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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

#261

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…

"You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics " Robert Solow, Noble Prize winning economist, 1987.

I do believe I'm more productive, but my company is not charging much more for it. I'm working the same hours. Maybe that's the reason.

I just had a meeting yesterday when someone from the customer support team vibe-coded a solution in a few hours. The boss said, "Let's just give this as a gift; this product is not our focus and I want to show them how AI makes us work fast."

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

#262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[dead]

> I'm going to be honest, you can feel the AGI when you use newer agentic tools like OpenClaw or Claude. You're right. I can feel how far away it is and how these tools will in no way be capable of getting us there.

Are you using Claude Opus 4.6?

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

#263
post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?)

mined should be 'hand-picked' and lab made could be 'hand-crafted'.

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

#264

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'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…

An interesting parallel would be to look at what it took for humans to accept that sapience existed in non-humans, especially non-human primates.

On terminology, I would argue for non-biological intelligence. People can be awfully bioist (biological racist).

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

#265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes, and AGI will cure cancer, Alzheimers, Huntingtons and all other diseases known to man... by killing us all. /scifi

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

#266
post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics " Robert Solow, Noble Prize winning economist, 1987.

Oh well had a talk with a director at office. He says, instead of using AI to get more productive, people were using AI to get more lazy. 1) What he means to say is, say you needed to get something done. You could ask AI to write you a Python script which does the job. Next time around you could use the same Python script. But that's not how people are using AI, they basically think of a prompt as the only source of…

The way I'm using it is I have AI generate the tool (python script) and then it will use it for the task and for future tasks. As time goes on, the AI has more tools to call on which makes it (and me) more productive (higher quality work in less time)

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

#267

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…

This should show in up in higher margins for the company.

Is your company a software firm or considered something outside of pure software?

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

#268

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'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…

AI becoming conscious is different to LLMs doing so. Maybe more people are claiming that? I think AI will but LLMs won't.

It depends a bit what you mean by conscious but assuming it's human like then it incorporates a lot of feelings, vision, sound, thoughts and the like, things that are not language really. But we do it with neurons and some chemicals and I imagine you could do something like that with artificial neural networks and some computer version of the chemistry, but not just language really.

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

#269

A motivated entity publishing a bombastic opinion. Hard to know what to make of this. If you believe claims about an economy they have a vested interest in affecting, better be sure they’re trustworthy. These opinions masquerading as statistics is why governments create departments to publish trustworthy statistics.

What makes the statistics published by the government inherently more trustworthy?

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

#270

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.

Because the power users of the max plan are subsidized at the upper end of usage by people who don’t approach the per account limit. In other words, the power users are getting more than they pay for, because most people don’t reach that threshold. If you let the power users have dozens of accounts, it has a multiple effect on the proportion of accounts breaching the profitability line.
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