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I was browsing through the news today and I found an interesting article about the current state of AI for corporate productivity.
MIT report: 95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing
There seems to have been a feeling over the last few years that generative AI was going to gut white collar jobs the same way that offshoring gutted blue collar jobs in the 1980s and 90s, and that it was going to happen any day now.
If this study is trustworthy, the promise of AI appears to be less concrete and less imminent than many would hope or fear.
I've been thinking about why that might be, and I've reached three non-exclusive but somewhat unrelated thoughts.
The first is that Gartner hype cycle is real. With almost every new technology, investors tend to think that every sigmoid curve is an exponential curve that will asymptotically approach infinity. Few actually are. Are we reaching the point where the practical gains available in each iteration our current models are beginning to bottom out? I'm not deeply plugged in to the industry, nor the research, nor the subculture, but it seems like the substantive value increase per watt is rapidly diminishing. If that's true, and there aren't any efficiency improvements hiding around the next corner, it seems like we may be entering the through of disillusionment soon.
The other thought that occurs to me is that people seem to be absolutely astounded by the capabilities of LLMs and similar technology.
Caveat: My own experience with LLMs is that it's like talking to a personable schizophrenic from a parallel earth, so take my ramblings with a grain of salt.
It almost seems like LLMs exist in an area similar to very early claims of humanoid automata, like the mechanical Turk. It can do things that seem human, and as a result, we naturally and unconsciously ascribe other human capabilities to them while downplaying their limits. Eventually, the discrepancy grows to great - usually when somebody notices the cost.
On the third hand, maybe it is a good technology and 95% of companies just don't know how to use it?
Does anyone have any evidence that might lend weight to any of these thoughts, or discredit them?
The true benchmark is GDP. If LLMs truely can boost productivity in most tasks except for pure manual labour we would see GDP roaring. If we saw a 10-40% increase in productivity among the majority of the labour force it would be like an industrial revolution on steroids. We are seeing lackluster economic growth, clearly production isn't booming.
Some how tech has the ability to radically change how people work and provide people with amazing tools without boosting productivity much. We went from type writers to Word to cloud services that allow us to share documents instantly across continents. We really haven't seen a matching boom in productivity. The amount of office workers wasn't slashed with the propagation of Email, excel, google search or CRM-systems.
I am willing to entertain claims that official statistics are distorted, but nevertheless someone should make the point: real GDP per capita has more than doubled since 1980s and typewriters. I never understood properly Total Factor Productivity, but it had respectable growth from 1980s to 00s.
I am too lazy to look-up the statistics, but qualitatively the office work functions has dramatically changed. There used to be significant pool of people whose job function was answering phone, typing documents on paper, managing the paper documents, managing someone's calendar and it was needed for the business to function. Secretaries and mail room jobs have practically disappeared.
I am amenable to argument that most of these efficiencies have been wasted (they enable more work to be done, but not all of the new work is productive).
Distorted doesn't begin to describe it. It's not like someone made an oopsie when refording data in their excel spreadsheet.
Citing these statistics is makes no sense until we establish we're even using the same definitions. If the bureaucratic sector expands to match the gains brought by technology, that's still "P" for the GDP god, and does little to argue against someone who says they're not seeing much productivity gains over their lifetime.
Outright dismissing them makes for a boring discussion, because then there is nothing to discuss unless the specific failures can be discussed. Concept of distortions I am ready accept, because whenever I hear how the calculations are made, they sound heartwarmingly crude. Method for constant prices adjustment even more so (what is the value of MacBook in 1980?). But any attempt to account for it is a headache, too.
I do believe the numbers are not wholly invented, so they track some kind of signal, which is a relevant to enough for to make the point: LLMs have not (hedge: not yet) caused dramatically increased GDP, but GDP (per capita) and productivity statistics increased when the office adopted MS Office.
Eta: sent an early draft too early.
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