AI startup Anthropic says the United States may be on the verge of a powerful productivity surge that current forecasts do not fully capture.
In a recent report dubbed Estimating AI Productivity Gains from Claude Conversations, Anthropic says it sampled 100,000 real conversations with its Claude model to estimate how long tasks would be completed with and without the help of AI.
“Based on Claude’s estimates, these tasks would take on average about 90 minutes to complete without AI assistance, and Claude speeds up individual tasks by about 80%.”
The firm says it subsequently extrapolated the estimates across the broader economy to see the potential impact of AI on US labor productivity growth.
“Extrapolating these estimates out suggests current-generation AI models could increase US labor productivity growth by 1.8% annually over the next decade—roughly twice the run rate in recent years.”
But Anthropic notes that the productivity gains are uneven across sectors. The firm finds that AI tends to offer the most time savings in tasks that take humans more time to complete.
“Looking at individual tasks within occupations provides concrete examples of where and how AI might be delivering time savings. At the most extreme end, we see users complete curriculum development tasks that Claude thinks would take 4.5 hours in just 11 minutes. Such tasks have an implied labor cost of $115 based on the average hourly wage of teachers.
People also use AI to save 87% of the time it would take to write invoices, memos, and other documents (at least for the type of documents Claude is asked to handle). Finally, AI saves 80% of time on financial analyst tasks like interpreting financial data for tasks that would ordinarily cost $31 in wages.”
Looking ahead, Anthropic says its findings are intentionally conservative as the estimates do not account for future model developments.
“However, this estimate does not account for future improvements in AI models (or more sophisticated uses of current technology), which could significantly magnify AI’s economic impact.”
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