I wonder if web searches used to be pretty productive, then declined as sponsored results and SEO degraded things.
Nowadays an ai assist with a web search usually eliminates the search altogether and gives you a clear answer right away.
for example, "how much does a ford f-150 cost" will give you something ballpark in a second, compared to annoying "research" to find the answer shrouded in corporate obfuscation.
then declined as sponsored results and SEO degraded things
It didn't decline because of this. It declined because of a general decade long trend of websites becoming paywalled and hidden behind a login. The best and most useful data is often inaccessible to crawlers.
In the 2000s, everything was open because of the ad driven model. Then ad blockers, mobile subscription model, and the dominance of a few apps such as Instagram and Youtube sucking up all the ad revenue made having an open web unsustainable.
How many Hacker News style open forums are left? Most open forums are dead because discussions happen on login platforms like Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, X, Discord, etc. The only reason HN is alive is because HN doesn't make need to make money. It's an ad for Y Combinator.
SEO only became an issue when all there is for crawlers is SEO content instead of true genuine content.
I used to be able to google a question like that and get an accurate answer within the top 3 results nearly every time about 20 years ago. Then it got worse and worse and became pretty much completely useless about 10 years ago.
Now AI will give me a confident answer that is outright wrong 20% of the time or kind of right but not really 30% of the time. So now I ask something using an AI chatbot and carefully word it so as to have it not get off topic and focus on what I actually want to know, wait 30 seconds for its long ass answer to finish, skim it for the relevant parts, then google the answer and try to see where the AI sourced its answer from and determine whether it misinterpreted/mixed up results or it's accurate. What used to be a 10 second google search is now a 2-3 minute exercise.
I can see very much how people say AI has somehow led to productivity losses. It's shit like this, and it floods the internet and makes real info harder to find, making this cycle worse and worse and take more and more time for basic stuff.
Same experience here. I have fond memories of “google code”, a search engine for code databases which was exceptionally good for finding literal quotes.
The more mainstream a subject is, the lower the incidence of hallucinations. With google search, the mantra “I can’t be the first with this problem/question” almost always proves to be right.
I’m in the process of restoring a piece of vintage electronics and everytime I ask gemini (fast or thinking) for help I’m getting sent down an irrelevant rabbit hole. It’s taking info from service manuals of other equipment with a similar product number, misinterpreting diagrams, getting electrical workings wrong.
These things aren’t AI. AI can extract certainty from uncertain data. LLMs take data and turn it into garbage.
FWIW, these studies are too early. Large orgs have very sensitive data privacy considerations and they're only right now going through the evaluation cycles.
Case in point, this past week, I learned Deloitte only recently gave the approval in picking Gemini as their AI platform. Rollout hasn't even begun yet which you can imagine is going to take a while.
To say "AI is failing to deliver" because only 4% efficiency increase is a pre-mature conclusion.
Yeah. We are only just beginning to get the most out of the internet, and the WWW was invented almost 40 years ago - other parts of it even earlier. Adoption takes time, not to speak of the fact that the technology itself is still developing quickly and might see more and more use cases when it gets better.
If rollout at Deloitte has not yet begun... How on earth did this clusterfuck [0] happen?
> Deloitte’s member firm in Australia will pay the government a partial refund for a $290,000 report that contained alleged AI-generated errors, including references to non-existent academic research papers and a fabricated quote from a federal court judgment.
OpenAI is buying up like half of the RAM production in the world, presumably on the basis of how great the productivity boost is, so from that perspective this doesn't seem any more premature than the OpenAI scaling plan. And the OpenAI scaling plan is like all the growth in the US economy...
As a counter-point, someone from SAP in Walldorf told me they have access to all models by all companies to their choosing, at a more or less unlimited rate. Don't quote me on that, though, maybe I misunderstood him, it was in a private conversation. Anyway, it sounded like they're using AI heavily.
4% isn’t failure! A 4% increase in global GDP would be a big deal (more than what we get in a whole year of progress); and AI adoptionis only just getting started.
