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medvezhenokyesterday at 4:54 PM2 repliesview on HN

What exactly would that evidence look like, for you?

It definitely increases some types of productivity (Opus one-shot a visualization that would have likely taken me at least a day to write before, for work) - although I would have never written this visualization before LLMs (because the effort was not worth it). So I guess it's Jevons Paradox in action somewhat.

In order to observe the productivity increases you need a good scale where the productivity would really matter (the same way that when a benchmark is saturated, like the AIME, it stops telling us anything useful about model improvement)


Replies

bwestergardyesterday at 6:42 PM

"What exactly would that evidence look like, for you?"

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MFPPBS https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OPHNFB

Productivity is by definition real output (usually inflation adjusted dollars) per unit of input. That could be per hour worked, or per representative unit of capital + labor mix.

I would accept an increase in the slope of either of these lines as evidence of a net productivity increase due to artificial intelligence (unless there were some other plausible cause of productivity growth speed up, which at present there is not).

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bopbopbop7yesterday at 5:11 PM

Well you would think if there is increased productivity there would be at least a couple studies, some clear artifacts, or increased quality of software being shipped.

Except all we have is "trust me bro, I'm 100x more productive" twitter/blog posts, blant pre-IPO AI company marketing disguised as blog posts, studies that show AI decreases productivity, increased outages, more CVEs, anecdotes without proof, and not a whole lot of shipping software.