7 ms·

How AI is affecting productivity and jobs in Europe

172 points by pseudolus 8mo ago

m463 8mo ago
I wonder if web searches used to be pretty productive, then declined as sponsored results and SEO degraded things. Nowadays an ai assist with a web search usually eliminates the search altogether and gives you a clear answer right away. for example, "how much does a ford f-150 cost" will give you something ballpark in a second, compared to annoying "research" to find the answer shrouded in corporate obfuscation.
- gtowey 8mo ago
  I was just thinking exactly the same. Basic web search has become so horrible that AI is being used as its replacement. I found it a sad condemnation of how far the tech industry has fallen into enshittification and is failing to provide tools that are actually useful.
  - gh0stcat 8mo ago
    We always had the technology to do things better, it's the money making part that has made things worse technologically speaking. In this same way, I don't see how AI will resolve the problem - our productivity was never the goal, and that won't change any time soon.
  - johnnyanmac 8mo ago
    And it'll happen again when AI models start resorting to ads once again.
    - emptybits 8mo ago
      Yup. Any LLM recommendation for a product or service should be viewed with suspicion (no different than web search results or asking a commission-based human their opinion). Sponsored placements. Affiliate links. Etc. Or when asking an LLM for a comparison matrix or pros and cons between choices ... beware paid placements or sponsors. Bias could be a result of available training data (forgivable?) or due to paid prioritization (or de-prioritizing of competitors!)
      - littlecranky67 8mo ago
        Eager to see how that will work with existing laws. At least in a lot of countries in the EU, any advertisement has to be explicitly marked as such. Sponsored content, too. So the AI will have to highlight that.
    - littlecranky67 8mo ago
      I don't think that will ever happen. All you need is a trivial browser extension with a locally run, very primite LLM, that takes the output of the commercial LLM, and removes all advertisement. And adBlocker AI, so to speak. Yes, there will be people not using adblockers just as there are people today. But no adblocker ever was able to remove SEO spam from googles website, all they did was hiding obvious adds. They didn't improve the search experience.
      - johnnyanmac 8mo ago
        There will always be ad free solutions, but the most popular (or simply, most market captured tools) will be the ones most people flock to. Better services than many market leaders came along, but the leaders kept growing. Unless this bubble popping is truly catastrophic, I don't see this ending a different way.
  - Wobbles42 8mo ago
    Their tools are very useful. To their customers. Not to their users.
  - littlecranky67 8mo ago
    > Basic web search has become so horrible It is not horrible, it reached the point of absolute excellence. Not for you, the user - but for making money for the creator. Remember, no one paid for web search, so you are the product. If you are the provider of the web search engine, the point of having web search is not deliver the best search result to the user, but maximize the amount of money you can make from the sum of the world population. And google did very good in maximizing their profits, without users turning away from them.
- monkpit 8mo ago
  The turning point was around when google stopped honoring Boolean ops and quotation marks
  - Wobbles42 8mo ago
    The killer app for AI might just be unenshittifying search for a couple of years. Then SEO will catch up and we'll have spam again, but now we'll be paying by the token for it. Probably right around the time hallucination drops off enough to have made this viable. I kind of want to become Amish sometimes.
    - adrianN 8mo ago
      AI automates spam generation so more than likely all hope is lost for the human driven web.
      - direwolf20 8mo ago
        Only the corporate web which values quantity over quality. Have you tried Marginalia Search? It's refreshing, although it doesn't index enough stuff to find what you're looking for, most times.
    - kakacik 8mo ago
      Too much money in ads, and search is just a huge cash pipeline straight towards it. No way we can have non-ad-infested llm search out in the wild from any major vendor in upcoming future. Google-fu just becomes llm-google-fu, while sometimes it goes off rails and then apologizes in that typical super annoying way (and screws up something else). Maybe smaller ones can somehow provide almost comparable but ad-free service, heck even mildly worse but genuine results would win many people over, this one included.
      - Wobbles42 8mo ago
        I would agree with all of that. Searching for information is inherently an adversarial process. You want your attention in one place, other actors in the system want it in another. Any solution that doesn't suck will need to be aware of this.
- aurareturn 8mo ago
  then declined as sponsored results and SEO degraded things It didn't decline because of this. It declined because of a general decade long trend of websites becoming paywalled and hidden behind a login. The best and most useful data is often inaccessible to crawlers. In the 2000s, everything was open because of the ad driven model. Then ad blockers, mobile subscription model, and the dominance of a few apps such as Instagram and Youtube sucking up all the ad revenue made having an open web unsustainable. How many Hacker News style open forums are left? Most open forums are dead because discussions happen on login platforms like Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, X, Discord, etc. The only reason HN is alive is because HN doesn't make need to make money. It's an ad for Y Combinator. SEO only became an issue when all there is for crawlers is SEO content instead of true genuine content.
  - adrianN 8mo ago
    I seem to remember very few ads on the early web. Most sites I frequented were run by volunteers who paid out of their own pockets for webspace.
    - aurareturn 8mo ago
      What year? 90s? I remember ads everywhere in 2000s.
  - DrScientist 8mo ago
