7 ms·
AI Added 'Basically Zero' to US Economic Growth Last Year, Goldman Sachs Says
- ath3nd 8mo ago[dead]
- pigpag 8mo ago[dead]
- sillyfluke 8mo agoBottom line, no one's buying your vibeslop when they can create and maintain their own for their custom needs. And if we're not buying each others vibeslop there's no productivity to be measured in the economy. With all this recent Claw stuff, it's weird that as people who should be championing the opposite due to our field of study or industry, some of us are now pushing a method of automation that is akin to robo vaccums randomly tracking dogshit across the carpet. In my working environment, people get dressed down for repeatedly communicating incorrect information. If they do it repeatedly in an automated fashion they will be publically shamed if they are senior enough. I have no idea what benefit a human-in-loop for sending an automatically generated emails or agent generated sdks or buliding blocks has when there is no guarentee or even a probability of correctness attached to the result. The effort for vaildating and editing a generated email can be equally or greater than manually writing a regular email let alone one of certain complexity or significance. And what do we do to create to try to guarentee a semblance of correctness? We add another layer of automated validation performed by, you guessed it, the same crew of wacky fuzzy operators that can inject correct sounding gibberish or business workflows at any moment. It's almost like trying to build a house of cards faster than the speed with which it is collapsing. There seems to be a morbid fascination among even the best of us with how far things can be taken until this way forward leads to some indisputable catastrophe.
- ekjhgkejhgk 8mo ago> a method of automation that is akin to robo vaccums randomly tracking dogshit across the carpet. Is it possible that this sort of problem will be fixed? Hypothetically, what would happen in a scenario where one of these apps can do in 1 hr the work that would take a developer a month, reliably? Or is your premise that will NEVER happen?
- sillyfluke 8mo agoThe same underlying magic that enables LLMs to be faster than a brute force SQL query on all the worlds data while producing "good enough" results appears to be the very thing that is creating hallucinations and finite context windows. ie there is no free lunch. It seems to be the theory in many in the field (ilya included?) that the obstacle might not be overcome without an LLM-level breakthrough in AI research, or maybe more likely, a breakthrough in hardware. Big tech until at least recently seems to have thought they can brute force it with energy (nuclear). But who's paying?
- keybored 8mo agoNo need to stress out over us rank and file answering that question. An entire economy is boiling based on it.
- pluto_modadic 8mo agoWhy do I have a feeling that this will be ignored as biased by the people who need to read it the most.
- ohyoutravel 8mo agoIt’s a grift being perpetuated by the folks at the top, who then sweep along in their slipstream folks under them, and so on. The folks who “need to hear this” are helpless to go against and so can’t back down, and the folks who don’t need to hear this because they’re driving it have their paychecks aligned to it, so they’re not backing down.
- co_king_5 8mo ago[flagged]
- platevoltage 8mo agoIt's just missing a question mark man. Is this really something you should be doing on a 9 day old account?
- brokencode 8mo agoWhy do I get the feeling that AI skeptics will treat it as definitive and irrefutable proof that they were right all along even though it’s one data point in an industry that’s hasn’t even been around for 5 years.
- albatross79 8mo agoYou're right, it is tempting to dunk on AI boosters every time an article like this comes out and puts a damper on their sci fi fan fiction fantasies. There's just something about a grown person getting all excited like a child that makes it really satisfying.
- brokencode 8mo agoYou must have a really bleak view on life to think an adult should never get excited like a child. Adult life doesn’t have to be boring drudgery, you know. I mean, it mostly is, but the rare moments of childlike joy and excitement are some of the best parts. As far as the putting a damper on anything, nope it doesn’t. And it never will. The people excited about AI are excited because of the impacts they see on their own jobs and daily lives. We don’t care what Goldman Sachs has to say about productivity.
- phendrenad2 8mo agoI'm sure we can find stories from the 1980s and 1990s about how the "world wide web" hasn't increased the GDP at all.
