5 ms·
Nadella is looking for the world to grow at 10% due to AI enhancement, like it did during the industrial revolution. That seems like a low bar because it alrea
by unsupp0rted 2y ago
Nadella is looking for the world to grow at 10% due to AI enhancement, like it did during the industrial revolution.
That seems like a low bar because it already is- it's just not equally distributed yet.
My own productivity has grown far more than 10% thanks to AI, and I don't just mean in terms of dev. It reads my bloodwork results, speeds up my ability to repair a leak in my toilet tank, writes a concise "no I won't lend you money; I barely know you" message... you name it.
Normally all of those things would take much longer and I'd get worse results on my own.
If that's what I can do at the personal level, then surely 10% is an easily-achievable improvement at the enterprise level.
- toomuchtodo 2y agoYou should be curious why Nadella is looking for the world to grow at that rate. That’s because he wants Microsoft to grow into $500B/year in revenue by 2030, and it will be challenging without that economic growth to grow into that target. You can grow into a TAM, try to grow or broaden the TAM, or some combination of both. Without AI, it is unlikely the growth target can be met. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/26/microsoft-ceo-nadella-said-revenue-would-reach-500-billion-by-2030.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/26/microsoft-ceo-nadella-said-r...
- thagsF 2y agoAnd Henry Ford would reply: "Who is going to buy the cars?" We have been living in a fake economy for quite some time where money is printed and distributed to the "tech" sector. Which isn't really "tech", but mostly entertainment (YouTube, Netflix, Facebook, ...). Growth of the economy means nothing. The money that has been printed goes to shareholders. What the common man gets is inflation and job losses. If you want to grow the real economy, build houses and reduce the cost of living.
- szundi 2y ago[dead]
- coliveira 2y ago> If you want to grow the real economy, build houses and reduce the cost of living. Yes, I wonder why it is so hard for Western countries to understand that there's no future in a place where housing is more expensive than your average salary. If may look cool for a few years until most people have left or are living on the streets.
- tonyhart7 2y ago"there's no future in a place where housing is more expensive than your average salary." don't get me wrong, everyone want cheaper housing but not their house
- sudosysgen 2y agoI for one would love it. If I have to sell housing then I have to buy housing, it's not a benefit to me unless I reduce my quality of life.
- mrbigbob 2y agoMaybe its time we stop seeing housing as an investment and more of a place to shelter oneself from the elements. One of the core pillars of survival
- bufferoverflow 2y agoPlenty of housing. The problem is, people want cheap housing in places where everyone wants to live. I don't think that will happen any time soon.
- coliveira 2y agoThis is a non-sense that spreads because of North American style of housing. If you're talking about sprawling suburban houses then you're right. But big cities have provided reasonable housing for lots of workers for centuries. The only thing you need is to build more apartments in the cities that have an excess of job positions.
- sharpshadow 2y agoA friend tried to tell me China has a real estate crisis, because the value of houses is dropping due to building to many and people are losing on their investments. I asked him if he is sure cheap and available housing is a crisis.
- treis 2y agoEveryone in the industry losing their shirts and going out of business is a crisis. It happened 15 years ago in the US and we still haven't made it back to mid 90s level of housing starts.
- threeseed 2y agoGoing to safely assume you've never worked at an enterprise. Because improving the productivity of every employee by 10% does not translate to the company being 10% more productive. Processes and systems exist precisely to slow employees down so that they comply with regulations, best practices etc rather than move fast and break things. And from experience with a few enterprise LLM projects now they are a waste of time. Because the money/effort to fix up the decades of bad source data far exceeds the ROI. You will definitely see them used in chat bots and replacing customer service people though.
- b112 2y agoIt also gets all of these things wrong, like not paying attention to models of toilets and quirks for their repair, often speaking with an authoritative voice and deceiving you on the validity of its instructions. All of the things you site are available via search engines, or better handled with expertise so you know how much of the response is nonsense. Every time I use AI, it's a time waste.
- unsupp0rted 2y agoEvery time I contact an enterprise for support, the person I'm talking to gets lots of things wrong too. It takes skepticism on my part and some back and forth to clean up the mess. On balance AI gets more things wrong than the best humans and fewer things wrong than average humans.
- Eggpants 2y agoAI is a lossy data compression technique at best. One can always tell when an AI cheerleader/ex blockchain bro has hitched their financial wagon to this statistic based word vomit grift.
