AI productivity gains are closer to 10% than 10x

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.

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).

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•3 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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