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AI saves about 3% of your hours, and almost none of it reaches the money

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Re: AI saves about 3% of your hours, and almost none of it reaches the money

#81

Post by eslaught »

pianopatrick wrote: post #45
eslaught wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what sense is AI like paying for ads? In one case you legitimately lose to the competition if you stop (prisoner's dilemma). In other case, whether and how much you lose depends almost entirely on how much it actually impacts your productivity in practice (or not). If you're referring to the public perception benefits (supposing those even exist, which isn't clear to me), then it seems easy to make a lot of noise…

If we assume everyone has access to the same AI tools and those tools do help improve output a lot then you get the same prisoner's dilemma as ads. The people using the AI tools to improve their output will set higher consumer expectations for their product or service. If you do not also use AI, you will not be able to keep up, and so you will lose business over time. So you have to pay for AI just to keep up with th…

If AI works the way you suggest then we've literally been here before and we know exactly how this goes.

When tractors came along, farmers became dramatically more productive. Were the farmers who did things the old way "forced" to buy tractors in order to stay afloat? Over time, sure. But this was in no way zero-sum. More products made it to market (literally), more of the workforce was able to shift away from manual labor, and society became much better off overall. The people who moved to cities made dramatically more money, and the farmers who remained made more money too.

Edit: this is literally on the front page right now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48775979

This is not a prisoner's dilemma in any meaningful sense, unless you just like being inefficient and wasting a bunch of human effort.

(I'm not convinced yet whether AI actually works this way or not. I'm just saying, if it works this way, the economic theory is well-developed and we can predict fairly accurately how it's going to play out.)

Re: AI saves about 3% of your hours, and almost none of it reaches the money

#82

Post by kstenerud »

shimman wrote: post #18
kstenerud wrote: post #9

Calling bullshit on this. The size of projects I've done in the past year compared to before is mind boggling. There is NO way I could have reached this level of productivity without a properly trained and properly prompted LLM.

Can you say what exactly you've accomplished with this productivity? Can you provide revenue numbers and how profit increased or does your definition of productivity not include this?

Hell no. I want you to doubt. More for me.

Re: AI saves about 3% of your hours, and almost none of it reaches the money

#83

Post by atmavatar »

asd88 wrote: post #75
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apps that I mostly don't understand the underlying code but can evaluate that it works fairly quick and effectively. This is a contradiction. If you don't understand the code, you cannot in fact evaluate that it works correctly. If that's the approach you are taking, you are doing sloppy work that is going to blow up in your face sooner or later.

I agree, but some (most?) software being written doesn’t require a deep understanding to verify because the domain is small enough or you’re not required to solve for all of its intricacies. E.g. prototypes, internal tools, low scale CRUD apps, personal projects, etc. I believe this is where the huge divide in perceived AI productivity in SW comes from. It’s folks working on low-understanding-required domains talking…

> E.g. prototypes, internal tools, low scale CRUD apps, personal projects, etc.

My experience has been that small-ish projects like these are the most likely to contain code with bond-villain level of complexity (and success).

More than once have I been stuck going on Da Vinci Code-esque adventures to uncover bugs in prototypes years after the fact because the business pivoted away from what it was trying to do and later decided to pivot back, only to discover that despite the prototype and systems/libraries it worked with not changing, somehow it mysteriously doesn't work at all or it fails in convoluted ways despite being perfectly functional when it was originally shelved.

Re: AI saves about 3% of your hours, and almost none of it reaches the money

#84

Post by ShinyLeftPad »

Gagarin1917 wrote: post #23

>And in coding specifically, the speedup is real and comes with its own bill. Oh so this article isn’t really about where AI spending is actually happening. I HOPE people aren’t spending money on AI writing emails. That’s definitely not worth it. Companies are spending the most on coding tools, not email writing. That’s the main value proposition right now. It also doesn’t get into media generation and industries tha…

> Companies are spending the most on coding tools, not email writing.

