Post #3785085

@hfalcke@mastodon.social People will pay serious money if they’re just 10% more efficient Being able to justify an expense for being 10% more productive requires you to be able to measure productivity. Most places that try to measure this properly find that LLMs are not actually helping at the things that matter. Using an LLM lets you produce text faster. That's like using a paint roller because it lets you apply paint faster: it won't make your portraits better. Word processors had a big commercial impact because they allowed companies to completely eliminate the typing pool: now, rather than drafting something longhand (or dictating it to someone who wrote shorthand or, later, with a dictaphone) and sending it to the pool for someone who can type a page on a typewriter without mistakes (at least often enough that they can get mistake-free pages out at a reasonable rate), you just typed and edited it directly. That was worth the cost of a computer on every desk (which had a capital cost of a good 5-10% of annual salary, in the early years). When the current bubble bursts, it's going to come with a massive hit to credit markets. That will have a knock-on effect across many industries. I would expect SaaS subscriptions that you didn't need a few years ago to be right at the top of the list for spending cuts, especially if they're also getting twice as expensive at the same time. The news is full of 'Company X rehires employees because they're cheaper than LLMs' stories, precisely because, in most industries, a machine that produces plausible output that is often wrong in subtle ways (an intrinsic property of LLMs, not something that can be fixed without moving to a completely different technology) is not actually a useful thing. A help bot that tells customers to use a form that doesn't exist reduces costs relative to a person answering the phone, but it also makes customers leave.