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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

#241

Post by great_psy »

palmotea wrote: post #239
great_psy wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (arguabl…

> 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. But isn't that bad for the AI companies, too? Because then people just run an ~2026 SOTA performance open source model on their laptop for free and not pay any subscription.

Yes and no.

Regular folks will not pay Anthropic, but NSA, NASA or research labs might.

I’m not implying this will be a good time for AI companies. I am saying AI as a technology can provide value without it being controlled by only 3 companies.

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

#242

Post by ericd »

slopinthebag wrote: post #191
ericd wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, it might actually decrease GDP in this case, because it's making it so I can just quickly make products that I would've otherwise purchased. But it's also made me more productive, and purchasing things isn't good for its own sake. So maybe measuring progress via GDP isn't ideal?

The thing I'm making with the APIs is very helpful to me, maybe it'll be helpful to others, who knows.

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

#243

Post by dw_arthur »

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…

It should show in decreased revenue for the company you didn't buy the product from. It also should show up at your company either as increased profit margin, increased investment, increase in total employee wages, or increased dividend payout.

If this is happening on a widespread basis in the economy we should see evidence of it sometime this year and that's what investors are anticipating with SaaS stocks.

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

#244

Post by falcor84 »

windows2020 wrote: post #235
falcor84 wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sufferi…

Bees seem like they know what's going on. What about a cell, though? A virus?

It depends on the cell; an amoeba for example clearly seems to know what's going on around it. A virus on the other hand, having no metabolism of its own clearly doesn't.

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

#245

Post by flowerthoughts »

preommr wrote: post #21
d_watt wrote: post #11

It took 20 years for computers to "add" to the economy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox

I am not saying this to be sarcastic - the problem is that people from OpenAI/Antrhopic are saying things like superintelligence in 3 years, or boris saying coding is solved and that 100% of his code is written by AI. It's not good enough to just say oreo ceos say we need to more oreos. There's a real grey area where these tools are useful in some capacity, and in that confusion we're spending billions. Too may peopl…

> the problem is that people from OpenAI/Antrhopic are saying things like superintelligence in 3 years

An even bigger problem is that people listen to them even after they say rationally implausible things. When even Yann LeCunn is putting his arms up and saying "this approach won't work," it's pretty bad.

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

#246

Post by diedyesterday »

1. The initial stage of adoption of AI will be more of a shift (some plus + here and some minus there) and reorientation and restructuring than net exponential growth.

2. Also a good portion of contribution of AI is where it's not taken into account by metrics like GDP. I have seen an explosion of FOSS projects especially in my own area and I'm sure it's pretty much are the case for many other areas.

3. Also there will be a sink-like effect with effects of AI on net wealth production. Like Earth's own oxygenation event which took billions for the produced oxygen to (after saturating all the sinks like Earth' iron reserves and turning them to Iron ore) ultimately find its way into the atmosphere.

4. Also I'm not sure what is exactly being counted on as contribution of AI to economy. Is the data-center build-outs and growth of chip companies,etc. included in this metric in AI's favor? ...

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

#247

Post by mirekrusin »

__loam wrote: post #72
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…

Can't even spell bureaucracy while you're making big predictions like this.

Now you know it wasn't written by a bot.

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

#248

Post by OneMorePerson »

addled wrote: post #195
ughitsaaron wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For me it was similar, but I think it was more about a lack of a natural friction. Normally when coding there was the "hit" of seeing something work, but the actually planning/coding/debugging would eventually wear me out, so I'd stop for the day. Now it can all just be endless "hit" of success and nothing that makes me feel tired or annoyed.

The reason I believe this is because I recently went through a really annoying battle with Claude trying to get it to stop being so strict with its sandbox. I wanted it to simply load some sanitized text from a source online, and it just would not do it. The sessions when I was sorting that out were so much easier to stop and moderate than the ones where everything just kept flowing effortlessly.

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

#249

Post by OneMorePerson »

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 is something people always claim, but this explanation assumes that everyone is "colluding". The guy who wants to get a promotion and get paid 50% more cause he has 3 kids isn't going to play along, he is going to at least put in 4 hours a day of real work, and then everyone else is going to look 20x less productive. There are teams where people are mailing it in so hard that they will find ways to kick out the hard workers, but this doesn't exist across entire orgs/companies/industries.

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

#250

Post by OneMorePerson »

mym1990 wrote: post #151
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.

Its partly this, but hardly any developers I know were writing code for 8 hours a day. 4 on a good day and the rest was meetings or other auxiliary activities. From what I have gathered, companies have no idea how to measure the productivity gains yet.

When you look into the edge cases developer productivity is really tough to understand. It's easy as the engineer yourself to see your own productivity as easy to understand, but if you are ever in the position of trying to assess someone's productivity that you don't work with day to day, its really difficult. There are people who are able to achieve millions in yearly savings with like 10 lines of code updated per year, perf debugging types. I'd never believe that up front if I hadn't seen it after the fact.
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