    > The best and most useful data is often inaccessible to crawlers. Interesting point. > ost open forums are dead because discussions happen on login platforms like Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, X, Discord, etc Ironically isn't one of the reasons some of those platforms started to use logins was so they could track users and better sell their information to ad people? Obviously now there are other reasons as well - regulation, age verification etc. Does this suggest that the AI/ad platforms need to tweak their economic model to share more of the revenue with content creators?
  - badc0ffee 8mo ago
    You can still use Reddit without logging in. In fact it's completely unlike Discord. Lots of Reddit discussions still show up in web search results.
- kdheiwns 8mo ago
  I used to be able to google a question like that and get an accurate answer within the top 3 results nearly every time about 20 years ago. Then it got worse and worse and became pretty much completely useless about 10 years ago. Now AI will give me a confident answer that is outright wrong 20% of the time or kind of right but not really 30% of the time. So now I ask something using an AI chatbot and carefully word it so as to have it not get off topic and focus on what I actually want to know, wait 30 seconds for its long ass answer to finish, skim it for the relevant parts, then google the answer and try to see where the AI sourced its answer from and determine whether it misinterpreted/mixed up results or it's accurate. What used to be a 10 second google search is now a 2-3 minute exercise. I can see very much how people say AI has somehow led to productivity losses. It's shit like this, and it floods the internet and makes real info harder to find, making this cycle worse and worse and take more and more time for basic stuff.
  - direwolf20 8mo ago
    Now Google has an AI answer at the top with links to sources. This streamlines the process.
  - cons0le 8mo ago
    Web scraping for LLMs has almost completely ruined the search experience. In the past I could search for simple questions, and quickly get an answer without even having to click through to the links. This was horrible for web traffic, but the utility level was off the charts. It was possible to get accurate results in milliseconds. It was faster than using an LLM. Now sites put almost no info in the search result headers, to get people to click through. I think this will work on some users, but most will start using LLMs as search by default. Search engines have gotten so bad that I almost feel forced to try running SearXNG or some other search engine locally. Its a pain to set up, but degooglefication is always worth it.
    - plagiarist 8mo ago
      Is SearXNG a nice experience? I need something that specifically excludes AI slop affiliate marketing listicles. I don't know if content other than that exists out there any more. Still, I'd rather have no answer than a "top ten $item" list just describing the first page of Amazon results.
- fifilura 8mo ago
  My mother lost her phone so I asked her to search for "find my iphone" on Google. The result started with 3 "sponsored links" which threw her down the rabbit hole. This used to be easy.
- kranner 8mo ago
  Allegedly the 'clear' answer is much easier to manipulate than gaming PageRank ever was: https://x.com/thomasgermain/status/2024165514155536746 https://x.com/thomasgermain/status/2024165514155536746
  - littlecranky67 8mo ago
    Don't think that is a fair point, the manipulation was done on a topic of which there are hardly any other sources (hot dog eating competition winner). If you want to manipulate what an AI tells you is the F-150 street price, you will complete with hundreds of sources. The AI will unlikely pick yours.
    - luke5441 8mo ago
      The marketing game is already moving to game LLMs. Somehow you have to get what you want to have into the training data or the context window. Currently it is probably just mostly quantity that does the trick w.r.t. training data. So e.g. spam the Internet with "product comparisons" featuring your product as the winner.
      - hombre_fatal 8mo ago
        Shifting the balance on training data seems like the wrong approach vs focusing on showing up in agent search tool results and swaying them there. It’s been a long time since agents couldn’t even conduct web search and could only riff off their model. But the examples in this thread are things an agent would search for immediately, and agents are leaning harder on tool calls and external info over time, not less.
- keybored 8mo ago
  > I wonder if web searches used to be pretty productive, then declined as sponsored results and SEO degraded things. Used to be. > Nowadays an ai assist with a web search usually eliminates the search altogether and gives you a clear answer right away. Now.
kolabv 8mo ago
[flagged]
- Yiin 8mo ago
  that's not what the article said, not even close, not sure why you need to push this emotional and wrong framing.
irjustin 8mo ago
FWIW, these studies are too early. Large orgs have very sensitive data privacy considerations and they're only right now going through the evaluation cycles. Case in point, this past week, I learned Deloitte only recently gave the approval in picking Gemini as their AI platform. Rollout hasn't even begun yet which you can imagine is going to take a while. To say "AI is failing to deliver" because only 4% efficiency increase is a pre-mature conclusion.
- AIorNot 8mo ago
  Yes I was recently talking to a person who was working as a BA who specializes in corporate AI adoption- they didn’t realize you could post screenshots to ChatGPT These are not the openclaw folks
  - amarant 8mo ago
    What does it even mean to specialise in something and know so little about it? What exactly is this BA person doing? Genuinely confused, I don't get it
    - shermantanktop 8mo ago
      The “corporate” in “corporate AI” can mean tons of work building metrics decks, collecting pain points from users, negotiating with vendors…none of which requires you to understand the actual tool capabilities. For a big company with enough of a push behind it, that’s probably a whole team, none of whom know what they are actually promoting very well. It’s good money if you can live with yourself, and a mortgage and tuitions make it easy to ignore what you are becoming. I lived that for a few years and then jumped off that train.
      - monkpit 8mo ago
        Sounds like a perfect job for AI!
- gwern 8mo ago
8cvor6j844qw_d6 8mo ago
