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Anthropic Economic Index report: economic primitives
- mips_avatar 9mo agoEvery single AI economic analysis talks about travel planning but none of the AI labs have the primitives (transit routing, geocoding, etc.) in a semantic interface for the models to use.
- bix6 9mo ago> These “primitives”—simple, foundational measures of how Claude is used, which we generate by asking Claude specific questions about anonymized Claude.ai and first-party (1P) API transcripts I just skimmed but is there any manual verification / human statistical analysis done on this or we just taking Claude’s word for it?
- sdwr 9mo agoLooks like they are relying on Claude for it, which is interesting. I bet social scientists are going to love this approach
- adverbly 9mo agoThis is very cool but it's not quite what I expected out of economic primitives. I expected to see measures of the economic productivity generated as a result of artificial intelligence use. Instead, what I'm seeing is measures of artificial intelligence use. I don't really see how this is measuring the most important economic primitives. Nothing related to productivity at all actually. Everything about how and where and who... This is just demographics and usage statistics...
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- kurttheviking 9mo agoagree, was similarly hoping for something akin to a total factor productivity argument
- johnrob 9mo agoUntil AI is used to generate new revenue streams (i.e. acquire new customers), I don’t think the economic impact is going to impress. My two cents.
- mr_toad 9mo agoPeople used to say the same things about computers. Even back in the early 90s people still questioned the value of computers in the workplace.
- no_wizard 9mo agoWhat people, exactly? You could see the introduction of desktop computing and other types of computing in industry with a double digit increase to productivity, all other things being equal. Any organization that properly adopted computers found out quickly how much they could improve productivity. The limiting factor was always understanding. The trouble with AI tools is they don’t have this trajectory. You can be very versed on using them well, know all the best practices and where they apply and you get at best uneven gains. This is not the introduction of desktops 2.0
- p1necone 9mo ago> I expected to see measures of the economic productivity generated as a result of artificial intelligence use. >Instead, what I'm seeing is measures of artificial intelligence use. Fun fact: this is also how most large companies are measuring their productivity increases from AI usage ;), alongside asking employees to tell them how much faster AI is making them while simultaneously telling them they're expected to go faster with AI.
- brap 9mo agoAll of this performative bullshit coming out of Anthropic is slowly but surely making them my least favorite AI company. We get it guys the very scary future is here any minute now and you’re the only ones taking it super seriously and responsibly and benevolently. That’s great. Now please just build the damn thing
- ossa-ma 9mo agoThese are economic studies on AI's impact on productivity, jobs, wages, global inequality. It's important to UNDERSTAND who benefits from technology and who gets left behind. Even putting the positive impacts of a study like this aside - this kinda due diligence is critical for them to understand developing markets and how to reach them.
- brap 9mo agoOk Dario
- futuraperdita 9mo agoBut the thing is that they really aren't rigorous economic studies. They're a sort of UX research-like sociological study with some statistics, but don't actually approach the topic with any sort of econometric modeling or give more than loose correlations to past economic data. So it does appear performative: it's "pop science" using a quantitative veneer to push a marketing message to business leaders in a way that looks well-optimised mathematically. Note the papers cited are nearly all ones about AI use, and align more closely with management case studies vs. economics.
- mlsu 9mo ago> This also highlights the importance of model design and training. While Claude is able to respond in a highly sophisticated manner, it tends to do so only when users input sophisticated prompts. If the output of the model depends on the intelligence of the person picking outputs out of its training corpus, is the model intelligent? This is kind of what I don't quite understand when people talk about the models being intelligent. There's a huge blindspot, which is that the prompt entirely determines the output.
- sjajshha 9mo ago[dead]
- thousand_nights 9mo agoi don't know, are we intelligent? you could argue that our input (senses) entirely define the output (thoughts, muscle movements, etc)
- HPsquared 9mo agoThere's a bit of baked-in stuff as well. We are a full culture-mind-body[-spirit] system.
- fuzzfactor 9mo agoFortunately we've got the full system because even under ideal conditions nobody's actually ever been intelligent at all times and we need the momentum from that full system to resume in an intelligent direction after an upset when it's not all at its best.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- bossyTeacher 9mo agoThe whole point of humans is the way we process the input. Every life form out there receives sound vibrations and has photons hitting their body all the time, not everyone uses that information in the same way or at all. That plus natal reflexes and hardcoded assumptions
- dingdingdang 9mo agoThe title actually cringes me out a bit, it reads like early report titles in academia where young students (myself no doubt incl back when) try their hardest at making a title sound clever but in actuality only achieve obscuration of their own material.
