alt Hacker News"We believe our internal AI R&D efforts are significantly faster than they would be without AI assistance, but not yet by a factor of 2 (though we are uncertain and measurement is difficult)"
So Anthropic thinks their productivity is not even doubled by AI. Interesting data point.
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Well, it is a data point but AI R&D at a frontier lab is not really a representative stand-in for a regular workplace.
AI R&D efforts != productivity. I think it's fairly obvious that SOTA research is less affected by AI than writing another boilerplate react frontend.
I think LLMs are best for ideation, experiments, small things.
They've probably already settled on most of the architecture and the big ideas, so they're details in big things instead of how to make complete small things.
The thing LLMs really speed up is how some ordinary person-- a PhD student, or similar, can whip up a miniature synthetic experiment that turns out to be horrid and needs to be fixed by hand, but which at least gave him a plot on the same day he had the idea. That's, I think, where LLMs shine: prototypes. Anthropic probably doesn't need that to the same degree as the small experimenter.
R&D productivity. Pretty sure they claim more for e.g. Claude Code.
>thinks
They can’t measure even measure it, it’s just vibes. They may not even be more productive.
So they did two years of work in one year? yeah right lol
So I can take that as ~infinite amount of tokens don't don't even get you 2x on any novel tasks? No auto-researcher, no rsi..
Is that correct?
> So Anthropic thinks their productivity is not even doubled by AI.
I find it hard to imagine launching this criticism at a new technology.