Its depressing when people are hearing managers are openly asking all employees to pitch in ideals for AI in order to reduce employee headcount. For those hearing this at work, better prepare an exit plan.
- andsoitis 8mo ago
  > Its depressing when people are hearing managers are openly asking all employees to pitch in ideals for AI in order to reduce employee headcount. If the manager doesn’t have ideas, it is they who deserve the boot.
  - wiseowise 8mo ago
    Manager is to manage optimal delivery, not coming up with ideas.
- Wobbles42 8mo ago
  "Ideas for AI to help reduce headcount" sounds like the title everyone should start using on resignation letters. If anyone still resigns that is. They seem to have automated that too.
- hackit2 8mo ago
  I've all-ways asked the managers can you kindly disclose all confidential business information. In which they obviously respond with condescending remarks. Then I respond with, then how am I going to give you a answer without all the knowledge of how the business runs and operates? You can go away and figure out what is going to make work for the business then you can delegate what you want me to do, it is the reason why you pay me money.
- EliRivers 8mo ago
  Apropos, I once had a boss who said he was running a headcount reduction pilot and anyone who had the time and availability to help him should email him saying how much time they had to spare. I cannot deny this had a satisfying elegance.
kittbuilds 8mo ago
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lifestyleguru 8mo ago
[flagged]
- wafflemaker 8mo ago
  Hey! Don't make fun of us! You'd get used to the bottle caps too. Not really that unnoying, except for smoothies, where a bit of the smoothie drips down on the bottleneck and makes everything sticky. And about the reaction time - politics is in a way expression of the will of the masses. And that depends on how they are informed. They are maybe not yet on point, but they are getting there. Nowadays people are slowly realizing that Merkel's "all refugees welcome" idea was stupid and can't work. Both ineffective as a means to help people - that's cheapest/most effective closer to their homes. And as immigration policy - getting more hands to work doesn't work with people who refuse to work and refuse to integrate. Part of that refusal comes from locals that are "pro immigrants" on social media, but refuse to live in same neighbourhoods as immigrants or hire them. More and more people are also realizing that carbon neutrality was often green washing. People are waking up to the fact that execution of good willing ideas with disregard for economic circumstances, or just reality in general, doesn't have good results. Only the Russian threat is not being realized soon enough. It's not like during cold war, Russia doesn't have the conventional army to conquer even the westernmost tip of Spain. Or we think it doesn't? Look at how two Ukrainian drone squads owned two NATO battalions of combined tanks & mechanized infantry in latest war exercises. With no losses on their side. We can infer that russian capabilities are more or less similar. But that drone event aside, the perception of threat in Europe is not uniform. Russia will likely only take everything east of Germany, (at least first, before rebuilding and attacking again). So Italy or Spain won't reduce their social spending to buy/ invest in defence to protect Poland, Czech or Romania. There also is a slowly forming pro-russian coalition of Slovaks and Hungarians. Who still, to this day, keep buying Russian oil. Yeah, when Putin is laughing that Europe is still buying Russian oil, he's not mentioning that it's just the pro Russian Hungary. Whos prime minister, Orban, is now in threat of loosing next elections. But the USA support is there already, Rubio is helping Orban in campaign for 12th of april elections. [sarcasm]So to sum up. Yeah, Europeans are waisting energy on bottle caps. But USA is funding pro-russian parties and helping pro-russian politicians. We in Europe can only hope that if Russia attacks, USA will not join the war, because it's becoming quite evident on whos side USA would fight. [/sarcasm]
FanaHOVA 8mo ago
You know it's a EU study because they bring up "AI patents" in the first 2 minutes of it, as if they mean anything
nivcmo 8mo ago
[flagged]
- dakolli 8mo ago
  You trust these stochastic text/slot machines for scheduling and follow-ups? Human intention is important for both of these. triage and reminders I can see, but if you send me an llm generated follow up, I'm just going to assume you don't care.
  - peterlk 8mo ago
    Yes. Other humans are generally accepting of mistakes below some frequency threshold, and frontier models are very robust in my experience
    - dakolli 8mo ago
      Have fun annoying a ton of people, and also, getting prompt injected on a weekly basis and leaking who knows what from your inbox.
  - NitpickLawyer 8mo ago
    > if you send me an llm generated follow up, I'm just going to assume you don't care. Ironically you just replied to an automated message on a forum and didn't realise :) (hint: click on the user, go to their comment history, you'll see the pattern)
    - dakolli 8mo ago
      :eyes:
- windows2020 8mo ago
  One process redesign that may be considered a moat for AI is employees intending to communicate through a sentence or two first passing the text into their AI of choice and asking it to elaborate. On the other end the colleague uses their AI to summarize the email into a bullet point or two. It's challenging for those that don't use AI to keep up.
gyulai 8mo ago
> The EU trails the US not only in the absolute number of AI-related patents but also in AI specialisation – the share of AI patents relative to total patents. E.U. patent law takes a very different attitude towards software patents than the U.S. Even if that wasn't the case: “Specialisation” means that no innovation unrelated to AI gets mind share, investment, patent applications. And that's somehow a good thing? Not something you can just throw out there as a presupposition without explaining your reasoning.
- eternauta3k 8mo ago
  EU firms don't file EU patents necessarily, but rather in the relevant countries (including USA).
- dash2 8mo ago
  > “Specialisation” means that no innovation unrelated to AI gets mind share, investment, patent applications. And that's somehow a good thing? I don’t think the authors claim we should have 100% specialisation. They just say that the fact that the EU has fewer AI-related patents as a proportion of the total (less specialisation) is evidence that it is behind in AI. That seems reasonable.
