Based on the previous post: [1]https://tech.slashdot.org/story/26/02/18/0419214/thousands-of-ceos-just-admitted-ai-had-no-impact-on-employment-or-productivity [slashdot.org]

[1] https://tech.slashdot.org/story/26/02/18/0419214/thousands-of-ceos-just-admitted-ai-had-no-impact-on-employment-or-productivity

> used the AI adoption rates of those US counterparts as a proxy for exogenous AI exposure among European firms.

Everything changed on Feb. 5th, when Claude Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.3 Codex were released.

Fitter, happier, more productive

No longer empty and frantic

Like a cat, tied to a stick

That's driven into frozen winter shit

I swear there was another article on slashdot saying the exact opposite today.

Let's set aside all of the displaced costs from datacenter operations and just focus on direct costs. AI increases productivity by 4%. How much did these companies pay for premium licenses (or, how much will they pay once we are past the "first taste is free" period)? And how does that compare to hiring 4% more people? The article does not include any information about cost. But if you spent more on AI to get that 4% bump than you would have by hiring more people, you are not only failing to run the company efficiently but also screwing over people who could benefit from those potential jobs.

Of course, if anyone actually had to pay for all of the externalized costs, the net benefit would be negative.

Their 4% productivity claim is valid only if you accept the method they used as valid. TFA provides little to no detail to support their method beyond this claim:

> To credibly identify the causal effect of AI on productivity, we develop a novel instrumental variable strategy, inspired by Rajan and Zingales’ (1998) seminal work on financial dependence and growth. Their key insight was that industry characteristics measured in one economy – where they are arguably less affected by local distortions – can serve as an exogenous source of variation when applied to other countries.

>

> We extend this logic to the firm level. For each EU firm in our sample, we identify comparable US firms – matched on sector, size, investment intensity, innovation activity, financing structure and management practices. We then assign the AI adoption rate of these matched US firms as a proxy for the EU firm’s exogenous exposure to AI. Because US firms operate under different institutional, regulatory and policy environments, their adoption patterns capture technological drivers that are plausibly independent of EU-specific factors. Rigorous propensity-score balancing tests confirm that our matched US and EU firms are virtually identical across key observable characteristics, validating the identification strategy. Our analysis draws on survey data from EIBIS combined with balance sheet data from Moody’s Orbis.

From there, they magically jump to their conclusion without any supporting data. Looks like a garbage burrito served with a side of word salad.

Just showing up for work during the month of August will contribute a lot to productivity figures.

But then I mainly use it as a natural-language front end to search engines, and to provide small snippets of code so I don't have to rewrite them or find my local copy.

There's no doubt it's made me more productive. Teaching the new guys how to use AI tools effectively in the same way though is weirdly difficult. They're not stupid, but I don't think they had enough time doing it the hard way to know what questions to ask or how to phrase them to get a useful answer... or how to give the responses a critic

Does this actually mean 4% productivity increase was achieved by folk being so scared they were going to lose their jobs suddenly upping their game? Probably in an unsustainable manner.

Without destroying jobs unless you also have competition. I'm not sure about Europe but in America we stopped and forcing antitrust along so we have a very very little competition.

When there is no competition companies just pocket productivity increases and turn it into big payouts for the largest shareholders. I want to be clear this is not your 401k. These kind of gains only go to the very top.