Live data from Hacker News

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

gizmodo.com

181–190 of 296 posts

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

#181

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, di…

[flagged]

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

#182

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…

What was the software package?

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

#183

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, di…

[flagged]

> spending 5 hours writing a tool to automate 5 minutes of work

Hey, that's a legitimate engineering activity.

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

#184

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…

What was the software package?

simulation model of a hardware component

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

#185
post #71

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 only 5 years away from fusion energy!

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

#186

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…

Yes. We needed to do a huge migration project that would otherwise have taken us six months and/or cost more than $100k. With the help of Opus 4.5 we finished it in three weeks for a total token cost of $1200. I posted about it last month.

So if you want to think of it in economic terms, some software consulting firm that would otherwise have made six figures instead did not. The vast majority of the money we would have spent stayed in our pocket. Slight decreases like this in “velocity of money” no doubt add up to significant sums.

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

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Then why are they stopping people from having multiple max plans? If they are making such good margins on inference.

They have good margins on inference at API costs, i.e. $5/$25 per mtok input/output. They are almost certainly making losses on subscriptions, at least if people max out rate limits.

In the past 30 days I have burned $78.19 in API token costs with my $20/month Claude Pro subscription. In January I burnt over $300 in API token costs.

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

#188
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 only 5 years away from fusion energy!

On a yearly average we've always been 8.317 light-minutes away from fusion energy.

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

#189
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>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. Isn't that a huge red flag? If customers are being given this product at a discount and it still isn't showing a positive ROI for them, what makes people think it will improve once we're charged full price?

I think most people just assume it's magic, and are too awestruck by the hype to think critically.

Financially this feels similar to Uber's business plan in the 2010s; undercut the market with unsound pricing propped up by venture capital (PE was literally subsidising taxi fares; they admitted this and their intention to readjust, but no one seemed to care) then stop manipulating the market and allow fares to even out at (gasp) what it cost to get a cab before Uber.

The difference here is that the LLM market is human productivity; enormous subsidies are afforded to Anthropic, OpenAI etc. in the form of VC or compute credit, but eventually those debts will be called in, the free-to-use aspect will vanish because it's simply not profitable, and we'll be left with several premium products that only a few people will actually pay for, and even then that may not be enough to cover their costs. That's when the bubble will burst.

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

#190
post #119

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…

Minor correction: "sparks of AGI" was in reference to GPT-4, which came out 5 months later in 2024. ( https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.12712 )

Ah, that’s my mistake. Thank you. I saw 2023, I thought GPT-3. Even still, people talk about GPT-4 today like it was a quaint little demo. It was a magnificent achievement, it scared the pants off of a lot of people, and sparked a new round of “is AI conscious?” discourse.
Post reply on HN