to the use of big data analytics and AI in 2024, not LLM. It concludes that the use of AI leads to a 4% increase in productivity. Nowadays the debate over AI productivity centers around LLMs, not big data analytics. This article does not seem to contradict more recent findings that LLM do not (yet) provide any increased productivity at the company level.
How AI is affecting productivity and jobs in Europe
61–70 of 144 posts
Re: How AI is affecting productivity and jobs in Europe
#62I wonder if web searches used to be pretty productive, then declined as sponsored results and SEO degraded things. Nowadays an ai assist with a web search usually eliminates the search altogether and gives you a clear answer right away. for example, "how much does a ford f-150 cost" will give you something ballpark in a second, compared to annoying "research" to find the answer shrouded in corporate obfuscation.
then declined as sponsored results and SEO degraded things It didn't decline because of this. It declined because of a general decade long trend of websites becoming paywalled and hidden behind a login. The best and most useful data is often inaccessible to crawlers. In the 2000s, everything was open because of the ad driven model. Then ad blockers, mobile subscription model, and the dominance of a few apps such as I…
I seem to remember very few ads on the early web. Most sites I frequented were run by volunteers who paid out of their own pockets for webspace.
Re: How AI is affecting productivity and jobs in Europe
#63Its depressing when people are hearing managers are openly asking all employees to pitch in ideals for AI in order to reduce employee headcount. For those hearing this at work, better prepare an exit plan.
> Its depressing when people are hearing managers are openly asking all employees to pitch in ideals for AI in order to reduce employee headcount. If the manager doesn’t have ideas, it is they who deserve the boot.
Manager is to manage optimal delivery, not coming up with ideas.
Re: How AI is affecting productivity and jobs in Europe
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
The turning point was around when google stopped honoring Boolean ops and quotation marks
The killer app for AI might just be unenshittifying search for a couple of years. Then SEO will catch up and we'll have spam again, but now we'll be paying by the token for it. Probably right around the time hallucination drops off enough to have made this viable. I kind of want to become Amish sometimes.
Too much money in ads, and search is just a huge cash pipeline straight towards it. No way we can have non-ad-infested llm search out in the wild from any major vendor in upcoming future. Google-fu just becomes llm-google-fu, while sometimes it goes off rails and then apologizes in that typical super annoying way (and screws up something else).
Maybe smaller ones can somehow provide almost comparable but ad-free service, heck even mildly worse but genuine results would win many people over, this one included.
Re: How AI is affecting productivity and jobs in Europe
#65I cannot read the paper that this article is based on, but it seems that it refers to the use of big data analytics and AI in 2024, not LLM. It concludes that the use of AI leads to a 4% increase in productivity. Nowadays the debate over AI productivity centers around LLMs, not big data analytics. This article does not seem to contradict more recent findings that LLM do not (yet) provide any increased productivity at…
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Re: How AI is affecting productivity and jobs in Europe
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you mean? Deloitte has been all in on Microsoft AI offerings for quite some time, people have access to a lot of AI tools through MS.
Did they communicate this from the top or just turn a blind eye to it?
They had official trainings on how to use Copilot/ChatGPT and some other tools, security and safety trainings and so on, this is not some people deciding to use whatever feature was there from Ms by default.
Re: How AI is affecting productivity and jobs in Europe
#67Its depressing when people are hearing managers are openly asking all employees to pitch in ideals for AI in order to reduce employee headcount. For those hearing this at work, better prepare an exit plan.
Why is it depressing? Personally, unless the alternative is literally starving, I wouldn't want to do a job that a robot could do instead just so that I could be kept busy. That sounds like an insult to human dignity tbh.
Dignity has no calories, though.
Re: How AI is affecting productivity and jobs in Europe
#68Its depressing when people are hearing managers are openly asking all employees to pitch in ideals for AI in order to reduce employee headcount. For those hearing this at work, better prepare an exit plan.
Why is it depressing? Personally, unless the alternative is literally starving, I wouldn't want to do a job that a robot could do instead just so that I could be kept busy. That sounds like an insult to human dignity tbh.
That's how capitalism works. It doesn't matter if your job is useful but if you don't do anything, you don't get money.
More people without jobs will be a heavy burden on social security systems, so in the end it's literally about starving.
Re: How AI is affecting productivity and jobs in Europe
#69FWIW, these studies are too early. Large orgs have very sensitive data privacy considerations and they're only right now going through the evaluation cycles. Case in point, this past week, I learned Deloitte only recently gave the approval in picking Gemini as their AI platform. Rollout hasn't even begun yet which you can imagine is going to take a while. To say "AI is failing to deliver" because only 4% efficiency i…
Yeah. We are only just beginning to get the most out of the internet, and the WWW was invented almost 40 years ago - other parts of it even earlier. Adoption takes time, not to speak of the fact that the technology itself is still developing quickly and might see more and more use cases when it gets better.
> We are only just beginning to get the most out of the internet
The Internet has been getting worse pretty steadily for 20 years now
Re: How AI is affecting productivity and jobs in Europe
#70> The EU trails the US not only in the absolute number of AI-related patents but also in AI specialisation – the share of AI patents relative to total patents. E.U. patent law takes a very different attitude towards software patents than the U.S. Even if that wasn't the case: “Specialisation” means that no innovation unrelated to AI gets mind share, investment, patent applications. And that's somehow a good thing? No…
> “Specialisation” means that no innovation unrelated to AI gets mind share, investment, patent applications. And that's somehow a good thing?
I don’t think the authors claim we should have 100% specialisation. They just say that the fact that the EU has fewer AI-related patents as a proportion of the total (less specialisation) is evidence that it is behind in AI. That seems reasonable.