71–80 of 82 posts
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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.
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 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…
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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.
Any organization that properly adopted computers found out quickly how much they could improve productivity. The limiting factor was always understanding.
The trouble with AI tools is they don’t have this trajectory. You can be very versed on using them well, know all the best practices and where they apply and you get at best uneven gains. This is not the introduction of desktops 2.0
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,,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.
The main difference is that people had no idea of the disruption it would cause and of course there wasn't there a huge investment industry around it.
The only question is about ROI of the investors will be positive (which depends on the timeline), not whether it is disruptive (or it will be after for example 30 years from now), and I see people confusing the two here quite often.
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…
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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.
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…
It also made me notice how much attention I’ve been giving these tech companies, almost as a substitute for the social media I try to avoid. I remember being genuinely excited for new posts on distill.pub the way I’d get excited for a new 3Blue1Brown or Veritasium video. These days, though, most of what I see feels like fingers-tired-from-scrolling marketing copy, and I can’t bring myself to care.
> How is AI reshaping the economy? oh I know this one! it's created mountains of systemic risk for absolutely no payoff whatsoever!
no payoff whatsoever? I just asked Claude to do a task that would have previously taken me four days. Then I got up and got lunch, and when I was back, it was done. I would never make the argument that there are no risks. But there's also no way you can make the argument there are no payoffs!
Now you can’t be paid to do that task and you’ve made yourself unemployed or paid lower in the future.
Meanwhile, mountains of additional energy is being comsumed to do that task, and a small handful of companies like Nvidia collect all the profit that used to go to people like you paid to do that task.
You don’t own a data center and your labor is on an express train to being worthless.
So, fine, I agree with you. There’s a big payoff. You’re just not the one getting it.
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What is a "sophisticated prompt"? What if I just tack on "please think about this a lot and respond in a highly sophisticated manner" to my question/prompt? Anyone can do this once they're made aware of this potential issue. Sometimes the UX layer even adds this for you in the system prompt, you just have to tick the checkbox for "I want a long, highly sophisticated answer".
They have a chart that shows it. The education level of the input determines the education level of the output. These things are supposed to have intelligence on tap. I'll imagine this in a very simple way. Let's say "intellignce" is like a fluid. It's a finite thing. Intelligence is very valuable, it's the substrate for real-world problem solving that makes these things ostensibly worth trillions of dollars. Intelli…
I see it with coworkers all the time. They'll ask ChatGPT to do an analysis and it'll output test results for a T-test. They don't know how to interpret it at all, and so it's ultimately meaningless to them. They're just using "stat sig" as a way to make a non-technical VP happy. In situations like this, I don't think a highly intelligent source, model or human, can make the recipient be more intelligent than they actually are.