- sib 8mo agoGiven that the first communication between a web server and client was in December 1990 (and that was private to Tim B-L's environment), and it was released to the public in 1991, I bet we actually couldn't find such stories in the 1980s :)
- trimethylpurine 8mo agoI assume you mean technology, not the www (didn't exist). And, until around the second half of the 90s those papers were right. Most papers you'll find arguing that it wasn't contributing much to productivity were saying just that, that it wasn't, not that it won't. At the time, they were right. Productivity had stagnated despite heavy spending in technology. But now we have something else happening. It's hard to find an application for something that makes a lot of mistakes. That's not the same issue. The issue then was that no one had written the software yet. Everyone knew what software needed writing. The future was obvious. Here, not so much. We can't see how to make it not make mistakes. We have to hope someone will come up with a solution to that. Otherwise their big bets on something non-productive won't pan out the same way that the computer did, and we're all going to suffer for it.
- qgin 8mo agoThe most interesting thing about this is that the underlying economy is actually stronger than people realize. The narrative has been that AI data center construction was propping up an otherwise weak economy. If this analysis is true, then it wasn't being propped up by data center construction. The strength was usual and normal strength. I have no doubt that people will use this to axe grind about they think AI is dumb in general, but I feel like that misses the point that this is mostly about data center construction contributing to GDP.
- Gigachad 8mo agoThe US economy is remarkably resilient considering its withstood a year of sabotage from the top down.
- vachina 8mo agoThe top don’t run the show. Tells you how much a value they provide.
- kmeisthax 8mo agoAlternatively: the companies at the top paid the necessary bribes (e.g. $100k H-1B sponsorships) and got to continue on with business as usual. The people at the bottom are the ones who can't pay the bribe and are thus hurting.
- tempodox 8mo agoThe amount of damage that was done in just a year says otherwise.
- mtct88 8mo agoI think it’s still a bit too early to draw the conclusion. We need to get past the hype first and let the cash grabbers crash. After that, with a clear mind we can finally think about engineering this technology in a sane and useful way.
- gdulli 8mo agoWhat about social media, did that evolve into something sane and useful or has it remained owned by the cash grabbers? Have we not yet internalized that they've permanently captured control of technological advances?
- HardCodedBias 8mo agoI think this is key: "On top of that, there is currently no reliable way to accurately measure how AI use among businesses and consumers contributes to economic growth." No doubt people are using it work ( https://www.gallup.com/workplace/701195/frequent-workplace-continued-rise.aspx https://www.gallup.com/workplace/701195/frequent-workplace-c... ) the question is how much productivity results and to whom does it accrue. Partially this is AI capability (both today and in the past), partially this is people taking time to change their tools.
- d_watt 8mo agoIt took 20 years for computers to "add" to the economy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox
- h0dlnHorses 8mo ago[dead]
- kakapo5672 8mo agoYep, and the same with the internet. During the 1990s and 2000s, people kept wondering why the internet wasn't showing up in productivity numbers. Many asked if the internet was therefore just a fad or bubble. Same as some now do with AI. It takes time for technology to show measurable impact in enormous economies. No reason why AI will be any different.
- sillyfluke 8mo agoIt didn't take mobile apps with the launch of the iPhone 20 years to add to the economy though, did it?
- m4rtink 8mo agoThe iPhone was not the first mobile device or even the first smartphone. Not to mention it did not support mobile applications as we know them today.
- sillyfluke 8mo agoThat seems a tad reductionist. Why not just say the iPhone was completely inconsequential because afterall it's simply another "computer". Why not go even back further and start the timer at the first physical implementation of a Turing machine? The iPhone killer UX + App store release can be directly traced to the growth in tech in the subsequent years its release.
- 8mo ago
- deterministic 8mo agoI completely agree. If AI can't do 100% of a job then you can't remove the job. And most jobs that can be automated already has been automated using traditional software.
- codexon 8mo agoYou can replace it with a much lower paid employee though.