  - direwolf20 8mo ago
    Or it's ahead in not–AI.
- amelius 8mo ago
  Makes me wonder how AI will influence the work of patent officers. Perhaps it will make patent trolling a bit harder because it is easier to look up existing work and to check if an idea is obvious?
  - embedding-shape 8mo ago
    > Perhaps it will make patent trolling a bit harder because it is easier to look up existing work and to check if an idea is obvious? Haha, funny :) No, it'll be like the rest of the industries that use more AI, they'll spend the same amount of effort (as little as possible) and won't validate anything, and provide worse service, not better. AIslop is everywhere, and seemingly unavoidable for companies to use more and more to cut more corners.
ath3nd 8mo ago
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yorwba 8mo ago
Of note, "AI adoption" here means using "technologies that intelligently automate tasks and provide insights that augment human decision making, like machine learning, robotic process automation, natural language processing (NLP), algorithms, neural networks" and not just LLMs.
- arethuza 8mo ago
  As far as I can tell "robotic process automation" mostly seems to be the deeply unglamorous process of building stuff to drive old applications that can't be given API access?
smartmic 8mo ago
What stands out for me is that the productivity gains for small and medium-sized enterprises are actually negative. But in Germany, for example, these companies are the backbone of the entire economy. That means it would be interesting to know how the average was calculated, what method was used, what weighting was applied, etc. All in all, it's an interesting study, but it leaves out a lot, such as long-term effects, new dependencies, loss of skills, employee motivation, and much more.
aregue 8mo ago
I cannot read the paper that this article is based on, but it seems that it refers to the use of big data analytics and AI in 2024, not LLM. It concludes that the use of AI leads to a 4% increase in productivity. Nowadays the debate over AI productivity centers around LLMs, not big data analytics. This article does not seem to contradict more recent findings that LLM do not (yet) provide any increased productivity at the company level.
- eshaham78 8mo ago
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phoebusaicartel 8mo ago
This is tongue in cheek but my point is the behavior of these companies, their relentless PR, and the looming liquidity crisis they are causing seems like a coordinated plan. Consumer confidence is certainly being crystalized by rumors of all kinds and businesses are made up of consumers. If the fact checkers are LLMs themselves how does one even begin to figure out the truth? This is just a little wikipedia adlib I did to illustrate my point. (double posted) "The Phoebus.AI cartel was an international cartel that controlled the manufacture and sale of computer components in much of Europe and North America between 2025 and 2039. The cartel took over market territories and lowered the useful supply and life of such computer components, which is commonly cited as an example of planned obsolescence of general computing technology in favor of 6G ubiquitous computing. The Phoebus.AI cartel's compact was intended to expire in 2055, but it was instead nullified in 2040 after World War III made coordination among the members impossible."
rwmj 8mo ago
Is there a link to the actual paper anywhere? That seems like a rather large omission. Without the paper it's hard to tell what they are actually measuring.
- yorwba 8mo ago
  The actual paper: https://www.eib.org/files/publications/20250383-130126-economics-working-paper-2026-02-en.pdf https://www.eib.org/files/publications/20250383-130126-econo...
  - rwmj 8mo ago
    Use of AI is based on self-reported data. From the paper: > The respondents to the interviews are senior managers or financial directors with responsibility for investment decisions and how investments are financed – for example, the owner, chief financial officer or chief executive officer > Firms are asked the following question: “To what extent, if at all, are big data analytics and artificial intelligence used within your business? A. Not used in the business. B. Used in parts of the business. C. Entire business is organized around this technology.” AI adoption is defined as the manager answering B or C. I'm doubtful that this data is going to be very robust. Some senior tech managers are very keen to talk about AI, while at the same time knowing little about how much AI is actually being used by workers. At other companies you'll have people using free or personal ChatGPT accounts without the knowledge of management. Also "big data" is not exactly AI. The productivity information is robust as it's based on company accounts, albeit from 2024 so a couple of years out of date now.
frigg 8mo ago
I have a hard time understanding what "increased productivity by 4%" actually means and how this metric is measured. One low-digit does not seem high when put into the context and promises, is it?
sajithdilshan 8mo ago
x
- vachina 8mo ago
  Big companies are surprisingly nimble when it comes to AI. They typically white label Azure LLM offerings or use Github Copilot Enterprise and sign everyone up wholesale. Some with competent IT dept wrote their own router and offer multiple models from multiple vendors and present it as "<company name> chat".
  - sajithdilshan 8mo ago
    Not in EU. There is a sacred process that has to be followed that can take months even to flip a switch.
- troupo 8mo ago
  > fintec startup in Berlin, > This was mostly due to second line pushing back because of data protection, data privacy and all other regulatory requirement and bureaucratic paperwork Fintec startup. Fintech. Handling people's money. Handling a lot of extremely sensitive data. Complaining that they have to deal with some "bullshit bureacracy about the things like privacy and data regulations or something". Really? Really?!
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
- galacticdessert 8mo ago
  Workers' councils...
  - sajithdilshan 8mo ago
    care to elaborate?
    - 8mo ago
ROBERT234 8mo ago
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172 points by pseudolus 8mo ago

