[adverbly]

This is very cool but it's not quite what I expected out of economic primitives.

I expected to see measures of the economic productivity generated as a result of artificial intelligence use.

Instead, what I'm seeing is measures of artificial intelligence use.

I don't really see how this is measuring the most important economic primitives. Nothing related to productivity at all actually. Everything about how and where and who... This is just demographics and usage statistics...

[p1necone]

> I expected to see measures of the economic productivity generated as a result of artificial intelligence use.

>Instead, what I'm seeing is measures of artificial intelligence use.

Fun fact: this is also how most large companies are measuring their productivity increases from AI usage ;), alongside asking employees to tell them how much faster AI is making them while simultaneously telling them they're expected to go faster with AI.

[xkcd-sucks]

When your OKRs for the past year include "internal adoption of ai tools"

[hazyc]

productivity is such a nebulous concept in knowledge work - an amalgamation of mostly-qualitative measures that get baked into quantitative measures that are mostly just bad data

[no_wizard]

Nice way to make all that data meaningless. I already know some people who’s jobs have pushed adoption of AI tools and it’s clear that whether or not it meaningfully impacts their speed it is not going to do them any favors to say it doesn’t even when it does not

[salynchnew]

So.... motivated reasoning makes the world go 'round?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivated_reasoning

[johnrob]

Until AI is used to generate new revenue streams (i.e. acquire new customers), I don’t think the economic impact is going to impress. My two cents.

[mr_toad]

People used to say the same things about computers. Even back in the early 90s people still questioned the value of computers in the workplace.

[Animats]

This is more like an internal marketing study. Nothing wrong with that, but it's being hyped as more than that.

[w10-1]

"wantin' ain't gettin'": you might find productivity more important, but they didn't sign up for that.

They define primitives as "simple, foundational measures of how Claude is used". They're not signing up to measure productivity, which would combine usage with displacement, work factoring, and a whole host of things outside their data pool.

What's the point? They're offering details on usage patterns relative to demographics that can help people assessing Anthropic's business and the utility of LLM-based AI. Notably, tasks and usage are concentrated in some industries (notably software) and localities (mainly correlated with GDP and the Gini index). This enables readers to project how much usage growth can be expected.

As far as I know, no one publicly offers this level of data on their emerging businesses - not google, ebay, apple, microsoft, amazon, nvidia or any of the many companies that have reshaped our technical and economic landscape in the last 30 years.

Normally we measure value with price and overall market (productivity gains is but one way that clients can recoup their price paid). But during this the build-out of AI, investors (of all stripes) are subsidizing costs to get share, so until we have stable competitive markets for AI services, value is an open question.

But it's clear some businesses feel that AI could be a strategic benefit, and they don't want to be left behind. So there is a stampede, as reflected in the neck-and-neck utilization of chat vs API.

[verisimi]

Reframing the meaning of words, in a way that your product's usages becomes the metric - eg so "economy" = "Claude" - makes this some sort of 'Claude promo pack'.

[kurttheviking]

agree, was similarly hoping for something akin to a total factor productivity argument

[amelius]

I expected a simulation of the economy using economic primitives and AI.

[PunchyHamster]

I think we can surmise how bad that looked from the omission..

[sinnsro]

I wonder if it is even possible to get such measurements. With so many things affecting output, how can one establish a baseline or avoiding to compare apples to oranges?

[fuzzfactor]

>expected to see measures of the economic productivity

I know what you mean.

Imagine my disappointment when I was expecting their unique approach and brainpower to have arrived at a straightforward index of overall world macroeconomic conditions rather than an internal corporate outlook for AI alone.