- loloquwowndueo 8mo agoA lower paid and less qualified employee won’t be able to spot when the AI screws up. Having a higher-paid, qualified employee supervising multiple AIs as the human only needs to spot for mistakes - maybe.
- codexon 8mo agoI'm not sure that's entirely true. For most things, checking if a solution is correct is much easier than implementing it (page looks wrong, can't login etc...)
- loloquwowndueo 8mo agoYou’re looking at the end result, I’m looking at implementation. Engineering management, not QA.
- qudat 8mo agoYou definitely cannot. Code org, architecture, and system design are senior level roles and responsibilities.
- codexon 8mo agoAI is already aware of the best practices. It does not just blindly do what you ask of it in the simplest way.
- co_king_5 8mo ago[flagged]
- loloquwowndueo 8mo agoDefinitely missing a /s
- co_king_5 8mo ago[dead]
- bryanlarsen 8mo agoJokes are downvoted to push them to the bottom of the conversation where they belong. They're the dessert of a serious conversation; meat and potatoes should come first.
- keybored 8mo agoAbsolutely[1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47131127 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47131127
- deterministic 8mo agoI assume this is sarcasm?
- tvaughan 8mo agoGitHub has never been down since Copilot was released.
- platevoltage 8mo agoWhy do I feel like I'm being marketed to right now? Is this HackerNews or Instagram?
- Madmallard 8mo agoYet the job situation for software developers in the United States is borderline terminal. Interesting.
- co_king_5 8mo ago[dead]
- rising-sky 8mo agoI guess this is trend now because it's a contrarian / attention grabbing headline. See: - "Thousands of CEOs just admitted AI had no impact on employment or productivity..." https://fortune.com/2026/02/17/ai-productivity-paradox-ceo-study-robert-solow-information-technology-age/ https://fortune.com/2026/02/17/ai-productivity-paradox-ceo-s... - “Over 80% of companies report no productivity gains from AI…” https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/over-80-percent-of-companies-report-no-productivity-gains-from-ai-so-far-despite-billions-in-investment-survey-suggests-6-000-executives-also-reveal-1-3-of-leaders-use-ai-but-only-for-90-minutes-a-week?utm_source=chatgpt.com https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell... But fundamentally, large shifts like this are like steering a super tanker, the effects take time to percolate through economies as large and diversified as the US. This is the Solow paradox / productivity paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox > The term can refer to the more general disconnect between powerful computer technologies and weak productivity growth
- ej88 8mo agoEven the source article in the first link, https://www.nber.org/papers/w34836 https://www.nber.org/papers/w34836 the same firms "predict sizable impacts" over the next three years late 2025 was an inflection point for a lot of companies
- XenophileJKO 8mo agoI keep seeing the "Productivity Paradox" highlighted over an over again. I think one thing people are missing with this specific technology is that unlike many of the comparisons (computers, internet, broadband, etc), AI in particular doesn't have a high requirement at the consumer side. Everyone already has everything they need to use it. There will be a period like we are in now where dramatic capability gain (like recent coding gains) take a while for people to adapt to, however, I think the change will be much faster. Even the speed of uptake in coding tools over the last 3 months has been faster than I predicted. I think we'll see other shifts like this in different sectors where it changes almost over a series of a few months.
- 8mo ago
- mirekrusin 8mo agoThis article seems to have "basically zero" content. Today you have to be blind to not see the change that is coming. World has its own (massive) inertia, burocracy present in businesses accounting for a big part in it. AI itself is moving fast but not at infinite speeds. We start to have good enough tooling but it's not yet available to everyone and it still hangs on too many hacks that will need to crystalize. People have a lot of mess to sort out in their projects to start taking full advantage of AI tooling - in general everybody has to do bottom up cleanup and documentation of all their projects, setup skills and whatnot and that's assuming their corp is ok with it, not blocking it and "using ai" doesn't mean that "you can copy paste code to/from copilot 365". As people say - something changed around Dec/Jan. We're only now going to start seeing noticable changes and changes themselves will start speeding up as well. But it all takes time.