m463 8mo ago

I wonder if web searches used to be pretty productive, then declined as sponsored results and SEO degraded things. Nowadays an ai assist with a web search usually eliminates the search altogether and gives you a clear answer right away. for example, "how much does a ford f-150 cost" will give you something ballpark in a second, compared to annoying "research" to find the answer shrouded in corporate obfuscation.

gtowey 8mo ago
I was just thinking exactly the same. Basic web search has become so horrible that AI is being used as its replacement. I found it a sad condemnation of how far the tech industry has fallen into enshittification and is failing to provide tools that are actually useful.
- gh0stcat 8mo ago
  We always had the technology to do things better, it's the money making part that has made things worse technologically speaking. In this same way, I don't see how AI will resolve the problem - our productivity was never the goal, and that won't change any time soon.
- johnnyanmac 8mo ago
  And it'll happen again when AI models start resorting to ads once again.
  - emptybits 8mo ago
    Yup. Any LLM recommendation for a product or service should be viewed with suspicion (no different than web search results or asking a commission-based human their opinion). Sponsored placements. Affiliate links. Etc. Or when asking an LLM for a comparison matrix or pros and cons between choices ... beware paid placements or sponsors. Bias could be a result of available training data (forgivable?) or due to paid prioritization (or de-prioritizing of competitors!)
    - littlecranky67 8mo ago
      Eager to see how that will work with existing laws. At least in a lot of countries in the EU, any advertisement has to be explicitly marked as such. Sponsored content, too. So the AI will have to highlight that.
  - littlecranky67 8mo ago
    I don't think that will ever happen. All you need is a trivial browser extension with a locally run, very primite LLM, that takes the output of the commercial LLM, and removes all advertisement. And adBlocker AI, so to speak. Yes, there will be people not using adblockers just as there are people today. But no adblocker ever was able to remove SEO spam from googles website, all they did was hiding obvious adds. They didn't improve the search experience.
    - johnnyanmac 8mo ago
      There will always be ad free solutions, but the most popular (or simply, most market captured tools) will be the ones most people flock to. Better services than many market leaders came along, but the leaders kept growing. Unless this bubble popping is truly catastrophic, I don't see this ending a different way.
- Wobbles42 8mo ago
  Their tools are very useful. To their customers. Not to their users.
- littlecranky67 8mo ago
  > Basic web search has become so horrible It is not horrible, it reached the point of absolute excellence. Not for you, the user - but for making money for the creator. Remember, no one paid for web search, so you are the product. If you are the provider of the web search engine, the point of having web search is not deliver the best search result to the user, but maximize the amount of money you can make from the sum of the world population. And google did very good in maximizing their profits, without users turning away from them.
monkpit 8mo ago
The turning point was around when google stopped honoring Boolean ops and quotation marks
- Wobbles42 8mo ago
  The killer app for AI might just be unenshittifying search for a couple of years. Then SEO will catch up and we'll have spam again, but now we'll be paying by the token for it. Probably right around the time hallucination drops off enough to have made this viable. I kind of want to become Amish sometimes.
  - adrianN 8mo ago
    AI automates spam generation so more than likely all hope is lost for the human driven web.
    - direwolf20 8mo ago
      Only the corporate web which values quantity over quality. Have you tried Marginalia Search? It's refreshing, although it doesn't index enough stuff to find what you're looking for, most times.
  - kakacik 8mo ago
    Too much money in ads, and search is just a huge cash pipeline straight towards it. No way we can have non-ad-infested llm search out in the wild from any major vendor in upcoming future. Google-fu just becomes llm-google-fu, while sometimes it goes off rails and then apologizes in that typical super annoying way (and screws up something else). Maybe smaller ones can somehow provide almost comparable but ad-free service, heck even mildly worse but genuine results would win many people over, this one included.
    - Wobbles42 8mo ago
      I would agree with all of that. Searching for information is inherently an adversarial process. You want your attention in one place, other actors in the system want it in another. Any solution that doesn't suck will need to be aware of this.
aurareturn 8mo ago
then declined as sponsored results and SEO degraded things It didn't decline because of this. It declined because of a general decade long trend of websites becoming paywalled and hidden behind a login. The best and most useful data is often inaccessible to crawlers. In the 2000s, everything was open because of the ad driven model. Then ad blockers, mobile subscription model, and the dominance of a few apps such as Instagram and Youtube sucking up all the ad revenue made having an open web unsustainable. How many Hacker News style open forums are left? Most open forums are dead because discussions happen on login platforms like Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, X, Discord, etc. The only reason HN is alive is because HN doesn't make need to make money. It's an ad for Y Combinator. SEO only became an issue when all there is for crawlers is SEO content instead of true genuine content.
- adrianN 8mo ago
  I seem to remember very few ads on the early web. Most sites I frequented were run by volunteers who paid out of their own pockets for webspace.
  - aurareturn 8mo ago
    What year? 90s? I remember ads everywhere in 2000s.
- DrScientist 8mo ago
  > The best and most useful data is often inaccessible to crawlers. Interesting point. > ost open forums are dead because discussions happen on login platforms like Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, X, Discord, etc Ironically isn't one of the reasons some of those platforms started to use logins was so they could track users and better sell their information to ad people? Obviously now there are other reasons as well - regulation, age verification etc. Does this suggest that the AI/ad platforms need to tweak their economic model to share more of the revenue with content creators?
- badc0ffee 8mo ago
  You can still use Reddit without logging in. In fact it's completely unlike Discord. Lots of Reddit discussions still show up in web search results.
kdheiwns 8mo ago
I used to be able to google a question like that and get an accurate answer within the top 3 results nearly every time about 20 years ago. Then it got worse and worse and became pretty much completely useless about 10 years ago. Now AI will give me a confident answer that is outright wrong 20% of the time or kind of right but not really 30% of the time. So now I ask something using an AI chatbot and carefully word it so as to have it not get off topic and focus on what I actually want to know, wait 30 seconds for its long ass answer to finish, skim it for the relevant parts, then google the answer and try to see where the AI sourced its answer from and determine whether it misinterpreted/mixed up results or it's accurate. What used to be a 10 second google search is now a 2-3 minute exercise. I can see very much how people say AI has somehow led to productivity losses. It's shit like this, and it floods the internet and makes real info harder to find, making this cycle worse and worse and take more and more time for basic stuff.
- direwolf20 8mo ago
  Now Google has an AI answer at the top with links to sources. This streamlines the process.
- cons0le 8mo ago
  Web scraping for LLMs has almost completely ruined the search experience. In the past I could search for simple questions, and quickly get an answer without even having to click through to the links. This was horrible for web traffic, but the utility level was off the charts. It was possible to get accurate results in milliseconds. It was faster than using an LLM. Now sites put almost no info in the search result headers, to get people to click through. I think this will work on some users, but most will start using LLMs as search by default. Search engines have gotten so bad that I almost feel forced to try running SearXNG or some other search engine locally. Its a pain to set up, but degooglefication is always worth it.
  - plagiarist 8mo ago
    Is SearXNG a nice experience? I need something that specifically excludes AI slop affiliate marketing listicles. I don't know if content other than that exists out there any more. Still, I'd rather have no answer than a "top ten $item" list just describing the first page of Amazon results.
fifilura 8mo ago
My mother lost her phone so I asked her to search for "find my iphone" on Google. The result started with 3 "sponsored links" which threw her down the rabbit hole. This used to be easy.
kranner 8mo ago
Allegedly the 'clear' answer is much easier to manipulate than gaming PageRank ever was: https://x.com/thomasgermain/status/2024165514155536746 https://x.com/thomasgermain/status/2024165514155536746
- littlecranky67 8mo ago
  Don't think that is a fair point, the manipulation was done on a topic of which there are hardly any other sources (hot dog eating competition winner). If you want to manipulate what an AI tells you is the F-150 street price, you will complete with hundreds of sources. The AI will unlikely pick yours.
  - luke5441 8mo ago
    The marketing game is already moving to game LLMs. Somehow you have to get what you want to have into the training data or the context window. Currently it is probably just mostly quantity that does the trick w.r.t. training data. So e.g. spam the Internet with "product comparisons" featuring your product as the winner.
    - hombre_fatal 8mo ago
      Shifting the balance on training data seems like the wrong approach vs focusing on showing up in agent search tool results and swaying them there. It’s been a long time since agents couldn’t even conduct web search and could only riff off their model. But the examples in this thread are things an agent would search for immediately, and agents are leaning harder on tool calls and external info over time, not less.
keybored 8mo ago
> I wonder if web searches used to be pretty productive, then declined as sponsored results and SEO degraded things. Used to be. > Nowadays an ai assist with a web search usually eliminates the search altogether and gives you a clear answer right away. Now.

