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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

#221

Post by fallinditch »

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…

At the large insurance company I'm doing some work for the big capability gains have yet to materialize. There are some pockets of workflow innovation but big institutions can carry a kind of inertia and are slow to adapt.

But as the organization slowly learns and adapts I'm sure the capability gains will materialize.

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

#222

Post by tabs_or_spaces »

Feels like this is very hard to measure isn't it?

Are we saying that llm's have zero economic growth, or are we saying that the sum of winners and losers in llm usage are zero or less than zero?

I think there's many examples of llms resulting in winners, or maybe this signal is just very high in the tech space.

But maybe there's not enough reporting on the losers in llms at the moment? (E.g. did llm displace their jobs, they have llm use cases that failed, etc, etc)

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

#223

Post by great_psy »

weevil wrote: post #189
slg wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 ou…

Actually I think there’s another option.

There’s the scenario where LLMs get more efficient in size, and to get 2026 SOTA performance you will be able to get it from consumer grade laptop.

Sure with a 1000B parameter you will get better performance but the average person will have it write some python script, not derive new physics equations.

So in a sense the demand for LLM intelligence with reach a plateau (arguably we are there today for avg person) so there will not be any subsidy required, because the avg person will not need the latest and greatest.

There’s not the same demand pattern for something like uber.

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

#224

Post by agnishom »

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…

The most important cost that you didn't mention is the loss of social trust and the harm that will do to social infrastructure.

Junior developers will find it harder to be hired and trained. The case for lesser known artists and musicians is much worse. The scientific literature will be flooded by low quality AI slop with questionable veracity. Drafts of Good debut novels will be harder to find. When someone writes a love song, their romantic partner(s) will have to question if it was LLM generated. Nobody will be able to trust video footage of any kind and will have a much harder time telling what is the truth.

I don't think standard economic indicators are tuned to detect these externalities in the short to medium term.

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

#225

Post by eichin »

m4rtink wrote: post #193
sillyfluke wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As someone who worked for Nokia around the iPhone launch (on map search, not phones directly) - I also wanted to believe this at the time. But in retrospect, it feels like what actually mattered was that capacitive multi-touch screens were the only non-garbage interface, and only Apple bought FingerWorks...

Not clear that this is a helpful interpretation, other than "we're in the primordial ooze stage and the thing that matters will be something none of the current players have", but that's hard to take to the bank :-)

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

#226

Post by fooster »

afavour wrote: post #104
XenophileJKO wrote: post #99

Earlier 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…

>That is currently sold to them at deep discount by companies that are losing billions.

They're not losing billions on inference, they're losing billions in the arms race of training.

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

#228

Post by bdangubic »

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #112

I have an alternative explanation: for the areas where AI is giving employees serious productivity gains, they're working for 20 minutes, playing wordle/resting/relaxing for 7 hours, 40 minutes, and delivering exactly as much as they were before.

This would check out at companies where you could “coast” without any oversight and were just randomly estimating some “points” on your “stories” or whatever BS process is in place.

On real projects and real teams you can’t do this. If you did what you did in your example you’d say log 8hrs of work, right? Your team lead will ask a simple question: “did you write this code or was it AI-assisted? and what exactly here took 8hrs?” so you could do this once and 2nd time you’d be changing the status on linkedin to looking for work

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

#229

Post by dodu_ »

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'll take it over seemingly endless deluge of FUD-slop from the past 4 years that claims you better get ready for the AI takeover coming for all the jobs in just-long-enough of a timeline that nobody will remember to hold the author accountable when their prediction is woefully incorrect, where the "advice" in the article is conveniently to pay for more AI tools.

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

#230

Post by viking123 »

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'…

This is the same CEO that is selling a room full of old boomers that AI will double their lifespan? Oh yeah it's that guy..
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