- __loam 8mo agoCan't even spell bureaucracy while you're making big predictions like this.
- mirekrusin 8mo agoNow you know it wasn't written by a bot.
- gaigalas 8mo agoChange is always coming. It's cute when someone thinks this time it's going to be special.
- staplers 8mo agothe change that is coming. Everything you argue reinforces that net output was still basically zero last year. I don't see them talking about 2026 data..
- burgerone 8mo agoIt's not that the technology is not there yer, it's all the ethical concerns and the mental barrier that nobody wants to spend their day begging AI for solutions.
- keybored 8mo agoNote last year. The vibes coming from the Claude dungeons tell a different story. Just in the last six weeks. We are on the precipice.
- co_king_5 8mo ago[dead]
- boxedemp 8mo agoJust so we're on the same page, you don't think that an llm is going to achieve AGI right? Like you're thinking some sort of combination between world models, llms, visual models and others. Right?
- albatross79 8mo agoI give it until the next model that you'll be proclaiming how NOW IT'S THE REAL THING FOR SURE THIS TIME GUYS.
- keybored 8mo agoYou’re replying to a parody account. My comment was a joke as well. > > I’ve been a nay sayer up till two weeks ago when I actually sat down and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47145729 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47145729 Just deep fry my head at this point.
- thomasfromcdnjs 8mo agoI've been using claude code to code my own gpt model from absolute scratch in type script with c code it generates for the gpu. Anytime it wants to use cuda or some lib to do things faster I can keep telling it to write it in typescript or c etc lots of fun and it actually works lol
- mgh2 8mo agoTrickle down effect reversal: > “A lot of the AI investment that we’re seeing in the U.S. adds to Taiwanese GDP, and it adds to Korean GDP but not really that much to U.S. GDP”
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- mark_l_watson 8mo agoI’ll do the Minority Report here: I loved the article, the point being that rich people hyping AI for their own enrichment have somewhat shutdown rational arguments of benefits vs. costs, the costs being: energy use, environmental impact of using environmentally unfriendly energy sources out of desperation, water pollution from by products of electronics production and recycling and from water use in data centers, diverting money from infrastructure and social programs, putting more debt stress on society, etc. I have been a paid AI practitioner since 1982, so I appreciate the benefits of AI - it is just that I hate the almost religious tech belief that real AI will happen from exponential cost increases for LLM training and inference for essentially linear gains. I get that some lazy ass people have turned vibe coding and development into what I consider an activity sort-of like mindlessly scrolling social media.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- boxedemp 8mo agoI've literally not met one person in tech who thinks LLMs will become sentient or conscious. But I always see people online claiming that there are lots of people who believe that. Where are they? Are we sure that's not a misunderstanding of the terminology? Artificial diamonds, such as cubic zirconia, are not diamonds, and nobody thinks they are. 'Artificial' means it's not the real thing. When will conscious, actual intelligence be called 'synthetic intelligence' instead of 'artificial'? Incidentally, this comment was written by AI.
- jamesfinlayson 8mo ago> But I always see people online claiming that there are lots of people who believe that. I saw someone on the news claiming this recently, but he ran an AI consultancy firm so I suspect he was trying to drum up business.
- grogers 8mo agoIt's not your main point, but I can't help but point out that artificial diamonds ARE diamonds. Cubic zirconia is a different mineral. Usually the distinction is "natural" vs "lab grown" diamonds. When computers have super-human level intelligence, we might be making similar distinctions. Intelligence IS intelligence, whether it's from a machine or an organism. LLMs might not get us there but something machine will eventually.
- snowhale 8mo ago[flagged]
- user____name 8mo agoThere really need to be better metrics about the state of an economy than GDP.
