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Anthropic Economic Index report: economic primitives

140 points by malshe

by adverbly

11 subcomments

This is very cool but it's not quite what I expected out of economic primitives.
I expected to see measures of the economic productivity generated as a result of artificial intelligence use.
Instead, what I'm seeing is measures of artificial intelligence use.
I don't really see how this is measuring the most important economic primitives. Nothing related to productivity at all actually. Everything about how and where and who... This is just demographics and usage statistics...

by siliconc0w

2 subcomments

Skimmed, some notes for a more 'bear' case:
* value seems highly concentrated in a sliver of tasks - the top ten accounting for 32%, suggesting a fat long-tail where it may be less useful/relevant.
* productivity drops to a more modest 1-1.2% productivity gain once you account for humans correcting AI failure. 1% is still plenty good, especially given the historical malaise here of only like 2% growth but it's not like industrial revolution good.
* reliability wall - 70% success rate is still problematic and we're getting down to 50% with just 2+ hours of task duration or about "15 years" of schooling in terms of complexity for API. For web-based multi-turn it's a bit better but I'd imagine that would at least partly due to task-selection bias.

by mlsu

6 subcomments

> This also highlights the importance of model design and training. While Claude is able to respond in a highly sophisticated manner, it tends to do so only when users input sophisticated prompts.
If the output of the model depends on the intelligence of the person picking outputs out of its training corpus, is the model intelligent?
This is kind of what I don't quite understand when people talk about the models being intelligent. There's a huge blindspot, which is that the prompt entirely determines the output.

by dingdingdang

1 subcomments

The title actually cringes me out a bit, it reads like early report titles in academia where young students (myself no doubt incl back when) try their hardest at making a title sound clever but in actuality only achieve obscuration of their own material.

by bix6

1 subcomments

> These “primitives”—simple, foundational measures of how Claude is used, which we generate by asking Claude specific questions about anonymized Claude.ai and first-party (1P) API transcripts
I just skimmed but is there any manual verification / human statistical analysis done on this or we just taking Claude’s word for it?

by bicepjai

0 subcomment

Recently I listened to an interview with a serial SaaS startup CEO, and one piece of advice clicked for me: “Get out there, talk to your customers, and write blogs, lots of them.” It clarified why companies keep churning out blog posts, reports, “primitives,” even “constitutions”; content is a growth channel.
It also made me notice how much attention I’ve been giving these tech companies, almost as a substitute for the social media I try to avoid. I remember being genuinely excited for new posts on distill.pub the way I’d get excited for a new 3Blue1Brown or Veritasium video. These days, though, most of what I see feels like fingers-tired-from-scrolling marketing copy, and I can’t bring myself to care.

by ossa-ma

0 subcomment

I'm not an economist so can someone explain whether this stat is significant:
> a sustained increase of 1.0 percentage point per year for the next ten years would return US productivity growth to rates that prevailed in the late 1990s and early 2000s
What can it be compared to? Is it on the same level of productivity growth as computers? The internet? Sliced bread?

by mips_avatar

2 subcomments

Every single AI economic analysis talks about travel planning but none of the AI labs have the primitives (transit routing, geocoding, etc.) in a semantic interface for the models to use.

0 subcomment

by brap

1 subcomments

All of this performative bullshit coming out of Anthropic is slowly but surely making them my least favorite AI company.
We get it guys the very scary future is here any minute now and you’re the only ones taking it super seriously and responsibly and benevolently. That’s great. Now please just build the damn thing

by blibble

1 subcomments

> How is AI reshaping the economy?
oh I know this one!
it's created mountains of systemic risk for absolutely no payoff whatsoever!