I know someone who works in law and deals particularly with an area of US benefits and healthcare law. One of their workflows for lower-level employees at their firm involves taking in documents from healthcare plans and organizations, analyzing them for certain kinds of data, and then importing that data into an internal system they use to analyze and provide guidance on plans. The internal system can contain hundreds of documents for an individual client. All of the documents have the same information (roughly) but in totally diverse formats and styles. Once it's in the system, it's easy to compare and analyze across documents and the research process is much faster.
They recently bought a Claude subscription and began using Claude to do the initial read of the documents and output JSON they can import into their internal systems. The work still must be reviewed by an attorney - Claude is nowhere near making the kinds of judgments a lawyer would make about this content - but it has increased their throughput from 2-3 documents an hour to 8-10 documents an hour by killing the busy work.
LLMs have great advantages for this kind of work - but not for decision-making. I just don't see OpenAI ever admitting that.
(I've left some details intentionally vague because this is a very specific area of law and I don't want my friends to be identified without their consent.)
I just realized how refreshing it is to read an honest take like "from 2-3 documents an hour to 8-10 documents an hour" instead of "it's doing the work of a month in 5 minutes!!!!1".
That's a factor of 3 to 5 improvement reported on here. If you keep stacking these kinds of improvements, you end up at month to minutes pretty quickly.
Sorry for being so detached from the discussion and your actual point but if someone had made a dystopian sci-fi novel with the tagline following your sentence with "...or can they?", and made it all cheesy, I'd read it in one sitting.
In the future, because of bad things we did to the atmosphere and stuff, miscarriages are the common ending of a pregnancy, instead of being the exception. One evil company finds a way to accelerate the process by using 10 women, lowering the chances of miscarriage simply by reducing the time in womb.
I thought, something like a medication helping the women develop the baby in 30 days, but seriously damages the host in a couple of days, so the fetus gets transferred from host to host. Some die, but the evil rich don't care. Your idea could also work though.
I realize that this is totally the wrong corner of the internet to post this but
I guess today I'll just go with it.
Yeah, that plot might actually work and is more believable than mine. (some women actually do feel like a baby is a parasite growing inside them - this would be a extreme version of it)
I'm too bad of a writer to be scared of giving my ideas away, but I'd explore a pupae stage, where (layman disclaimer, if it isn't abundantly clear from my incoming butchering of the science) the butterfly is basically melted down into a goop with no "brain part" or "feet part" of the goop existing until reformed, yet retain their memories. If you divided that goop up and imagined there was a gestation time reduction, before combining it for the final stage of formation, you'd have some "plausible" (loose definition here) venue for it.
In one part of Brave New World they bring up that they tried to do more automation, but people got restless without the drudgery. In another part, they bring up that they tried to have a society with only Alphas, but they didn't want to do the drudgery.
The AI can't make a reliable judgement, so now you have to hire 3x to 5x more to make those judgements if you have the documents coming in at 3x to 5x faster. Or you'll have one severely overworked lawyer. It's the same problem developers have with thousands of AI generated PRs. Just because you speed up one thing doesn't mean the whole system works faster, and yes a human really does need to be in the loop or you end up with even bigger problems, and lawsuits.
No, that'd only be true the judgement was the full work. If the judgement was 33% of the work and the rest was just old plain e.g. typing, that is now fully automated and instantaneous, then you automate 2/3 of the work, getting 3x in productivity.
That doesn't take into account dependencies between tasks, where bottlenecks can happen. In any case, Amdahl's law applies regarding what kind of speedup you can get in such a case.
But wouldn't that be great if true? Why all the negativity over the prospect of leveling the playing between people lucky enough to be born with high IQs and average people? High IQ is a completely unearned gift and AI might reduce that fundamental source of unfairness in the world.
I was thinking about this today. I am definitely making things easier but.. if I was paying the actual costs of this service, could it even be close to worth it?
People will eventually realize that this is exactly what AI does for most workflows. The propaganda is "synthetic humans", "obsolete mathematicians" and so forth, but what we will likely see is a fantastic time saver for things we didn't like to do to begin with.
It's not a time saver in that you, as an employee, don't get more time to yourself. You get to work more. Can you walk up to your boss and tell them that you are going to start working 20 hours a week instead of 40?
I use these things daily, not against this kind of "AI" at all.
