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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

#171

Post by DrewADesign »

dvt wrote: post #71
mirekrusin wrote: post #35

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…

We're still 6-12+ months away from a "killer" AI product. OpenClaw showed what's possible-ish, but it breaks half the time, eats tokens like crazy, and can leak all kinds of secrets. Clearly there's potential there, and a lot of people are working on products in the AI space (myself included), but anyone that's seriously tried to wrangle these models will agree with the reality that it's very hard to reliably get the…

> We're still 6-12+ months away from a "killer" AI product. OpenClaw showed what's possible-ish, but it breaks half the time, eats tokens like crazy, and can leak all kinds of secrets.

If you replace OpenClaw with any number of other hot LLM products/projects, I’ve been hearing that same exact sentiment for numerous 6-to-12-month periods. I’d argue we have no idea how long it’s doing to be, but it’s probably not very soon.

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

#172

Post by maxdo »

there 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.

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

#173

Post by loloquwowndueo »

codexon wrote: post #27
loloquwowndueo wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 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.

I'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...)

You’re looking at the end result, I’m looking at implementation. Engineering management, not QA.

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

#174

Post by chris_money202 »

I 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.

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

#175

Post by edgyquant »

rising-sky wrote: post #34

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…

Seems like it’s an ever shifting goalpost when we are told that tons of layoffs etc are already happening due to the tech and yet when quantified it’s debatable if there’s been any gains at all

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

#176

Post by DrewADesign »

rfv6723 wrote: post #118
afavour wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But fiber optic created in 2000 is still very usable in 2026. AI hardware purchases in 2026 is going to out of date very quickly by comparison.

The massive investment in power grids and data centers provides a permanent physical backbone that outlives any specific silicon generation. This infrastructure serves as a durable shell for the model design knowledge and chip architectural IP gained through each iteration. Capital is effectively funding a structural moat built on energy access and engineering mastery.

Seems like there’s a lot of resources being dumped into those data centers that will not be very useful. Saying it will all be worthwhile because we’ll have the buildings and the modest power grid updates (which are largely paid for by tax payers, anyway,) feels like saying a PS5 is a good long-term investment because the cords and box will still be good long ag after the PS5 has outlived its usefulness.

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

#177

Post by gpm »

chris_money202 wrote: post #174

I 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 compa…

I suspect we are still at the stage where for every story like this there's an offsetting story in the other direction of "I (more commonly reported as my coworker) tried to implement something with AI, messed it up, and ended up wasting a ton of time and resources on that mistake".

It's not that AI can't be useful, but that there's a learning curve, and early in the learning curve we should expect as many resources to be spent learning as resources are saved by using the thing. A macro level view of the economy as a whole sees this as "zero economic growth".

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

#178

Post by pylua »

chris_money202 wrote: post #174

I 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 compa…

Doesn’t this hurt the economy ?

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

#179

Post by WalterBright »

mattclarkdotnet wrote: post #152
boxedemp wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What? Nobody says cubic zirconia is an artificial diamond, it’s just a different shiny crystal. We have loads of actual artificial diamonds, so cheap you can get a cutting disc made fr9m them for $10 at home depot. And nobody working in the space either as ML/AI practitioners, or as philosophers, or as cognitive scientists, even thinks we know what consciousness is, or what is required to create it. So there would be…

I'm pretty sure mammals and birds are conscious. Insects, probably not.

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

#180

Post by chris_money202 »

pylua wrote: post #178
chris_money202 wrote: post #174

I 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 compa…

Doesn’t this hurt the economy ?

I think it would depend on which company is the more innovative. Is the 3rd party going to use the money we give them to drive further economic growth and innovation? Or is the money saved going to do that. Its a tough call and could go both ways. We need to somehow measure how the pendulum swings with more accuracy and clearer signals.
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