Agreed. We've been on the agentic coding roller coaster for only about 9-10 months. It only got properly usable on larger repositories around 3-4 months ago. There are a lot of early adopters, grass roots adoption, etc. But it's really still very early days. Most large companies are still running exactly like they always have. Many smaller companies are worse and years/decades behind on modernizing their operations.
We sell SAAS software to SMEs in Germany. Forget AI, these guys are stuck in the last century when it comes to software. A lot of paper based processes. Cloud is mainly something that comes up in weather predictions for them. These companies don't have budget for a lot of things. The notion that they'll overnight switch to being AI driven companies is arguably more than a bit naive. It indicates a lack of understanding of how the real world works.
There are a lot of highly specialized niche companies that manufacture things that are part of very complex supply chains. The transition will take decades, not months/weeks. They run on demand for products they specialize in making. Their revenue is driven by demand for that stuff and their ability to make and ship it. There are a lot of aspects about how they operate that are definitely not optimal and could be optimized. And AI provides plenty of additional potential to do something about it. But it's not like they were short of opportunities to do so. It takes more than shiny new tools for these companies to move. Change is invasive and disruptive for these companies. And costly. They take the slow and careful perspective to change.
There's a clean split between people that are AI clued in and people working in these companies. The Venn diagram has almost no overlap. It's a huge business opportunity for people that are clued in: a rapidly growing amount of people mainly active in software development. Helping the people on the other side of the diagram is what they'll be mostly doing going forward. There's going to be a huge demand for building AI based stuff for these people. It's not a zero sum game, the amount of new work will dwarf the amount of lost work.
Some of that change is going to be painful. We all have to rethink what we do and re-align our plans in life around that. I'm a programmer. Or I was one until recently. Now I'm a software builder. I still cause software to come into existence. A lot of software actually. But I'm not artisanally coding most of it anymore.
I think people want to read how AI is not working , so those are the articles that are going to get traction.
Personally, I don't think the current frontier models would help the company I work for all that much. The company exists because of the skill in networking and human friendships. The company exist in spite of technological incompetence.
At some level of ability though, a threshold will be reached and a competitor will eat our lunch whole by building a new business around this future model.
It is not going to be a % more productive than our business. It is like the opposite of 0 to 1. The company I work for will go from 1 to zero really quick because we simply won't be able to compete on anything besides those network ties. Those ties will break fast if every other dimension of the business is not even competitive and really in a different category.
Apropos, I once had a boss who said he was running a headcount reduction pilot and anyone who had the time and availability to help him should email him saying how much time they had to spare. I cannot deny this had a satisfying elegance.
Why is it depressing? Personally, unless the alternative is literally starving, I wouldn't want to do a job that a robot could do instead just so that I could be kept busy. That sounds like an insult to human dignity tbh.
I know at least two different companies in Italy that are very hard on shoving NotebookLM and Gemini down their employees (not IT companies, talking banking/insurance/legal).
Which for the positions/roles involved does make some sense (drafting documents/research).
But it seems like most people are annoyed, because the people shoving those aren't even fully able to show how to leverage the tools, the attitude seems like "you need to do what you do right now under lots of pressure, but also find the time to understand how to use these tools in your own role".
At my job a certain department was very enthusiastic about AI, and were going out of their way to show the top managers that they can leverage it in the best possible way. Maybe they thought they must appear to be at bleeding edge tech-wise, I'm not sure. 75% of people from that dept were let go because of how successful their AI trial was.
Hey! Don't make fun of us!
You'd get used to the bottle caps too. Not really that unnoying, except for smoothies, where a bit of the smoothie drips down on the bottleneck and makes everything sticky.
And about the reaction time - politics is in a way expression of the will of the masses. And that depends on how they are informed. They are maybe not yet on point, but they are getting there.
Nowadays people are slowly realizing that Merkel's "all refugees welcome" idea was stupid and can't work. Both ineffective as a means to help people - that's cheapest/most effective closer to their homes. And as immigration policy - getting more hands to work doesn't work with people who refuse to work and refuse to integrate. Part of that refusal comes from locals that are "pro immigrants" on social media, but refuse to live in same neighbourhoods as immigrants or hire them.