You're not wrong of course, but removing the tedious parts of a job can be really nice. I still work the same hours of course, but now I get to work on things that are more meaningful, more design and architecture oriented, and less about the grind of tedium. I'm sure there are plenty of exceptions out there, so I don't want to generalize, but I do suspect there are a number of people in a similar situation as me.
How can we deal with this mental overload? There are only so many things that I can keep in my head.
Your job was to deliver Project X and you did it in half the time. What do you do with the other half? Your job was to deliver X. Now what? Extra vacation time? Just musing.
>removing the tedious parts of a job can be really nice
Sure. For me AI removes the parts of programming work that I like the most, and "gives" me more time to do thing I consider tedious, like solving human problems, achieving consensus in the team, attending meetings.
There's nothing that will save your employment time because any employer will want to maximize what they get from you. This applies to literally any innovation past, present and future.
For self-employed people, it allows them to focus on other problems. I know people who would be bankrupt without AI now because development time was crushing their company and they couldn't afford to hire others. Now they can spend more time in marketing and sales. AI will make some business that weren't profitable in the past viable.
For people who program for leisure, self-consumption or otherwise don't have a major income pressure, it is objectively a huge time saver.
For people who program for leisure, self-consumption or otherwise don't have a major income pressure, it is objectively a huge time saver.
I've had much enjoyment recreating my frequently used utilities on macOS. It's not about saving money, it's costing me more than to keep my subscriptions active, it's more about tailoring things to myself and keeping BPMs up.
There's nothing that will save your employment time because any employer will want to maximize what they get from you. This applies to literally any innovation past, present and future.
A personal anecdote from 2 decades ago which hunts me till today.
I was at a smallish firm in NYC, less than 50 people. I ran the "IT department" which included a couple of devs, DTP folks and one customer support underling who I backed up when needed.
We fixed all the printer problems, all the network shares, everything was quiet. I get called into the corner office and am told, "tell the help desk dude to sweep the floors as they are not doing anything". And, I really liked that boss. It's a different mindset.
Sure, nobody knows the exact future. But you still plan for what's probably going to happen. I don't know if social security is going to be around when I retire, and all the experts are saying it's probably not going to be. So, I'm planning a retirement without. Similarly, all the experts are saying AI (<- that word is not "LLM") is probably going to improve. I personally think it's irrational to ignore experts.
I think that a person (me) who has worked directly with frontier AI for over a year now for many hours a day may have gained some expertise in what this technology is capable of and thus what is dangerous about it, but I wouldn't speculate too hard on what superintelligent AI would or could do because we have not yet seen such a thing nor is there even an established criteria as to what that would look like or how it would be valued and in what capacity (hint: humans are still the final evaluators of what is valuable)
The simple fact that I have to write every control scheme in the book to keep the thing on the goal path (and not lapsing into laziness or dishonesty) is itself possibly a safety feature, if you look at it that way
> The simple fact that I have to write every control scheme ...
Look three years ago for a reality check of the progress. The LLM you're using now isn't the LLM you'll be using in 5 years. It probably won't even really be the same architecture, just like those from 3 years ago. What you're doing was literal science fiction not long ago.
People with experience in every other field have a better handle on what's coming than others, and yet experience with AI is apparently the sole exception to you LOL
See e.g. <a href="https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/facultyworkingpapers/144/" rel="nofollow">https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/facultyworking...
ivraatiems · · focus · HN ↗
They recently bought a Claude subscription and began using Claude to do the initial read of the documents and output JSON they can import into their internal systems. The work still must be reviewed by an attorney - Claude is nowhere near making the kinds of judgments a lawyer would make about this content - but it has increased their throughput from 2-3 documents an hour to 8-10 documents an hour by killing the busy work.
LLMs have great advantages for this kind of work - but not for decision-making. I just don't see OpenAI ever admitting that.
(I've left some details intentionally vague because this is a very specific area of law and I don't want my friends to be identified without their consent.)
ManuelKiessling · · focus · HN ↗
[deleted] · · focus · HN ↗
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eru · · focus · HN ↗
That's a factor of 3 to 5 improvement reported on here. If you keep stacking these kinds of improvements, you end up at month to minutes pretty quickly.
monax · · focus · HN ↗
eru · · focus · HN ↗
egeozcan · · focus · HN ↗
lukan · · focus · HN ↗
egeozcan · · focus · HN ↗
I thought, something like a medication helping the women develop the baby in 30 days, but seriously damages the host in a couple of days, so the fetus gets transferred from host to host. Some die, but the evil rich don't care. Your idea could also work though.
