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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

#191

Post by slopinthebag »

ericd wrote: post #111
rainsford wrote: post #28

Earlier 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…

All those racks of Nvidia machines might not pay off for the companies buying them, but I have a hard time believing that people are still questioning the utility of this stuff. In the last hour, Opus downloaded data for and implemented a couple of APIs that I would’ve otherwise paid hundreds a month for, end to end, from research all the way to testing its implementation. It’s so, incredibly, obviously useful.

It's only really useful if what you produce with those API's is useful. It's easy to feel productive with AI tho, in a way that doesn't show up in economic statistics, hence the disconnect.

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

#192

Post by mrtksn »

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 think this is probably going to be the mainstream. Once you are able to define what you need LLMs are able to produce it. If you are able to understand what is delivered, it ends up working as expected.

I needed and embedded document based database, a friend of mine with 30 years experience was vibe coding a database in Rust and I asked him if he can make it support Swift and be embedded in iOS and in few minutes he delivered that using Claude. Then I started vibe coding on it with Codex adding features I wanted and integrating it into my project. It worked as expected. I think it is close to reaching parity with MongDB, years of work vibe coded in a weekend.

There’s going to be fundamental changes in how we program computers and consequently the IT industry.

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

#193

Post by m4rtink »

sillyfluke wrote: post #57
m4rtink wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 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.

That 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.

I think it would have happened regardless - late Symbian from Nokia was pretty close and Maemo was already a thing with N900 not that far off in the future, not to mention Android.

We might have been possibly better of actually, with the Apple walled garden abominations and user device lockdowns not being dragged into the mainstream.

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

#194

Post by linkjuice4all »

chris_money202 wrote: post #184
slopinthebag wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was the software package?

simulation model of a hardware component

Typically 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.

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

#195

Post by addled »

ughitsaaron wrote: post #149
mark_l_watson wrote: post #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, di…

I just want to call out how much I appreciate the comparison of “vibe coding” to the endless scroll.

Agreed. I noticed myself having a harder time stopping at the end of the day since I started using AI tools in earnest.

I naturally have a hard time stopping when almost done with something, but with AI everything feels "close" to a big breakthrough.

Just one more turn... Until suddenly it's way later than I thought and hardly have time to interact with my family.

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

#196

Post by slopinthebag »

linkjuice4all wrote: post #194
chris_money202 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

simulation model of a hardware component

Typically 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.

I didn't push because I imagine they want to stay anonymous, but I am also curious.

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

#197

Post by sifar »

XenophileJKO wrote: post #99
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…

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

Effective use of these AI tools need high critical thinking skills which are in short supply.

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

#198

Post by falcor84 »

WalterBright wrote: post #179
mattclarkdotnet wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why? Are you arguing that insects are purely automatons? I personally don't have a strong view on insects, but my intuition is that there are different degrees of consciousness, and feel natural to attribute some consciousness to insects, and even individual amoebas, and maybe even (as in Chalmers's famous example) to thermostats.

I would draw a separate line around sapience, and particularly the capacity for suffering, maybe indeed attributing it to mammals and birds but not insects, but consciousness seems more widespread to me.

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

#199

Post by interestpiqued »

maxdo wrote: post #172

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'…

The 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.

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

#200

Post by slopinthebag »

lich_king wrote: post #183
slopinthebag wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> spending 5 hours writing a tool to automate 5 minutes of work Hey, that's a legitimate engineering activity.

It can be!

Also I don't understand why my comment got flagged - I'm pointing out that the type of person who likes to build tooling, automate their work as much as possible etc, really likes vibe coding because it lets them do more of it faster.

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