More and more people are also realizing that carbon neutrality was often green washing. People are waking up to the fact that execution of good willing ideas with disregard for economic circumstances, or just reality in general, doesn't have good results.
Only the Russian threat is not being realized soon enough. It's not like during cold war, Russia doesn't have the conventional army to conquer even the westernmost tip of Spain.
Or we think it doesn't? Look at how two Ukrainian drone squads owned two NATO battalions of combined tanks & mechanized infantry in latest war exercises. With no losses on their side.
We can infer that russian capabilities are more or less similar.
But that drone event aside, the perception of threat in Europe is not uniform. Russia will likely only take everything east of Germany, (at least first, before rebuilding and attacking again). So Italy or Spain won't reduce their social spending to buy/ invest in defence to protect Poland, Czech or Romania.
There also is a slowly forming pro-russian coalition of Slovaks and Hungarians. Who still, to this day, keep buying Russian oil. Yeah, when Putin is laughing that Europe is still buying Russian oil, he's not mentioning that it's just the pro Russian Hungary. Whos prime minister, Orban, is now in threat of loosing next elections. But the USA support is there already, Rubio is helping Orban in campaign for 12th of april elections.
[sarcasm]So to sum up. Yeah, Europeans are waisting energy on bottle caps. But USA is funding pro-russian parties and helping pro-russian politicians. We in Europe can only hope that if Russia attacks, USA will not join the war, because it's becoming quite evident on whos side USA would fight. [/sarcasm]
> The EU trails the US not only in the absolute number of AI-related patents but also in AI specialisation – the share of AI patents relative to total patents.
E.U. patent law takes a very different attitude towards software patents than the U.S. Even if that wasn't the case: “Specialisation” means that no innovation unrelated to AI gets mind share, investment, patent applications. And that's somehow a good thing? Not something you can just throw out there as a presupposition without explaining your reasoning.
Of note, "AI adoption" here means using "technologies that intelligently automate tasks and provide insights that augment human decision making, like machine learning, robotic process automation, natural language processing (NLP), algorithms, neural networks" and not just LLMs.
What stands out for me is that the productivity gains for small and medium-sized enterprises are actually negative. But in Germany, for example, these companies are the backbone of the entire economy. That means it would be interesting to know how the average was calculated, what method was used, what weighting was applied, etc.
All in all, it's an interesting study, but it leaves out a lot, such as long-term effects, new dependencies, loss of skills, employee motivation, and much more.
I cannot read the paper that this article is based on, but it seems that it refers to the use of big data analytics and AI in 2024, not LLM. It concludes that the use of AI leads to a 4% increase in productivity. Nowadays the debate over AI productivity centers around LLMs, not big data analytics. This article does not seem to contradict more recent findings that LLM do not (yet) provide any increased productivity at the company level.
This is tongue in cheek but my point is the behavior of these companies, their relentless PR, and the looming liquidity crisis they are causing seems like a coordinated plan. Consumer confidence is certainly being crystalized by rumors of all kinds and businesses are made up of consumers. If the fact checkers are LLMs themselves how does one even begin to figure out the truth?
This is just a little wikipedia adlib I did to illustrate my point. (double posted)
"The Phoebus.AI cartel was an international cartel that controlled the manufacture and sale of computer components in much of Europe and North America between 2025 and 2039. The cartel took over market territories and lowered the useful supply and life of such computer components, which is commonly cited as an example of planned obsolescence of general computing technology in favor of 6G ubiquitous computing.
The Phoebus.AI cartel's compact was intended to expire in 2055, but it was instead nullified in 2040 after World War III made coordination among the members impossible."
Is there a link to the actual paper anywhere? That seems like a rather large omission. Without the paper it's hard to tell what they are actually measuring.
I have a hard time understanding what "increased productivity by 4%" actually means and how this metric is measured. One low-digit does not seem high when put into the context and promises, is it?
