AI productivity gains are closer to 10% than 10x

horticulturist•30 minutes ago

The variation in individual developer throughput was as much as 20x pre-AI. 10% is basically nothing. You’d be better off firing your worst performer and replacing them with someone good (or great).

mycentstoo•about 1 hour ago

My unsolicited thoughts:

* AI will drive additional features as development accelerates

* There will be a window where fast adopting AI companies can deliver features faster than peers

* Those fast adopting AI companies will be able to garner additional revenue

* Gap closes as AI benefits slow in their impact to feature development and slower adopting companies catch up

* Companies that were faster adopters can no longer charge more for additional revenue without giving up market share to now caught-up competitors

* New normal is that companies are in a bind - they have to pay for tokens/AI aided development else they lose speed and therefore market share - but the paying is now without additional revenue and exists as a tax

Assumptions:

* No AGI

* LLMs have bounded impact on features

* Timeframe is long enough that companies that trail in AI won't be starved out

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/iVHmp9F4Rl0

discreteevent•about 1 hour ago

> There will be a window where fast adopting AI companies can deliver features faster than peers >Those fast adopting AI companies will be able to garner additional revenue

The companies going 50% slower on reliable features that customers want to pay for will continue to wipe the floor with the hyper productive companies producing fluff.

maleero•about 2 hours ago

10% seems low. I think 1.5-3x is more like it without sacrificing quality. You can easily go 10x if you don’t care about the results too much.

smcg•3 minutes ago

unless AI also speeds up the 84% of work that isn't coding, that is not possible.

Tagbert•about 2 hours ago

There are probably larger gains in some areas like testing and coding. other areas, less so as they depend on messy data. I can tell you that only some areas of project management benefit from AI. the rest is more of a people problem.

watwut•about 1 hour ago

> You can easily go 10x if you don’t care about the results too much.

People are also much faster when they dont care about quality at all.

UltraSane•about 1 hour ago

10% is still huge.

smcg•2 minutes ago

it's much lower than common claims about AI.

discreteevent•about 1 hour ago

10% in profit is huge but that's not what the article is about.

simianwords•about 1 hour ago

This is very similar to how you can double the employees in a company and only get marginal improvement in productivity.

If that’s true, AI gives the same gains doubling labour. No?

mytailorisrich•about 2 hours ago

AI has the potential to be extremely powerful but it is also very new. People and organisations are just at the beginning of the learning process.

goatlover•about 2 hours ago

Sure but the hype has been about the 10x productivity increases and how less employees are needed. Also all the AGI/singularity stuff being just around the corner, not simply AI potentially making employees a lot more productive.

AI productivity gains are closer to 10% than 10x

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