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Comment by joshuastuden | Hacker News Reader

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joshuastuden

How can that be attributed to any code an LLM wrote?

>$8 billion of net income was the result of a tax benefit the company realized in the first quarter of the year.

So exactly how much of their revenue is because of any code LLMs wrote vs. just structural tail winds?

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You can always say "it's not because of LLMs", that's nearly unfalsifiable.

But if all of your peers are saying LLMs are more productive, if you're building things faster than ever before, the macro picture speaks for itself.

It sounds like this has a pretty falsifiable claim here - is the revenue attributed to a tax thing? Then it's clearly not attributable to code.

I agree that the macro picture would speak for itself. Can you point to any macro level detail that is indeed cleanly showing benefits from increased productivity from LLMs?

Not a macro detail, but my peers and I are shipping features at at least 5-10x the speed we used to.

I'm not asking to say "it's not because of LLMs" I am asking for evidence that LLMs are creating revenue for users.

I think the lack of evidence for LLM productivity is not an indictment on LLMs… it’s an indictment on the industry still having no real way to measure developer productivity in general.

I agree that you can't draw any conclusions about AI, but their revenue increased by 33% percent. That's just straight income before any taxes or costs are applied.

Yes, but that doesn't mean AI increased their revenue. Is there definitive proof that AI/LLMs caused this increase?

I completely agree with you. I pointed out replying to the same person that in the same report their ad impressions were up 20% and the price per ad was up 12%, which account for a huge amount chunk of that revenue increase.

All I was saying here was that tax breaks wouldn't impact revenue since revenue is reported before taxes, operating costs and anything else.

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