- unsupp0rted 2y agoPlease elaborate, preferably without breaking HN guidelines about dismissive name-calling
- xienze 2y agoThe difference is that a human will tell you things like "I think", "I'm pretty sure" or "I don't know" in order to manage expectations. The LLM will very matter-of-factly tell you something that's not right at all, and if you correct them the LLM will go and very confidently rattle off another answer based on what you just said, whether your were telling it the truth or not. If a human acted that way more than a few times we'd stop asking them questions or at least have to do a lot of "trust but verify." LLMs do this over and over again and we just kind of shrug our shoulders and go "well they do pretty good overall."
- suraci 2y agoI think the 'grow at 10%' refers to the incremental part of the entire world/market. during the industrial revolution(steam/electricity/internet), the world was growing, there're trains, cars, netflix bussiness grown with productivity growing, even so, we lived through 2 world wars and dozens of economic crisis but now is very different, when you repair the tank with LLM's help, when the labour value of repairers is decreased, there's no addition value are produced there's a very simple thought experiment abt the result of productivity growing alone: let's assume robotics become to a extremely high level, everything humen work can be reduced to 1/100 with help of robots, what will happen next?
- ta1243 2y ago> let's assume robotics become to a extremely high level, everything humen work can be reduced to 1/100 with help of robots, what will happen next? We work 35 hour years instead of 35 hour weeks?
- tacomadome 2y agoYou’re describing exactly what happened during both the Industrial Revolution and the advent of computer automation. Prior to computerization and databases, millions of people were required for filing, typing, and physically transporting messages and information. All of those jobs, entire fields of work were deleted by computerization.
- Earw0rm 2y agoEven "computer" was originally a job title. For a person.
- geuis 2y agoAll I hear is anecdotal statements from people claiming LLMs have made them some percent more productive. Yet few actually say how or demonstrate it. For the last year, I've tried all sorts of models both as hosted services and running locally with llama.cpp or ollama. I've used both the continue.dev vscode extension and cursor more recently. The results have been frustrating at best. The user interface of the tools is just awful. The output of any models from Deepseek to quen to Claude to whatever other model is mediocre to useless. I literally highlight some code that includes comments about what I need and I even include long explicit descriptions etc in the prompts and it's just unrelated garbage out every time. The most useful thing has just been ChatGPT when there's something I need to learn about. Rubber ducking basically. It's alright at very simple coding questions or asking about obscure database questions I might have, but beyond that it's useless. Gotta keep the context window short, or it starts going off the rails every single time.
- infecto 2y agoJust in the past couple months there have been a number of "I am a senior/principal engineer and this is how I use LLMs". I would agree that the tools are not optimal yet but every iteration has improved for me. Maybe whatever language you are coding it or whatever project you are working on is not a good fit? It is an equally perplexing situation for myself when I hear anecdotes like yours which don't align with my experience. The fact that you say everything is garbage calls into question either how you are using the tool or something else. I can reliably use cursor's composer to reference a couple files, give a bullet list of what we are trying to do and point it to one of the better models and the output is junior engineer level or better output. When I say junior, I mean a junior who has experience with the codebase.
- jononor 2y agoWhat is your personal productivity metric by which you have more than 10% increase? More money earned, less money spent, fewer working hours for same income, more leisure time? It needs to be something in aggregate to mean something related to what Nadella meant. There are many individual task which LLM system can help with. But there is also may ways for those gains to fail to aggregate into large overall gains. Both on personal level and on corporate, and economy wide level.
- maigret 2y agoWho suddenly knows how to measure developer productivity? I thought this was impossible.
- toberoni 2y agoAnnual growth rates during the Industrial Revolution where way lower than 10%. In the 18th century it was well below 1%, during the 19th century it was on average at 1-1.5% (the highest estimates go up to 3% annual growth for certain decades close to 1900).[0][1][2] Some regions or sectors might have experienced higher growth spurts, but the main point stands: the overall economic growth was quite low by modern standards - even though I don't think GDP numbers alone adequately describe the huge societal changes of such sustained growth compared to agrarian cultures before the Industrial Revolution. [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20071127032512/http://minneapolisfed.org/pubs/region/04-05/essay.cfm https://web.archive.org/web/20071127032512/http://minneapoli... [1] https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/explainers/how-has-growth-changed-over-time https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/explainers/how-has-growth-ch... [2] https://academic.oup.com/ereh/article/21/2/141/3044162 https://academic.oup.com/ereh/article/21/2/141/3044162
- deadbabe 2y agoUnless you’re producing 10% more money with AI you’re not doing shit.
- dennis_jeeves2 2y agoOr fix a leaking faucet.
- mvandermeulen 2y agoHow close do we need to be for you to help a brother out? Feeling seriously unsupp0rted right now