- erelong 8mo agoArticle refutes itself by saying it's difficult to measure impact on GDP (thus would by this logic have to take a neutral stance on impact of AI)
- pier25 8mo agoThe article is reporting what someone from Goldman Sachs said in an interview.
- aaronbrethorst 8mo agoI have an alternative explanation: for the areas where AI is giving employees serious productivity gains, they're working for 20 minutes, playing wordle/resting/relaxing for 7 hours, 40 minutes, and delivering exactly as much as they were before.
- bilsbie 8mo agoIncentives matter
- lattalayta 8mo agoI've heard another version of this is that AI can speed up some tasks, but then employees still need to wait for meetings, approvals, other users to chime in, etc. that the net effect isn't as pronounced
- mym1990 8mo agoIts partly this, but hardly any developers I know were writing code for 8 hours a day. 4 on a good day and the rest was meetings or other auxiliary activities. From what I have gathered, companies have no idea how to measure the productivity gains yet.
- OneMorePerson 8mo agoWhen you look into the edge cases developer productivity is really tough to understand. It's easy as the engineer yourself to see your own productivity as easy to understand, but if you are ever in the position of trying to assess someone's productivity that you don't work with day to day, its really difficult. There are people who are able to achieve millions in yearly savings with like 10 lines of code updated per year, perf debugging types. I'd never believe that up front if I hadn't seen it after the fact.
- mym1990 8mo agoIts interesting to me that over the last 10 years of working in agile teams, not one team has analyzed burn rates to see if we are doing better/worse over time. Its like every sprint is a clean slate and no one actually gets better at their job...
- wefzyn 8mo agoAndrej Karpathy said that major revolutions like the Internet, smartphones, and AI often don’t show up clearly in GDP statistics, even when they radically change how people work. GDP measures total spending, not productivity or usefulness. These revolutions improved efficiency and quality of life, but GDP mostly continued along its long-term trend. See his interview in Dwarkesh's podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0-0gGdDJyE&t=4983s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0-0gGdDJyE&t=4983s
- mlnj 8mo agoBesides, AI has barely started to be productive to Developers. The rest of the workforce are still untouched for the most part. The tools that assist the bulk of knowledge work out there is still in the works.
- bwestergard 8mo ago"These revolutions improved efficiency and quality of life" I'm genuinely not sure. We are all computer people in this forum, so it may have improved our lives. But for many people, information technology has lessened the time spent in a given week or year on activities they find meaningful.
- wefzyn 8mo agoTrue. The point remains the same. GDP isn’t measuring “meaningfulness,” and it also doesn’t measure “stress” very well either. Tech can change daily life massively in either direction without moving GDP much.
- cmiles8 8mo agoThe AI bros are saying everyone will be out of work in 5 years. Economists and businesses are calling BS and saying AI is cool, but basically adding zero measurable value with 95% of AI projects failing. The truth is likely somewhere in the middle, but it seems unlikely this bubble can continue much longer.
- tempodox 8mo agoThe duration of this bubble so far goes to show how incredibly rich the investors are, burning trillions of dollars over the years in a wild speculation that they will be able to get everyone else out of work and then having the power to decide who will be allowed to live and who will have to die in the fight over the last breadcrumbs. In the end they will be the ones who can afford to buy private armies to protect themselves from the hungry masses.
- jibal 8mo agoThis is an abbreviated version of a far more nuanced WaPo article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/02/23/ai-economic-growth-gdp-mirage/?pwapi_token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJyZWFzb24iOiJnaWZ0IiwibmJmIjoxNzcxODIyODAwLCJpc3MiOiJzdWJzY3JpcHRpb25zIiwiZXhwIjoxNzczMjAxNTk5LCJpYXQiOjE3NzE4MjI4MDAsImp0aSI6ImFlMTQ5MjRhLTBmZDYtNGVhMi05YzRjLTJhYjVlMmM5M2ExYiIsInVybCI6Imh0dHBzOi8vd3d3Lndhc2hpbmd0b25wb3N0LmNvbS90ZWNobm9sb2d5LzIwMjYvMDIvMjMvYWktZWNvbm9taWMtZ3Jvd3RoLWdkcC1taXJhZ2UvIn0.KEne6ZV0emSzCETAoXKtlGV7iLLjepJcS-wDvfLvo9Y https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/02/23/ai-econ...
