Anyone saying 10x as a serious claim is clearly using a round number and vibes; however, even if it were so, AI getting popular 3 years ago does not mean what you say.

The earliest used models in this category would easily 10x (what did I just say) the creation of one-off short scripts, but you're not writing a 30-year app out of just a bunch of short scripts.

The METR time horizons graph suggests we can now get 10x (ahem) speedup on solving most coding problems that take us a few hours and about half of problems that take 2 days. Amdahl's law bites: even infinity speedup on half your problems is only 2x overall.

If you let an LLM loose, with a huge budget, what's the biggest artefact it can make before it drowns under the weight of bad decisions? The C compiler and web browser headlines a while back? The maths papers we see now that solve problems which stumped the maths world for decades?

But this is the other side of the same coin: teamwork. One person getting a thing made in twelve months vs a team of a hundred, you can scale up fast with money when you have a proof of concept, and an LLM can make a lot of proofs of a lot of concepts even in free accounts.

Can only speak for my own project, but can give an example:

After an aquisition earlier this year I got the task of doing an SAP-Integration for the new company, last time I did this 5 years ago it was a 6 month task, but with the experience and skills ive gained since I estimated it would be a 3 month project (with or without AI, most work is just logistics, AI cant help much there).

In those 3 months I was able to not only integrate SAP but also deliver a completely modernised user-facing software for that integration. While I could have written that software myself in a vacuum it would have never been worth it financially, since it would have delayed the launch of the integration by 6+ months. Building the software post-launch of the integration would have easily taken 2.5 years at minimum.

But this is also basically a "spherical cow in a vacuum" scenario, where I was essentially acting as a solo dev, in full operational control of the project, with deep domain knowledge of the topic and an allready fully set up codebase that I knew perfectly while working down ideas I've had in my backlog for 5+ years.

Definitely something I've come around to as well, even though I am very pro-AI and think it's an amazing technology. But the bottlenecks just hit too hard. I notice every day where my usage of AI is so constrained, by myself and my imagination, by external factors like slow feedback loops (gathering requirements), by the AI still not being good enough for certain details (you need to heavily steer it, give feedback, even in long running agentic sessions).

So yes, many aspects of my job are now 10x as productive, but turns out that improves my overall throughput only very little.

First, it's not three years since. The real improvements in programming ability arrived in the last 6-8 months.

Second, the Internet didn't show up much in GDP and similar measures either!

But your point stands. Where are the amazing digital products/stuff? I get that it might take time to arrive as we scale up compute and learn new paradigms. But so much infra already exists (deployment pipeliens, everyone reachable on a smartphone) that we should be seeing something.

I think it's more that it shifts the thought process from "If this is going to take 30 years then we won't bother, because the investment can be spent on things that pay off sooner" to "If we can do this in 3 years then we'll make that investment because that's a good bet."

The way it changes the game is by lowering the cost of making radical bets so we end up trying more moonshots.

Right now we are in the golden age where we do the same and take time off. Employers have not yet fully caught up with the workforce. I can't think of people that are not putting less hours this year for the same salaries.

> If AI makes us 10x more productive, the 3 years since its popularization were enough for a product that would have taken 30 years to build without AI, for instance.

A product still requires a lot of handholding and human thinking, at least if one does not want everyone even throwing a glance at it to immediately be repulsed by the usual AI slop tells.

> I'm an AI advocate but that question makes me feel that AI is simply "very useful" rather than being a historical game changer for humanity.

It absolutely already is a historical game changer on par with the Industrial Revolution when it comes to the amount of jobs destroyed and economies screwed up - and the impact will be even worse in 10+ years as existing seniors retire but no new seniors rise as AI has destroyed entry level career paths.