I have a suspicion that, outside of tech, AI WILL speed up the mundane aspects of people’s jobs, that part which they spend 80% of their time getting through, so they can then do the 20% where they actually add value.
BUT the new time they unlock will be spent doing more of the mundane work that previously just didn’t get done because it was overtaken by events or it got done to the absolute barest minimum level.
As a result the 20% where they add value never really grows or changes and in fact might be less valuable because of all the extra noise created by doing more tasks in the 80%.
> BUT the new time they unlock will be spent doing more of the mundane work
...which will also quickly be done by "AI", uncovering more such tasks until most of the "mundane work" is done by "AI" leaving humans free to do "non-mundane work". Of course those less mundane tasks require more insight, intelligence, knowledge and initiative from those humans which means some people will just not be able to keep up with their competitors, the humans who can do the less mundane tasks and the "AI" which can do the mundane stuff faster, more reliably and cheaper.
The big question is what those humans will do once such a scenario becomes true.
The mundane tasks are only about 20% of the work for white collar works. AI just eliminates the low-value mundane tasks.
Unless AI companies are willing to do the impossible and accept liability for incorrect responses/outcomes, they're never going to be trusted with any task that could incur liability (law, accounting, medicine, architecture, engineering).
Could humans review AI output? Sure. You still need humans. Funnily enough wages won't decline in the long-run - they'll rise as firms compete for those who remained employed in said roles as others fell out of favour and have gaps in work experience.
Many, many variables at play. I never take anyone seriously who never considers this (many people on here).
If mainstream corporate America thought it would turn increasingly cheap intelligence into higher revenue growth and higher profit margins, then mainstream corporate America needs to go back to school.
If you want to increase your profit margins, you'll have to innovate! Adopting AI tools that somebody else created, and are equally available to your competitors, won't increase your revenue or margins. The ones who will see increased revenue and profit margins are the ones who actually innovated, by creating the AI.
This is exactly what Apollo reports: the Magnificent Seven increased their profit margins, while mainstream corporate America didn't.
The economy has many different resources with different supplies available. Making the supply of one resource infinite may sound like a huge win, but nothing is dependent on a single resource, everything requires a combination – just like in board game economies, you can't win by only producing wood.
AI represents some weird intelligence-like resource. It clearly does something of value, but that must be combined with other resources. In tech there's a lot of that, so making it (roughly) infinitely accessible has had a nice impact and we've run into our next limiting factor: human time. Companies that aren't "pure tech" though will run into much earlier limiting factors – hardware, compliance, regulation, artistic value, human time, and so on.
The cost of training/developing a frontier model will continue to rise. The cost of inference will continue to fall. Companies don't buy models as such, they buy inference. As inference becomes a larger and larger business expense companies will optimize that spending, routing work to the "capable enough" least cost tokens.
There is a lot of human work that can be offset with tokens. On the other hand, the amount of work for the highest intelligence models will remain limited - corporate strategy, major decisions, etc. are just not as frequent.
I have a suspicion that, outside of tech, AI WILL speed up the mundane aspects of people’s jobs, that part which they spend 80% of their time getting through, so they can then do the 20% where they actually add value.
BUT the new time they unlock will be spent doing more of the mundane work that previously just didn’t get done because it was overtaken by events or it got done to the absolute barest minimum level.
As a result the 20% where they add value never really grows or changes and in fact might be less valuable because of all the extra noise created by doing more tasks in the 80%.
This is working theory and likely full of holes.
Its not even a theory tbh. Its just a statement - utterance.
> BUT the new time they unlock will be spent doing more of the mundane work
...which will also quickly be done by "AI", uncovering more such tasks until most of the "mundane work" is done by "AI" leaving humans free to do "non-mundane work". Of course those less mundane tasks require more insight, intelligence, knowledge and initiative from those humans which means some people will just not be able to keep up with their competitors, the humans who can do the less mundane tasks and the "AI" which can do the mundane stuff faster, more reliably and cheaper.
The big question is what those humans will do once such a scenario becomes true.
The mundane tasks are only about 20% of the work for white collar works. AI just eliminates the low-value mundane tasks.
Unless AI companies are willing to do the impossible and accept liability for incorrect responses/outcomes, they're never going to be trusted with any task that could incur liability (law, accounting, medicine, architecture, engineering).
Correct.
Could humans review AI output? Sure. You still need humans. Funnily enough wages won't decline in the long-run - they'll rise as firms compete for those who remained employed in said roles as others fell out of favour and have gaps in work experience.
Many, many variables at play. I never take anyone seriously who never considers this (many people on here).
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50224463
609 points by the-mitr 1 day ago | hide | past | favorite | 645 comments
If mainstream corporate America thought it would turn increasingly cheap intelligence into higher revenue growth and higher profit margins, then mainstream corporate America needs to go back to school.
If you want to increase your profit margins, you'll have to innovate! Adopting AI tools that somebody else created, and are equally available to your competitors, won't increase your revenue or margins. The ones who will see increased revenue and profit margins are the ones who actually innovated, by creating the AI.
This is exactly what Apollo reports: the Magnificent Seven increased their profit margins, while mainstream corporate America didn't.
The economy has many different resources with different supplies available. Making the supply of one resource infinite may sound like a huge win, but nothing is dependent on a single resource, everything requires a combination – just like in board game economies, you can't win by only producing wood.
AI represents some weird intelligence-like resource. It clearly does something of value, but that must be combined with other resources. In tech there's a lot of that, so making it (roughly) infinitely accessible has had a nice impact and we've run into our next limiting factor: human time. Companies that aren't "pure tech" though will run into much earlier limiting factors – hardware, compliance, regulation, artistic value, human time, and so on.
The cost of training/developing a frontier model will continue to rise. The cost of inference will continue to fall. Companies don't buy models as such, they buy inference. As inference becomes a larger and larger business expense companies will optimize that spending, routing work to the "capable enough" least cost tokens.
There is a lot of human work that can be offset with tokens. On the other hand, the amount of work for the highest intelligence models will remain limited - corporate strategy, major decisions, etc. are just not as frequent.
It's because other industries are buying expensive tokens, and there's no real ROI yet.