Earlier quoted context omitted.
Researchers looked at GPT-3 in 2023 and saw “sparks of AGI”. The saying “feel the AGI” became widespread not long after, if I’m remembering right. We’ve been saying AGI is right around the corner for a while now. And of course, if you predict the end of the world every day, you’ll eventually be right. But for the moment, what we have is an exceptionally powerful coding assistant that can also speed up entry-level wor…
iirc, when Eliza came out, many people briefly believed it was sentient
AI Added 'Basically Zero' to US Economic Growth Last Year, Goldman Sachs Says
121–130 of 296 posts
Re: AI Added 'Basically Zero' to US Economic Growth Last Year, Goldman Sachs Says
#122I 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…
I 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…
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Re: AI Added 'Basically Zero' to US Economic Growth Last Year, Goldman Sachs Says
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, but you have to consider Carl Sagan's point, "The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." Some truly useful technologies start out slow and the question is asked if they are fads or bubbles even though they end up having huge im…
Columbus was not a genius. He was an idiot who believed the earth was smaller than the scientists of his day, and the scientists were right. Columbus became successful through pure luck, genocide and cruelty. Most idiots like Columbus died in obscurity.
Columbus, the man that didn't know where he was going to, and when he came back he couldn't tell where he was.
Re: AI Added 'Basically Zero' to US Economic Growth Last Year, Goldman Sachs Says
#124I’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, di…
I'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, actua…
> 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.
Re: AI Added 'Basically Zero' to US Economic Growth Last Year, Goldman Sachs Says
#125I 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…
I would argue that the leadership and financial support behind AI (in its current form) does not have the patience or level-headedness to treat it as a long-term change, and is very much trying an all-or-nothing approach to making a long shift happen in a few years instead, or burn through nation-level budgets trying.
To my eyes, the problem is not the productivity gain arriving slowly, but the immediate draining of funding from virtually all other areas of innovation.
Re: AI Added 'Basically Zero' to US Economic Growth Last Year, Goldman Sachs Says
#126It took 20 years for computers to "add" to the economy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox
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…
It's a "Motte and Bailey" system [0], where the extreme "AI will do everything for you" claim keeps getting thrown around to try to get investors to throw in cash, but then somehow it transmutes into "all technologies took time to mature stop being mean to me."
To be fair, it isn't necessarily the same people doing both at once. Sometimes there are two groups under the same general banner, where one makes the big-claims, and another responds to perceived criticism of their lesser-claim.
Re: AI Added 'Basically Zero' to US Economic Growth Last Year, Goldman Sachs Says
#127Re: AI Added 'Basically Zero' to US Economic Growth Last Year, Goldman Sachs Says
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
I 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…
> AI in particular doesn't have a high requirement at the consumer side. Everyone already has everything they need to use it. That isn’t actually true though, right now everyone has a hard dependency on a cloud service. That is currently sold to them at deep discount by companies that are losing billions. When the market eventually corrects it’ll be interesting to see how much AI ends up costing. At the very least it…
Is it actually being sold at a steep discount? Anthropic CEO has stated they have high margins on inference, so training is the big cost center.
Re: AI Added 'Basically Zero' to US Economic Growth Last Year, Goldman Sachs Says
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
if it was just Meta perhaps I’d think twice but it is not just Meta, it is all of them
"The lemmings can't be wrong, they're all doing it". I think you're overlooking the incentive structures here.
I am certainly not saying that this can’t all come crashing down for the big boys, surely it can. I just am putting a little more weight on them than on people on the internet and doomsdayers hunting for clicks is all
Re: AI Added 'Basically Zero' to US Economic Growth Last Year, Goldman Sachs Says
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
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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If somehow Claude became sentient that would be sci-fi. One day it’s wrangling CSS and Spring Boot Controllers and the next it’s telling you opinions it developed through its own experiences on programming languages. Not sure that’s on the near horizon, but it’s definitely impressive technology.