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AI and the Automation of Work

ben-evans.com

1–10 of 268 posts

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#2
> As an analyst, though, I tend to prefer Hume’s empiricism over Decartes - I can only analyse what we can know. We don’t have AGI, and without that, we have only another wave of automation, and we don’t seem to have any a priori reason why this must be more or less painful than all the others.

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#5

What exactly is a "shadow IT app" ? How in the heck is _Evernote_ the top shadow IT app or related to automation and aI?

Shadow IT is an unsupported, unendorsed IT process. Like when an office (without official support, and possibly against official rules) uses MS Access + VBA + whatever to automate a business process. ChatGPT is not endorsed by a lot of offices (in fact it's discouraged by many because it's an easy way to exfiltrate proprietary or otherwise confidential information since OpenAI retains those inputs), but it's become a part of a lot of people's workflows.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_IT

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#6
I think the "sparks of AIG" presentations are compelling. It does feel like there are a just a few remaining big problems away from AGI level capabilities where it was more futuristic unclear projections in the past.

If the issues as synthetic data conversations like alpha go but for LLMs; setting much longer token contexts (or dramatically cheaper training on custom data sets) And scaling via software and hardware a few more orders of magnitude.

I think then we have some big waves that will wash over any observations we could make at this point in time.

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#8

What exactly is a "shadow IT app" ? How in the heck is _Evernote_ the top shadow IT app or related to automation and aI?

Shadow IT is an unsupported, unendorsed IT process. Like when an office (without official support, and possibly against official rules) uses MS Access + VBA + whatever to automate a business process. ChatGPT is not endorsed by a lot of offices (in fact it's discouraged by many because it's an easy way to exfiltrate proprietary or otherwise confidential information since OpenAI retains those inputs), but it's become a…

Salesforce is oddly popular as a Shadow IT platform for web applications because it has a database and a programming language, but is often controlled by "non-IT" teams such as finance or whatever.

I'm seeing people migrate perfectly fine ASP.NET or JSP applications to Salesforce just to get away from their internal IT teams, which can stretch out the paperwork to 2-3 years just to spin up a VM for a legitimate purpose.

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#10

Or it could be that the time/effort required to craft a prompt and check the output is not worth it for most/all use cases, and thus after the initial excitement ChatGPT and friends gather dust much like blockchain and Apple Vision.

Yeah this hype has opened my eyes to the fact that there are so many people who haven't already found a flow for internet searches that's more streamlined than this AI stuff. Don't we all do this every day?
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