- Apollo published a blog post [AI is not driving productivity outside of the tech sector] noting that, four years past the ChatGPT moment, there is still no evidence that AI is driving productivity across the economy. No noticeable increase in value-add measured by GDP, nor the profit margin improving.
- Other sources make similar observations; see the St. Louis Fed post [here] and an MIT study [here].
- This aligns with my experience implementing generative AI applications at one of the largest US banks. While AI has made many coding tasks much easier, the way day-to-day work gets done hasn’t fundamentally changed yet.
- Why aren’t we seeing the same productivity boost from AI in other areas that we’ve seen in coding?
- The first reason is the interface. Chat interfaces are far removed from how work is usually done, and the terminal isn’t friendly to a large share of human workers.
- The second reason is that humans have a great deal of knowledge and context, built up over years of experience, that isn’t yet readily available to AI. In the compliance space where I work, veterans know the nuances and edge cases, and that knowledge hasn’t yet been fed to AI in a way that makes it useful. This may be solvable with the right interface, since this knowledge can technically be captured and used to train specialized AI.
- The third reason is that AI fundamentally doesn’t yet have the accountability or trust-earning ability of humans. AI also still can’t sense the politics, read the room, and contribute to a meeting the way a person does. Maybe that’s what Anthropic wants to build with its “virtual colleague,” but such colleagues will still need to earn people’s trust in human ways.
- Right now, it looks more like a very impressive intern.
- I’ve also realized that jobs are much more than a collection of tasks. With the right combination of task design, model capability, and interface (how AI reads data, stores memory, and takes actions), a growing share of those tasks may become doable.
- When I was at the airport in Washington, D.C., watching people eating and drinking at the gates, I realized that commercial air travel didn’t exist until the 20th century. Society reorganized itself to make it work: building airports, creating rules, regulating airspace, and so on. Maybe society and organizations will need to reinvent themselves to make the most of this technology.
- It probably doesn’t depend solely on building out data centers, but also on rethinking how work gets defined and done to give the models some airspace.