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AI Added 'Basically Zero' to US Economic Growth Last Year, Goldman Sachs Says

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Re: AI Added 'Basically Zero' to US Economic Growth Last Year, Goldman Sachs Says

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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What does that mean? By what metric do you measure "AGI", whatever that means? Industry definitions are incredibly vague, perhaps intentionally so, with no benchmarks to define how a model, harness, or other technology might achieve "AGI". They have no intelligence, and can't even reason that you need to take your car to the car wash to have it washed[0]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47031580

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Re: AI Added 'Basically Zero' to US Economic Growth Last Year, Goldman Sachs Says

#62

I'm sure we can find stories from the 1980s and 1990s about how the "world wide web" hasn't increased the GDP at all.

I 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.

Re: AI Added 'Basically Zero' to US Economic Growth Last Year, Goldman Sachs Says

#63

This 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. Peop…

It'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.

Re: AI Added 'Basically Zero' to US Economic Growth Last Year, Goldman Sachs Says

#65

I 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-s... - “Over 80% of companies report no productivity gains from AI…” https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell... But fundamentally, large shifts like this are like ste…

Even the source article in the first link, 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

Re: AI Added 'Basically Zero' to US Economic Growth Last Year, Goldman Sachs Says

#66
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not saying this to be sarcastic - the problem is that people from OpenAI/Antrhopic are saying things like superintelligence in 3 years, or boris saying coding is solved and that 100% of his code is written by AI. It's not good enough to just say oreo ceos say we need to more oreos. There's a real grey area where these tools are useful in some capacity, and in that confusion we're spending billions. Too may peopl…

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> I'm going to be honest, you can feel the AGI when you use newer agentic tools like OpenClaw or Claude.

You're right. I can feel how far away it is and how these tools will in no way be capable of getting us there.

Re: AI Added 'Basically Zero' to US Economic Growth Last Year, Goldman Sachs Says

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[dead]

What does that mean? By what metric do you measure "AGI", whatever that means? Industry definitions are incredibly vague, perhaps intentionally so, with no benchmarks to define how a model, harness, or other technology might achieve "AGI". They have no intelligence, and can't even reason that you need to take your car to the car wash to have it washed[0]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47031580

A link to a page where the top comment talks about how a major model doesn’t get stuck on the question doesn’t seem like much of a flex.

Re: AI Added 'Basically Zero' to US Economic Growth Last Year, Goldman Sachs Says

#68
I’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.

Re: AI Added 'Basically Zero' to US Economic Growth Last Year, Goldman Sachs Says

#69
post #58
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You definitely cannot. Code org, architecture, and system design are senior level roles and responsibilities.

AI is already aware of the best practices. It does not just blindly do what you ask of it in the simplest way.

Best practices are always situation dependent.

Re: AI Added 'Basically Zero' to US Economic Growth Last Year, Goldman Sachs Says

#70

This 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. Peop…

> This article seems to have "basically zero" content.

Why? It’s descriptive of the “past”. While you’re trying to predict the near/far “future” and project your assumptions. Two different things.

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