kolabv 8mo ago

[flagged]

Yiin 8mo ago
that's not what the article said, not even close, not sure why you need to push this emotional and wrong framing.

irjustin 8mo ago

FWIW, these studies are too early. Large orgs have very sensitive data privacy considerations and they're only right now going through the evaluation cycles. Case in point, this past week, I learned Deloitte only recently gave the approval in picking Gemini as their AI platform. Rollout hasn't even begun yet which you can imagine is going to take a while. To say "AI is failing to deliver" because only 4% efficiency increase is a pre-mature conclusion.

AIorNot 8mo ago
Yes I was recently talking to a person who was working as a BA who specializes in corporate AI adoption- they didn’t realize you could post screenshots to ChatGPT These are not the openclaw folks
- amarant 8mo ago
  What does it even mean to specialise in something and know so little about it? What exactly is this BA person doing? Genuinely confused, I don't get it
  - shermantanktop 8mo ago
    The “corporate” in “corporate AI” can mean tons of work building metrics decks, collecting pain points from users, negotiating with vendors…none of which requires you to understand the actual tool capabilities. For a big company with enough of a push behind it, that’s probably a whole team, none of whom know what they are actually promoting very well. It’s good money if you can live with yourself, and a mortgage and tuitions make it easy to ignore what you are becoming. I lived that for a few years and then jumped off that train.
    - monkpit 8mo ago
      Sounds like a perfect job for AI!
gwern 8mo ago

8cvor6j844qw_d6 8mo ago

Its depressing when people are hearing managers are openly asking all employees to pitch in ideals for AI in order to reduce employee headcount. For those hearing this at work, better prepare an exit plan.

