Some people (not Anthropic necessarily) are claiming 5x or 10x productivity improvement. So it is relevant, as it is being somewhat oversold by some.

To play the devil’s advocate, some people and orgs that were highly inefficient that adopted it really could get massive productivity gains.

A performance improvement is relative to some baseline, and that baseline for some may be a lot lower than others, and if they adopt tech effectively it really could be a big boost. Across the board though I don’t think it’s sensible.

I work in an industry that very intentionally tries to be inefficient and I can tell you having certain tasks automated that before had a person barrier intentionally acting inefficiently that you can now sidestep by outsourcing their tasks to something like Claude gives me a massive performance increase because I’m not blocked as much anymore. I can literally just replace some external tasks that were intentionally slowing processes down for their own benefits with a few prompts and move along. I could have done the tasks before but then people would ask why I’m spending my time doing it, now I can just say “oh, I was blocked so I had Claude take care of that blocker” and move along.

It can be true that some people are getting 5x or 10x while Anthropic is getting less than 2x. CRUD apps that are simple variations on something done a zillion times before is different than AI research. R&D is not some thing that just requires someone to type a volume of code.

It can further be true that some developers are getting 5x or 10x while as a whole their organization is sped up less than 2x. I'm sure many tasks at Anthropic are sped up 5x or 10x or more.

It can further be the case that many people overestimate their gains as well. That's fine, and I think what you're saying - but it's still wild to shake your head and go "pfft, they have not even doubled their productivity". Double is a lot!

Not all task are cutting-edge AI research.