Comment by weatherlite
5 months ago
Like what economic changes? You can make a case people are 10% more productive in very specific fields (programming, perhaps consultancy etc). That's not really an earthquake, the internet/web was probably way more significant.
LLMs are fundamentally a new paradigm, it just isn't distributed yet.
It's not like the web suddenly was just there, it came slow at first, then everywhere at once, the money came even later.
The LLMs are quite widely distributed already, they're just not that impactful. My wife is an accountant at a big 4 and they're all using them (everyone on Microsoft Office is probably using them, which is a lot of people). It's just not the earth shattering tech change CEOS make it to be , at least not yet. We need order of mangitude improvements in things like reliability, factuality and memory for the real economic efficiencies to come and its unclear to me when that's gonna happen.
Not necessarily, workflows just need to be adapted to work with it rather than it working in existing workflows. It's something that happens during each industrial revolution.
Originally electric generators merely replaced steam generators but had no additional productivity gains, this only changed when they changed the rest of the processes around it.
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Government and healthcare workers have been using AI for notes for over a year in Louisiana; an additional anecdote to sibling.
It's a force multiplier.
Think of having a secretary, or ten. These secretaries are not as good as an average human at most tasks, but they're good enough for tasks that are easy to double check. You can give them an immense amount of drudgery that would burn out a human.
What drudgery, though? Secretaries don't do a lot of drudgery. And a good one will see tasks that need doing that you didn't specify.
If you're generating immense amounts of really basic make work, that seems like you're managing your time poorly.
As one example, LLMs are great at summarizing, or writing or brainstorming outlines of things. They won't display world-class creativity, but as long as they're not hallucinating, their output is quite usable.
Using them to replace core competencies will probably remain forbidden by professional ethics (writing court documents, diagnosing patients, building bridges). However, there are ways for LLMs to assist people without doing their jobs for them.
Law firms are already using LLMs to deal with large amounts of discovery materials. Doctors and researchers probably use it to summarize papers they want to be familiar with but don't have the energy to read themselves. Engineers might eventually be able to use AI to do a rough design, then do all the regulatory and finite element analysis necessary to prove that it's up to code, just like they'd have to do anyway.
I don't have a high-level LLM subscription, but I think with the right tooling, even existing LLMs might already be pretty good at managing schedules and providing reminders.
Very limited thinking AI is a tool