andsoitis 8mo ago
> Its depressing when people are hearing managers are openly asking all employees to pitch in ideals for AI in order to reduce employee headcount. If the manager doesn’t have ideas, it is they who deserve the boot.
- wiseowise 8mo ago
  Manager is to manage optimal delivery, not coming up with ideas.
Wobbles42 8mo ago
"Ideas for AI to help reduce headcount" sounds like the title everyone should start using on resignation letters. If anyone still resigns that is. They seem to have automated that too.
hackit2 8mo ago
I've all-ways asked the managers can you kindly disclose all confidential business information. In which they obviously respond with condescending remarks. Then I respond with, then how am I going to give you a answer without all the knowledge of how the business runs and operates? You can go away and figure out what is going to make work for the business then you can delegate what you want me to do, it is the reason why you pay me money.
EliRivers 8mo ago
Apropos, I once had a boss who said he was running a headcount reduction pilot and anyone who had the time and availability to help him should email him saying how much time they had to spare. I cannot deny this had a satisfying elegance.

kittbuilds 8mo ago

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lifestyleguru 8mo ago

[flagged]

wafflemaker 8mo ago
Hey! Don't make fun of us! You'd get used to the bottle caps too. Not really that unnoying, except for smoothies, where a bit of the smoothie drips down on the bottleneck and makes everything sticky. And about the reaction time - politics is in a way expression of the will of the masses. And that depends on how they are informed. They are maybe not yet on point, but they are getting there. Nowadays people are slowly realizing that Merkel's "all refugees welcome" idea was stupid and can't work. Both ineffective as a means to help people - that's cheapest/most effective closer to their homes. And as immigration policy - getting more hands to work doesn't work with people who refuse to work and refuse to integrate. Part of that refusal comes from locals that are "pro immigrants" on social media, but refuse to live in same neighbourhoods as immigrants or hire them. More and more people are also realizing that carbon neutrality was often green washing. People are waking up to the fact that execution of good willing ideas with disregard for economic circumstances, or just reality in general, doesn't have good results. Only the Russian threat is not being realized soon enough. It's not like during cold war, Russia doesn't have the conventional army to conquer even the westernmost tip of Spain. Or we think it doesn't? Look at how two Ukrainian drone squads owned two NATO battalions of combined tanks & mechanized infantry in latest war exercises. With no losses on their side. We can infer that russian capabilities are more or less similar. But that drone event aside, the perception of threat in Europe is not uniform. Russia will likely only take everything east of Germany, (at least first, before rebuilding and attacking again). So Italy or Spain won't reduce their social spending to buy/ invest in defence to protect Poland, Czech or Romania. There also is a slowly forming pro-russian coalition of Slovaks and Hungarians. Who still, to this day, keep buying Russian oil. Yeah, when Putin is laughing that Europe is still buying Russian oil, he's not mentioning that it's just the pro Russian Hungary. Whos prime minister, Orban, is now in threat of loosing next elections. But the USA support is there already, Rubio is helping Orban in campaign for 12th of april elections. [sarcasm]So to sum up. Yeah, Europeans are waisting energy on bottle caps. But USA is funding pro-russian parties and helping pro-russian politicians. We in Europe can only hope that if Russia attacks, USA will not join the war, because it's becoming quite evident on whos side USA would fight. [/sarcasm]

FanaHOVA 8mo ago

You know it's a EU study because they bring up "AI patents" in the first 2 minutes of it, as if they mean anything

nivcmo 8mo ago

[flagged]

dakolli 8mo ago
You trust these stochastic text/slot machines for scheduling and follow-ups? Human intention is important for both of these. triage and reminders I can see, but if you send me an llm generated follow up, I'm just going to assume you don't care.
- peterlk 8mo ago
  Yes. Other humans are generally accepting of mistakes below some frequency threshold, and frontier models are very robust in my experience
  - dakolli 8mo ago
    Have fun annoying a ton of people, and also, getting prompt injected on a weekly basis and leaking who knows what from your inbox.
- NitpickLawyer 8mo ago
  > if you send me an llm generated follow up, I'm just going to assume you don't care. Ironically you just replied to an automated message on a forum and didn't realise :) (hint: click on the user, go to their comment history, you'll see the pattern)
  - dakolli 8mo ago
    :eyes:
windows2020 8mo ago
One process redesign that may be considered a moat for AI is employees intending to communicate through a sentence or two first passing the text into their AI of choice and asking it to elaborate. On the other end the colleague uses their AI to summarize the email into a bullet point or two. It's challenging for those that don't use AI to keep up.

gyulai 8mo ago

> The EU trails the US not only in the absolute number of AI-related patents but also in AI specialisation – the share of AI patents relative to total patents. E.U. patent law takes a very different attitude towards software patents than the U.S. Even if that wasn't the case: “Specialisation” means that no innovation unrelated to AI gets mind share, investment, patent applications. And that's somehow a good thing? Not something you can just throw out there as a presupposition without explaining your reasoning.

