So Anthropic thinks their productivity is not even doubled by AI. Interesting data point.
I find it hard to imagine launching this criticism at a new technology.
Seems like that would be easily recupable even without future growth.
While it is true that investors only got a fraction of the company for that money, and their EV can be debated, I think the clear the value is there from a net cash in to value produced.
Last valuation was like 1 trillion. Company could be worth like 1/20 and still justify the cash.
I'm not betting on whether it will or won't. I'm absolutely 100% suggesting it hasn't happened and isn't guaranteed.
I agree returns on actual spend are not guaranteed (nothing is), but think them pretty likely. Valuations are are more challenging, but risk is known there.
A performance improvement is relative to some baseline, and that baseline for some may be a lot lower than others, and if they adopt tech effectively it really could be a big boost. Across the board though I don’t think it’s sensible.
I work in an industry that very intentionally tries to be inefficient and I can tell you having certain tasks automated that before had a person barrier intentionally acting inefficiently that you can now sidestep by outsourcing their tasks to something like Claude gives me a massive performance increase because I’m not blocked as much anymore. I can literally just replace some external tasks that were intentionally slowing processes down for their own benefits with a few prompts and move along. I could have done the tasks before but then people would ask why I’m spending my time doing it, now I can just say “oh, I was blocked so I had Claude take care of that blocker” and move along.
It can further be true that some developers are getting 5x or 10x while as a whole their organization is sped up less than 2x. I'm sure many tasks at Anthropic are sped up 5x or 10x or more.
It can further be the case that many people overestimate their gains as well. That's fine, and I think what you're saying - but it's still wild to shake your head and go "pfft, they have not even doubled their productivity". Double is a lot!
They've probably already settled on most of the architecture and the big ideas, so they're details in big things instead of how to make complete small things.
The thing LLMs really speed up is how some ordinary person-- a PhD student, or similar, can whip up a miniature synthetic experiment that turns out to be horrid and needs to be fixed by hand, but which at least gave him a plot on the same day he had the idea. That's, I think, where LLMs shine: prototypes. Anthropic probably doesn't need that to the same degree as the small experimenter.
They can’t measure even measure it, it’s just vibes. They may not even be more productive.
Maybe they should ask an AI to create one!
slop
bubble
Is that correct?