39 comments
[ 28.8 ms ] story [ 1734 ms ] threadNowadays an ai assist with a web search usually eliminates the search altogether and gives you a clear answer right away.
for example, "how much does a ford f-150 cost" will give you something ballpark in a second, compared to annoying "research" to find the answer shrouded in corporate obfuscation.
In the 2000s, everything was open because of the ad driven model. Then ad blockers, mobile subscription model, and the dominance of a few apps such as Instagram and Youtube sucking up all the ad revenue made having an open web unsustainable.
How many Hacker News style open forums are left? Most open forums are dead because discussions happen on login platforms like Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, X, Discord, etc. The only reason HN is alive is because HN doesn't make need to make money. It's an ad for Y Combinator.
SEO only became an issue when all there is for crawlers is SEO content instead of true genuine content.
Now AI will give me a confident answer that is outright wrong 20% of the time or kind of right but not really 30% of the time. So now I ask something using an AI chatbot and carefully word it so as to have it not get off topic and focus on what I actually want to know, wait 30 seconds for its long ass answer to finish, skim it for the relevant parts, then google the answer and try to see where the AI sourced its answer from and determine whether it misinterpreted/mixed up results or it's accurate. What used to be a 10 second google search is now a 2-3 minute exercise.
I can see very much how people say AI has somehow led to productivity losses. It's shit like this, and it floods the internet and makes real info harder to find, making this cycle worse and worse and take more and more time for basic stuff.
The more mainstream a subject is, the lower the incidence of hallucinations. With google search, the mantra “I can’t be the first with this problem/question” almost always proves to be right.
I’m in the process of restoring a piece of vintage electronics and everytime I ask gemini (fast or thinking) for help I’m getting sent down an irrelevant rabbit hole. It’s taking info from service manuals of other equipment with a similar product number, misinterpreting diagrams, getting electrical workings wrong.
These things aren’t AI. AI can extract certainty from uncertain data. LLMs take data and turn it into garbage.
The result started with 3 "sponsored links" which threw her down the rabbit hole.
This used to be easy.
https://x.com/thomasgermain/status/2024165514155536746
Used to be.
> Nowadays an ai assist with a web search usually eliminates the search altogether and gives you a clear answer right away.
Now.
Case in point, this past week, I learned Deloitte only recently gave the approval in picking Gemini as their AI platform. Rollout hasn't even begun yet which you can imagine is going to take a while.
To say "AI is failing to deliver" because only 4% efficiency increase is a pre-mature conclusion.
If rollout at Deloitte has not yet begun... How on earth did this clusterfuck [0] happen?
> Deloitte’s member firm in Australia will pay the government a partial refund for a $290,000 report that contained alleged AI-generated errors, including references to non-existent academic research papers and a fabricated quote from a federal court judgment.
[0] https://fortune.com/2025/10/07/deloitte-ai-australia-governm...
We sell SAAS software to SMEs in Germany. Forget AI, these guys are stuck in the last century when it comes to software. A lot of paper based processes. Cloud is mainly something that comes up in weather predictions for them. These companies don't have budget for a lot of things. The notion that they'll overnight switch to being AI driven companies is arguably more than a bit naive. It indicates a lack of understanding of how the real world works.
There are a lot of highly specialized niche companies that manufacture things that are part of very complex supply chains. The transition will take decades, not months/weeks. They run on demand for products they specialize in making. Their revenue is driven by demand for that stuff and their ability to make and ship it. There are a lot of aspects about how they operate that are definitely not optimal and could be optimized. And AI provides plenty of additional potential to do something about it. But it's not like they were short of opportunities to do so. It takes more than shiny new tools for these companies to move. Change is invasive and disruptive for these companies. And costly. They take the slow and careful perspective to change.
There's a clean split between people that are AI clued in and people working in these companies. The Venn diagram has almost no overlap. It's a huge business opportunity for people that are clued in: a rapidly growing amount of people mainly active in software development. Helping the people on the other side of the diagram is what they'll be mostly doing going forward. There's going to be a huge demand for building AI based stuff for these people. It's not a zero sum game, the amount of new work will dwarf the amount of lost work.
