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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

#2
This makes sense to me. When using an LLM for programming it’s the most useful when teaching me the basics of a new language or framework. For example, it’s very helpful for giving me introductory information on x86-64. But much less useful at writing recursive higher-kinded types in TypeScript.

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

#4

This makes sense to me. When using an LLM for programming it’s the most useful when teaching me the basics of a new language or framework. For example, it’s very helpful for giving me introductory information on x86-64. But much less useful at writing recursive higher-kinded types in TypeScript.

Yep, it's been great for me for knocking together scripts in Python where I know there will be a way to do something like open a csv file and read it into a list of dicts, but am not familiar enough with the ecosystem yet to know exactly what packages might be useful or how to invoke them. I could work the same thing out from stack overflow, but it would take a lot longer.

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

#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 scraped on the internet it hallucinates like crazy and sounds so confident about it. Maybe I'm just horrible at prompting, but I can't help but feel we're still N breakthroughs away from having it really impact dev jobs.

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

#7
Claims like this are so dumb. Call center work has a very low ceiling on skill, so obviously people who are maxed out can't benefit.

But in any knowledge economy type job, there is no ceiling on skill. Creative, curious, intelligent people who are already high skill are also going to be the most effective at using a new and weird and tricky tool in interesting ways to develop their skills.

Generative AI will make some old skill obsolete, but people who are generically good at picking up new skills will be much more effective at wielding it. Those are the same people who were good at picking up the old skills, too.

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

#8
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…

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.

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

#9

This makes sense to me. When using an LLM for programming it’s the most useful when teaching me the basics of a new language or framework. For example, it’s very helpful for giving me introductory information on x86-64. But much less useful at writing recursive higher-kinded types in TypeScript.

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

#10
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 wonder how much of that 5-10% improvement is because Google results are total garbage these days
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