Aaron Levie: AI productivity ceiling rose from 30-50% to 5-10x in two years
Box CEO Aaron Levie believes that while AI adoption is at its broadest, the output gap may also be the largest in history: two years ago, even those best at using AI saw productivity gains of only 30-50% in areas such as programming, whereas today, depending on the field, it can reach 5-10x. He points out that models can independently complete longer tasks, harnesses support agentic work, and improved training data quality has reduced manual intervention, while progress in RSI will continue to widen this gap.
View original postSomewhere in the world there’s probably an entire team of 6 devs, working full time on a project that’s just one Claude Code prompt
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Somewhere in the world there’s probably an entire team of 6 devs, working full time on a project that’s just one Claude Code prompt
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The divergence in AI output weirdly may be the highest it’s ever been, even though adoption is the broadest it’s ever been.
A few years ago the best productivity gains you could get, even in the most capability-aligned field (like coding), was maybe 30-50% better productivity if you were very good at it. You’d spend a decent chunk of time cleaning up the mistakes of models, the context windows were too limited to do any long running work, and the interfaces required highly synchronous interactions.
Now, the models can do far longer tasks at a time with limited human interaction. The harnesses support agentic work that can take on these larger tasks. The models are trained on vastly better datasets for a growing array of domains so you have to intervene far less. And we have systems that better support working with many agents at once.
In just a two year timespan, the upper limits on productivity gains have gone from 30-50% to now likely 5-10X depending on the field. So we’ve gone from an environment where living at the frontier vs. not paying attention at all could be an order of magnitude difference in your output.
This distance is only getting wider from here given the rate of progress we’re likely to see with RSI. Crazy times.