They probably spend more on having LLMs just parse documents than writing emails than writing code. You maybe forget that most people are not programmers.

Re: AI saves about 3% of your hours, and almost none of it reaches the money

#85

Post by bathtub365 »

edukite wrote: post #73
kevin42 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'll have to take my word for it because I'm not going to disclose my private business or personal financial records. But, I'm running a small, two person business and we are being paid by a large company to develop a robotics project. We're working at a very fast velocity and have fielded a prototype within a few months. I've been doing this kind of work for years, and we're more productive than larger teams (8-10…

There's other word for such code and it sounds similar. It's crappy. I was tempted to use Claude couple of days ago to help me with optimization and from 4Gb RAM and 21s it managed to squeeze 1Tb and 41s. When I asked to fixed it AI reduced it to 1Gb and 10s. It just removed most heavy business logic. So yeah. 3 days and this was only total waste of time and cash

How do you know it’s crappy? Have you read the code?

Re: AI saves about 3% of your hours, and almost none of it reaches the money

#86

Post by Gagarin1917 »

ShinyLeftPad wrote: post #84
Gagarin1917 wrote: post #23

>And in coding specifically, the speedup is real and comes with its own bill. Oh so this article isn’t really about where AI spending is actually happening. I HOPE people aren’t spending money on AI writing emails. That’s definitely not worth it. Companies are spending the most on coding tools, not email writing. That’s the main value proposition right now. It also doesn’t get into media generation and industries tha…

> Companies are spending the most on coding tools, not email writing. They probably spend more on having LLMs just parse documents than writing emails than writing code. You maybe forget that most people are not programmers.

It doesn’t matter what “most people” are, coding agents use an obscene amount of tokens, literally millions per day. Every request to an agent needs to parse at least several different documents/files.

Re: AI saves about 3% of your hours, and almost none of it reaches the money

#87

Post by ShinyLeftPad »

Gagarin1917 wrote: post #86
ShinyLeftPad wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Companies are spending the most on coding tools, not email writing. They probably spend more on having LLMs just parse documents than writing emails than writing code. You maybe forget that most people are not programmers.

It doesn’t matter what “most people” are, coding agents use an obscene amount of tokens, literally millions per day. Every request to an agent needs to parse at least several different documents/files.

All LLMs use obscene tokens just programmers are more aware of it

Re: AI saves about 3% of your hours, and almost none of it reaches the money

#88

Post by Gagarin1917 »

ShinyLeftPad wrote: post #87
Gagarin1917 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn’t matter what “most people” are, coding agents use an obscene amount of tokens, literally millions per day. Every request to an agent needs to parse at least several different documents/files.

All LLMs use obscene tokens just programmers are more aware of it

That’s not true. The different use cases of LLMs objectively use different amounts of tokens. AI coding agents can parse half a dozen or more files on each request, plus use a ton for thinking.

Writing an email barely uses any in comparison.

Re: AI saves about 3% of your hours, and almost none of it reaches the money

#89

Post by [deleted] »

bathtub365 wrote: post #85
edukite wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's other word for such code and it sounds similar. It's crappy. I was tempted to use Claude couple of days ago to help me with optimization and from 4Gb RAM and 21s it managed to squeeze 1Tb and 41s. When I asked to fixed it AI reduced it to 1Gb and 10s. It just removed most heavy business logic. So yeah. 3 days and this was only total waste of time and cash

How do you know it’s crappy? Have you read the code?

[deleted]

Re: AI saves about 3% of your hours, and almost none of it reaches the money

#90

Post by giancarlostoro »

Gagarin1917 wrote: post #65
giancarlostoro wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use AI to shorten my emails, I write as I talk, and I ramble a lot in my head.

But surely the free version of any of the chatbots is enough to achieve that, right? You don’t need a Pro subscription for that.

It's not the only use case for LLMs I have. I use local LLMs for some things.
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