I realize that this is totally the wrong corner of the internet to post this but I guess today I'll just go with it.
lukan · · focus · HN ↗
eru · · focus · HN ↗
As a premise for science fiction, it sounds like it might be interesting.
croon · · focus · HN ↗
eru · · focus · HN ↗
croon · · focus · HN ↗
marcta · · focus · HN ↗
lukan · · focus · HN ↗
eru · · focus · HN ↗
KellyCriterion · · focus · HN ↗
If humanity lives long enough, someonen will came up with this idea and implement it?
Cthulhu_ · · focus · HN ↗
eru · · focus · HN ↗
In one part of Brave New World they bring up that they tried to do more automation, but people got restless without the drudgery. In another part, they bring up that they tried to have a society with only Alphas, but they didn't want to do the drudgery.
I wonder why they never tried combining both?
weatherlite · · focus · HN ↗
egeozcan · · focus · HN ↗
leptons · · focus · HN ↗
franciscop · · focus · HN ↗
liquicity · · focus · HN ↗
Surely there's a middle ground / this is faster than reading all papers front to back.
gf000 · · focus · HN ↗
alansaber · · focus · HN ↗
00deadbeef · · focus · HN ↗
hkt · · focus · HN ↗
rayiner · · focus · HN ↗
00deadbeef · · focus · HN ↗
totetsu · · focus · HN ↗
glimshe · · focus · HN ↗
stasomatic · · focus · HN ↗
I use these things daily, not against this kind of "AI" at all.
sneak · · focus · HN ↗
If you’re an employee, you are selling a quantity of your time, not your results. Of course you will have to work the same amount of time.
Your issue is with employment as a general concept, wherein the employer reaps any efficiency gains, not the worker.
freedomben · · focus · HN ↗
stasomatic · · focus · HN ↗
Your job was to deliver Project X and you did it in half the time. What do you do with the other half? Your job was to deliver X. Now what? Extra vacation time? Just musing.
RussianCow · · focus · HN ↗
my-huge-pony · · focus · HN ↗
Sure. For me AI removes the parts of programming work that I like the most, and "gives" me more time to do thing I consider tedious, like solving human problems, achieving consensus in the team, attending meetings.
glimshe · · focus · HN ↗
For self-employed people, it allows them to focus on other problems. I know people who would be bankrupt without AI now because development time was crushing their company and they couldn't afford to hire others. Now they can spend more time in marketing and sales. AI will make some business that weren't profitable in the past viable.
For people who program for leisure, self-consumption or otherwise don't have a major income pressure, it is objectively a huge time saver.
stasomatic · · focus · HN ↗
I've had much enjoyment recreating my frequently used utilities on macOS. It's not about saving money, it's costing me more than to keep my subscriptions active, it's more about tailoring things to myself and keeping BPMs up.
There's nothing that will save your employment time because any employer will want to maximize what they get from you. This applies to literally any innovation past, present and future.
A personal anecdote from 2 decades ago which hunts me till today.
I was at a smallish firm in NYC, less than 50 people. I ran the "IT department" which included a couple of devs, DTP folks and one customer support underling who I backed up when needed.
We fixed all the printer problems, all the network shares, everything was quiet. I get called into the corner office and am told, "tell the help desk dude to sweep the floors as they are not doing anything". And, I really liked that boss. It's a different mindset.
Melatonic · · focus · HN ↗
meowface · · focus · HN ↗
pmarreck · · focus · HN ↗
nomel · · focus · HN ↗
pmarreck · · focus · HN ↗
The simple fact that I have to write every control scheme in the book to keep the thing on the goal path (and not lapsing into laziness or dishonesty) is itself possibly a safety feature, if you look at it that way
nomel · · focus · HN ↗
Look three years ago for a reality check of the progress. The LLM you're using now isn't the LLM you'll be using in 5 years. It probably won't even really be the same architecture, just like those from 3 years ago. What you're doing was literal science fiction not long ago.
aswegs8 · · focus · HN ↗
pmarreck · · focus · HN ↗
aswegs8 · · focus · HN ↗
See e.g. <a href="https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/facultyworkingpapers/144/" rel="nofollow">https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/facultyworking...
gandreani · · focus · HN ↗