- yunnpp 8mo agoThe cover image is just too good. It's just way too good.
- christkv 8mo agoI mean for me I compare AI today with the introduction of the Apple 2. It promises a lot and can do some awesome things but we are still at the beginning. Also I am amazed how quickly people just got used to AI. Its still magical and 5 years ago this was science fiction that people did not think was possible.
- maxdo 8mo agothere literally slew of companies who went in 1 year from mid size business to multi billion ARR. And yeah, blah blah they burn money blah blah. Check Anthropic CEO interviews. He openly describe the balance problem : - cost of training a new model - newly built infra ratio of training vs inference - market adoption, that is despite extremely quick is not unlimited, since even market is not unlimited. essentially it's a tricky balance, between you do not invest today you will loose tomorrow vs you invest too much and go bankrupt next year.
- interestpiqued 8mo agoThe problem is, part of their whole appeal is being on the "frontier" of model development. So what happens when scaling gets too expensive or we reach some sort of end state for LLMs? They will lose their differentiation and it seems like a non negligible chance their pricing power collapses. The entire reason they make so much money is because they spend so much to be on the frontier.
- viking123 8mo agoThis is the same CEO that is selling a room full of old boomers that AI will double their lifespan? Oh yeah it's that guy..
- chris_money202 8mo agoI think a pretty good example I had at work, we had the option to buy a software package from a 3rd party company. After reviewing the specs we needed, I told my manager to give me a few hours to see if I could produce what we needed with AI instead. Lo and behold, I was able to do it in just a few hours, AI package was tested, integrated, and we moved on. No where was any of that recorded that I just saved the company lots of money using AI. I bet there are lots of examples like this that just aren't adequately tracked at both micro and macro levels. For some reason we expected to to be able to see these huge gains from AI but we never bothered putting systems in place to observe them.
- slopinthebag 8mo agoWhat was the software package?
- chris_money202 8mo agosimulation model of a hardware component
- linkjuice4all 8mo agoTypically I wouldn't press on the details - but do you have any reason not to name the specific package/vendor and/or the use case? It's nice to draw from the actual experiences of HN commenters and I'd be interested to hear how you used the technology in question in actual practice.
- slopinthebag 8mo agoI didn't push because I imagine they want to stay anonymous, but I am also curious.
- chris_money202 8mo ago[dead]
- 8mo ago
- deadbabe 8mo agoAnyone want to speculate on the Post-AI Bubble world? When companies can no longer afford to just keep running AI data centers at a loss, we will suddenly have a lot more data centers than we need, who will benefit from these? Who could have use for the hardware for other purposes?
- areoform 8mo agoI think analyses like these are motivated reasoning. In 2000, I'm sure you could have said that after infrastructure costs the internet, and the web, added "basically zero" to US economic growth. And there were people saying that! Someone I deeply respect, Clifford Stollm wrote a book called “Silicon Snake Oil — Second thoughts on the information highway" in 1995. And while he was and is a brilliant person, Stoll was wrong. Smart people are terrible at predicting the most consequential changes in our future – even when they're familiar with the technology. I wrote a bit about my thesis why here, https://1517.substack.com/p/inside-v-outside-context-problems https://1517.substack.com/p/inside-v-outside-context-problem... Don't make his mistake. Don't look away from the change being wrought. The world has changed and our history now has a new, sharp dividing chapter "Before ChatGPT | After ChatGPT" and that chapter will go down right next to "Before Trinity | After Trinity"; "Before PC | After PC"; "Before 'Internet' | After 'Internet'"† † Yes, I know I'm referring to the Web. But we're still using the dark fiber from the .com boom.
