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

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201–210 of 296 posts

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

#201

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.

If you were to force the choice I might agree. But I’d prefer to think there’s likely a sliding scale in operation here. Even humans aren’t conscious all the time, or equally conscious at all times. It will be an amazing day when we figure this out.

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

#202

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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.

I actually wonder what will come first, fusion or AGI.

Or will AGI build the fusion energy

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

#203

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…

It's not your main point, but I can't help but point out that artificial diamonds ARE diamonds. Cubic zirconia is a different mineral. Usually the distinction is "natural" vs "lab grown" diamonds. When computers have super-human level intelligence, we might be making similar distinctions. Intelligence IS intelligence, whether it's from a machine or an organism. LLMs might not get us there but something machine will e…

I agree, but as a nit, the industry uses "earth mined" instead of "natural", presumably because it's more precise (and maybe less normative?)

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

#204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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

Absolutely, as per the xkcd automation chart, you'll break even if you save yourself those 5 minutes of work even just once a month over 5 years.

https://xkcd.com/1205/

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

#205
Anyone want to speculate on the Post-AI Bubble world?

When companies can no longer afford to just keep running AI data centers at a loss, we will suddenly have a lot more data centers than we need, who will benefit from these? Who could have use for the hardware for other purposes?

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

#206

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 h…

GDP is a classic example of Goodhart's law.

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

#207
post #195

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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.

It's a slot machine.

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

#208

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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.

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

#209
post #80

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The US economy is remarkably resilient considering its withstood a year of sabotage from the top down.

The top don’t run the show. Tells you how much a value they provide.

Alternatively: the companies at the top paid the necessary bribes (e.g. $100k H-1B sponsorships) and got to continue on with business as usual. The people at the bottom are the ones who can't pay the bribe and are thus hurting.

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

#210

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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.

> 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. They're spending more than they're making. For the foreseeable future, saying "we could be profitable if we stopped training" if goofy, because they can't stop. If they do, no one will want to use their product because it will be overtaken by competitors within three month…

That's a perfectly valid approach if you can balance capex and revenue. Why stop and try to be profitable when the economy is giving you the liquidity to push that down the road?

Models are already super useful, but if you can make them more useful by burning cash people are willing to hand you, why not?

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