- bilsbie 9mo agoReminds me of psychohistory.
- dingdingdang 9mo agoNever read the Foundation series, the concept of psychohistory makes me want to though!
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- blibble 9mo ago> How is AI reshaping the economy? oh I know this one! it's created mountains of systemic risk for absolutely no payoff whatsoever!
- andy_xor_andrew 9mo agono payoff whatsoever? I just asked Claude to do a task that would have previously taken me four days. Then I got up and got lunch, and when I was back, it was done. I would never make the argument that there are no risks. But there's also no way you can make the argument there are no payoffs!
- blibble 9mo ago> I just asked Claude to do a task that would have previously taken me four days. I think this probably says more about you than the "AI"
- steve_adams_86 9mo agoThat's not a very constructive thought given you don't know what the task is or why it could have taken them days. In a field as large and complex as software, there are myriad reasons why any single person could find substantial time-saving opportunities with LLMs, and it doesn't have to point to their own inadequacies.
- dangus 9mo agoSo, where’s the payoff? Now you can’t be paid to do that task and you’ve made yourself unemployed or paid lower in the future. Meanwhile, mountains of additional energy is being comsumed to do that task, and a small handful of companies like Nvidia collect all the profit that used to go to people like you paid to do that task. You don’t own a data center and your labor is on an express train to being worthless. So, fine, I agree with you. There’s a big payoff. You’re just not the one getting it.
- siliconc0w 9mo agoSkimmed, some notes for a more 'bear' case: * value seems highly concentrated in a sliver of tasks - the top ten accounting for 32%, suggesting a fat long-tail where it may be less useful/relevant. * productivity drops to a more modest 1-1.2% productivity gain once you account for humans correcting AI failure. 1% is still plenty good, especially given the historical malaise here of only like 2% growth but it's not like industrial revolution good. * reliability wall - 70% success rate is still problematic and we're getting down to 50% with just 2+ hours of task duration or about "15 years" of schooling in terms of complexity for API. For web-based multi-turn it's a bit better but I'd imagine that would at least partly due to task-selection bias.
- xiphias2 9mo ago,,1% is still plenty good, especially given the historical malaise here of only like 2% growth but it's not like industrial revolution good.'' You can't compare the speed of AI improvements to the speed of technical improvements during the industrial revolution. ChatGPT is 3 years old.
- reppap 9mo agoAs long as people claim it's revolutionary it's fair to compare it to other revolutions.
- xiphias2 9mo agoI mean you can compare, but at the start it was also super small improvements. The main difference is that people had no idea of the disruption it would cause and of course there wasn't there a huge investment industry around it. The only question is about ROI of the investors will be positive (which depends on the timeline), not whether it is disruptive (or it will be after for example 30 years from now), and I see people confusing the two here quite often.
- storystarling 9mo agoI've found that architecting around that reliability wall is where the margins fall apart. You end up chaining verification steps and retries to get a usable result, which multiplies inference costs until the business case just doesn't work for a bootstrapped product.
- ossa-ma 9mo agoI'm not an economist so can someone explain whether this stat is significant: > a sustained increase of 1.0 percentage point per year for the next ten years would return US productivity growth to rates that prevailed in the late 1990s and early 2000s What can it be compared to? Is it on the same level of productivity growth as computers? The internet? Sliced bread?
- bicepjai 9mo agoRecently I listened to an interview with a serial SaaS startup CEO, and one piece of advice clicked for me: “Get out there, talk to your customers, and write blogs, lots of them.” It clarified why companies keep churning out blog posts, reports, “primitives,” even “constitutions”; content is a growth channel. It also made me notice how much attention I’ve been giving these tech companies, almost as a substitute for the social media I try to avoid. I remember being genuinely excited for new posts on distill.pub the way I’d get excited for a new 3Blue1Brown or Veritasium video. These days, though, most of what I see feels like fingers-tired-from-scrolling marketing copy, and I can’t bring myself to care.