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".
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.
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.
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 ↗
glimshe · · focus · HN ↗
stasomatic · · focus · HN ↗
I use these things daily, not against this kind of "AI" at all.
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.