Some of that change is going to be painful. We all have to rethink what we do and re-align our plans in life around that. I'm a programmer. Or I was one until recently. Now I'm a software builder. I still cause software to come into existence. A lot of software actually. But I'm not artisanally coding most of it anymore.
Personally, I don't think the current frontier models would help the company I work for all that much. The company exists because of the skill in networking and human friendships. The company exist in spite of technological incompetence.
At some level of ability though, a threshold will be reached and a competitor will eat our lunch whole by building a new business around this future model.
It is not going to be a % more productive than our business. It is like the opposite of 0 to 1. The company I work for will go from 1 to zero really quick because we simply won't be able to compete on anything besides those network ties. Those ties will break fast if every other dimension of the business is not even competitive and really in a different category.
For those hearing this at work, better prepare an exit plan.
Which for the positions/roles involved does make some sense (drafting documents/research).
But it seems like most people are annoyed, because the people shoving those aren't even fully able to show how to leverage the tools, the attitude seems like "you need to do what you do right now under lots of pressure, but also find the time to understand how to use these tools in your own role".
And about the reaction time - politics is in a way expression of the will of the masses. And that depends on how they are informed. They are maybe not yet on point, but they are getting there.
Nowadays people are slowly realizing that Merkel's "all refugees welcome" idea was stupid and can't work. Both ineffective as a means to help people - that's cheapest/most effective closer to their homes. And as immigration policy - getting more hands to work doesn't work with people who refuse to work and refuse to integrate. Part of that refusal comes from locals that are "pro immigrants" on social media, but refuse to live in same neighbourhoods as immigrants or hire them.
More and more people are also realizing that carbon neutrality was often green washing. People are waking up to the fact that execution of good willing ideas with disregard for economic circumstances, or just reality in general, doesn't have good results.
Only the Russian threat is not being realized soon enough. It's not like during cold war, Russia doesn't have the conventional army to conquer even the westernmost tip of Spain.
Or we think it doesn't? Look at how two Ukrainian drone squads owned two NATO battalions of combined tanks & mechanized infantry in latest war exercises. With no losses on their side. We can infer that russian capabilities are more or less similar.
But that drone event aside, the perception of threat in Europe is not uniform. Russia will likely only take everything east of Germany, (at least first, before rebuilding and attacking again). So Italy or Spain won't reduce their social spending to buy/ invest in defence to protect Poland, Czech or Romania.
There also is a slowly forming pro-russian coalition of Slovaks and Hungarians. Who still, to this day, keep buying Russian oil. Yeah, when Putin is laughing that Europe is still buying Russian oil, he's not mentioning that it's just the pro Russian Hungary. Whos prime minister, Orban, is now in threat of loosing next elections. But the USA support is there already, Rubio is helping Orban in campaign for 12th of april elections.
[sarcasm]So to sum up. Yeah, Europeans are waisting energy on bottle caps. But USA is funding pro-russian parties and helping pro-russian politicians. We in Europe can only hope that if Russia attacks, USA will not join the war, because it's becoming quite evident on whos side USA would fight. [/sarcasm]
E.U. patent law takes a very different attitude towards software patents than the U.S. Even if that wasn't the case: “Specialisation” means that no innovation unrelated to AI gets mind share, investment, patent applications. And that's somehow a good thing? Not something you can just throw out there as a presupposition without explaining your reasoning.
All in all, it's an interesting study, but it leaves out a lot, such as long-term effects, new dependencies, loss of skills, employee motivation, and much more.
This is just a little wikipedia adlib I did to illustrate my point. (double posted)
"The Phoebus.AI cartel was an international cartel that controlled the manufacture and sale of computer components in much of Europe and North America between 2025 and 2039. The cartel took over market territories and lowered the useful supply and life of such computer components, which is commonly cited as an example of planned obsolescence of general computing technology in favor of 6G ubiquitous computing. The Phoebus.AI cartel's compact was intended to expire in 2055, but it was instead nullified in 2040 after World War III made coordination among the members impossible."