- PlatoIsADisease 8mo agoAfter using OpenClaw for 1 week, I'm so extremely bullish. Buy buy buy buy. We don't even have enough data centers.
- tabs_or_spaces 8mo agoFeels like this is very hard to measure isn't it? Are we saying that llm's have zero economic growth, or are we saying that the sum of winners and losers in llm usage are zero or less than zero? I think there's many examples of llms resulting in winners, or maybe this signal is just very high in the tech space. But maybe there's not enough reporting on the losers in llms at the moment? (E.g. did llm displace their jobs, they have llm use cases that failed, etc, etc)
- roncesvalles 8mo agoAI has tremendously improved quality of life (both personal and professional) but I just don't see it translating to increased economic productivity.
- diedyesterday 8mo ago1. The initial stage of adoption of AI will be more of a shift (some plus + here and some minus there) and reorientation and restructuring than net exponential growth. 2. Also a good portion of contribution of AI is where it's not taken into account by metrics like GDP. I have seen an explosion of FOSS projects especially in my own area and I'm sure it's pretty much are the case for many other areas. 3. Also there will be a sink-like effect with effects of AI on net wealth production. Like Earth's own oxygenation event which took billions for the produced oxygen to (after saturating all the sinks like Earth' iron reserves and turning them to Iron ore) ultimately find its way into the atmosphere. 4. Also I'm not sure what is exactly being counted on as contribution of AI to economy. Is the data-center build-outs and growth of chip companies,etc. included in this metric in AI's favor? ...
- cadamsdotcom 8mo agoA motivated entity publishing a bombastic opinion. Hard to know what to make of this. If you believe claims about an economy they have a vested interest in affecting, better be sure they’re trustworthy. These opinions masquerading as statistics is why governments create departments to publish trustworthy statistics.
- bjacobel 8mo agoWhat makes the statistics published by the government inherently more trustworthy?
- zombot 8mo agoWhen the high priests of capitalism say so themselves, I tend to believe them. Nice to see that not everybody has completely lost their mind under the endless barrage of hype, shilling and astroturfing.
- kermatt 8mo agoWhen talking about the economy, how much of these numbers consider secondary effects of AI? For example when there are large scale layoffs attributed to AI (which in some cases may be a smokescreen to reduce headcount), the people that are affected reduce their spending to compensate. Less spending means less revenue for other companies, resulting in more layoffs, something of a feedback loop?Therefore perceived productivity gains maybe a net negative in the macro economic sense. I am no economist so I don't know if any of that makes sense, but it's something I regularly wonder about.
- casey2 8mo agoA week ago it was "AI spending is solely keeping US GDP and the stock market afloat" Now it's adding "Basically Zero" to US Economic Growth https://gizmodo.com/wall-street-apparently-believes-the-future-involves-making-your-software-instead-of-buying-it-2000718250 https://gizmodo.com/wall-street-apparently-believes-the-futu... This one's from bloomberg Does Gizmodo just repeat random stuff they hear like some kind of stochastic click generating parrot? Low GDP this quarter is due to low government spendint. Hardware is still extremely cheap and isn't getting better much faster. America has taken a major lead by buying out all the fabtime. If I ran Taiwan I would have nationalized TSMC, horded all the chips and allied with Japan and SK for a joint AI and defense pact. The key innovation of the LLM beyond anything technical is that, across the board, government can now see the potential of ML and "AGI". The current American left (and Europeans leaders) is absolutely hopeless, while they make "not one drop for data signs" we are quickly moving towards a future where your job is creating data mostly by doing whatever you want. 10 years ago data was worth 1/9th it's current worth, in 10 years it will be at least 9x it's current worth today. 22+% year on year for the last 14 years 50+% during lockdown. It's strangely hard for people to imagine that work becomes easier over time even though it's always been true. There is a huge difference between letting people capture the value of their labor and preventing that value from being created in the first place.