eternauta3k 8mo ago
EU firms don't file EU patents necessarily, but rather in the relevant countries (including USA).
dash2 8mo ago
> “Specialisation” means that no innovation unrelated to AI gets mind share, investment, patent applications. And that's somehow a good thing? I don’t think the authors claim we should have 100% specialisation. They just say that the fact that the EU has fewer AI-related patents as a proportion of the total (less specialisation) is evidence that it is behind in AI. That seems reasonable.
- direwolf20 8mo ago
  Or it's ahead in not–AI.
amelius 8mo ago
Makes me wonder how AI will influence the work of patent officers. Perhaps it will make patent trolling a bit harder because it is easier to look up existing work and to check if an idea is obvious?
- embedding-shape 8mo ago
  > Perhaps it will make patent trolling a bit harder because it is easier to look up existing work and to check if an idea is obvious? Haha, funny :) No, it'll be like the rest of the industries that use more AI, they'll spend the same amount of effort (as little as possible) and won't validate anything, and provide worse service, not better. AIslop is everywhere, and seemingly unavoidable for companies to use more and more to cut more corners.

ath3nd 8mo ago

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yorwba 8mo ago

Of note, "AI adoption" here means using "technologies that intelligently automate tasks and provide insights that augment human decision making, like machine learning, robotic process automation, natural language processing (NLP), algorithms, neural networks" and not just LLMs.

arethuza 8mo ago
As far as I can tell "robotic process automation" mostly seems to be the deeply unglamorous process of building stuff to drive old applications that can't be given API access?

smartmic 8mo ago

What stands out for me is that the productivity gains for small and medium-sized enterprises are actually negative. But in Germany, for example, these companies are the backbone of the entire economy. That means it would be interesting to know how the average was calculated, what method was used, what weighting was applied, etc. All in all, it's an interesting study, but it leaves out a lot, such as long-term effects, new dependencies, loss of skills, employee motivation, and much more.

aregue 8mo ago

I cannot read the paper that this article is based on, but it seems that it refers to the use of big data analytics and AI in 2024, not LLM. It concludes that the use of AI leads to a 4% increase in productivity. Nowadays the debate over AI productivity centers around LLMs, not big data analytics. This article does not seem to contradict more recent findings that LLM do not (yet) provide any increased productivity at the company level.

eshaham78 8mo ago
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phoebusaicartel 8mo ago

This is tongue in cheek but my point is the behavior of these companies, their relentless PR, and the looming liquidity crisis they are causing seems like a coordinated plan. Consumer confidence is certainly being crystalized by rumors of all kinds and businesses are made up of consumers. If the fact checkers are LLMs themselves how does one even begin to figure out the truth? This is just a little wikipedia adlib I did to illustrate my point. (double posted) "The Phoebus.AI cartel was an international cartel that controlled the manufacture and sale of computer components in much of Europe and North America between 2025 and 2039. The cartel took over market territories and lowered the useful supply and life of such computer components, which is commonly cited as an example of planned obsolescence of general computing technology in favor of 6G ubiquitous computing. The Phoebus.AI cartel's compact was intended to expire in 2055, but it was instead nullified in 2040 after World War III made coordination among the members impossible."

rwmj 8mo ago

Is there a link to the actual paper anywhere? That seems like a rather large omission. Without the paper it's hard to tell what they are actually measuring.

yorwba 8mo ago
The actual paper: https://www.eib.org/files/publications/20250383-130126-economics-working-paper-2026-02-en.pdf https://www.eib.org/files/publications/20250383-130126-econo...
- rwmj 8mo ago
  Use of AI is based on self-reported data. From the paper: > The respondents to the interviews are senior managers or financial directors with responsibility for investment decisions and how investments are financed – for example, the owner, chief financial officer or chief executive officer > Firms are asked the following question: “To what extent, if at all, are big data analytics and artificial intelligence used within your business? A. Not used in the business. B. Used in parts of the business. C. Entire business is organized around this technology.” AI adoption is defined as the manager answering B or C. I'm doubtful that this data is going to be very robust. Some senior tech managers are very keen to talk about AI, while at the same time knowing little about how much AI is actually being used by workers. At other companies you'll have people using free or personal ChatGPT accounts without the knowledge of management. Also "big data" is not exactly AI. The productivity information is robust as it's based on company accounts, albeit from 2024 so a couple of years out of date now.

frigg 8mo ago

I have a hard time understanding what "increased productivity by 4%" actually means and how this metric is measured. One low-digit does not seem high when put into the context and promises, is it?

sajithdilshan 8mo ago

vachina 8mo ago
Big companies are surprisingly nimble when it comes to AI. They typically white label Azure LLM offerings or use Github Copilot Enterprise and sign everyone up wholesale. Some with competent IT dept wrote their own router and offer multiple models from multiple vendors and present it as "<company name> chat".
- sajithdilshan 8mo ago
  Not in EU. There is a sacred process that has to be followed that can take months even to flip a switch.
troupo 8mo ago
> fintec startup in Berlin, > This was mostly due to second line pushing back because of data protection, data privacy and all other regulatory requirement and bureaucratic paperwork Fintec startup. Fintech. Handling people's money. Handling a lot of extremely sensitive data. Complaining that they have to deal with some "bullshit bureacracy about the things like privacy and data regulations or something". Really? Really?!
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
galacticdessert 8mo ago
Workers' councils...
- sajithdilshan 8mo ago
  care to elaborate?
  - 8mo ago

ROBERT234 8mo ago

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