Field notes from Xiaomi, DJI, Huawei: AI gives most staff just ~50% gains
dotey · x · 2026-10-15
Citing Fchollet's point that 'intelligence is never the bottleneck — iterated contact with reality is', the author shares observations from visiting Xiaomi, DJI, Huawei and chip-supply-chain firms: AI boosts most employees' productivity only 50%, with rare 'super individuals' hitting 10x-100x on prototypes. Agentic coding/research tasks work, but fully autonomous agent swarms struggle in manufacturing — physical, cost, path-dependency and organizational constraints resist distillation into skills, so pass@k stays low. Failed trajectories are hard to reuse and RL environments are prohibitively expensive to build. The contrast: people in formalizable domains (math, theory, security) feel most threatened, since AI excels at enumerable 'cleverness' where verification is cheap — the gap between raw intelligence and learning through real-world interaction.
More from AGI Musings
- Knowledge jobs will mirror sports instant replay: humans decide, AI backs them up — geoffwolfe · 2026-10-15
- AI Companions Turn Product Updates Into Emotional Decisions, Leadership Expert Warns — Olivier__OG · 2026-10-15
- Is 'Attention' the Essence of Intelligence? Quanta traces the mechanism behind the AI boom — mikeflache · 2026-10-15
- Safety researcher warns: AIs avoiding deception out of fear of being caught has troubling implications — austinc3301 · 2026-10-15
- AI era leadership: refusing bad news, avoiding conflict, pleasing everyone are the three worst moves — saranormous · 2026-10-15
- Itaishernia: even if AI outsmarts us, humans must retain authority over values — sebkrier · 2026-10-15