Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

gizmodo.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 296 posts

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

#131

Post by camillomiller »

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…

All of the technologies mentioned eventually made things better. In order to work, gen AI requires a general acceptance of widely spread mostly mediocre outcomes. I don’t see how the comparison stands.

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

#132

Post by ambicapter »

BobbyJo wrote: post #128
afavour wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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.

Well, training isn't going to end soon if these companies keep on competing with one another whilst being neck-and-neck, so I'm not sure why you would ignore the cost of training in the ROI calculation.

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

#133

Post by camillomiller »

Lalabadie wrote: post #125
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 would argue that the leadership and financial support behind AI (in its current form) does not have the patience or level-headedness to treat it as a long-term change, and is very much trying an all-or-nothing approach to making a long shift happen in a few years instead, or burn through nation-level budgets trying. To my eyes, the problem is not the productivity gain arriving slowly, but the immediate draining of…

This. They created an innovation black hole and we will all pay the long-term consequences of it

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

#134

Post by testbjjl »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #96
co_king_5 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[dead]

> Superintelligence in 3 years doesn't really sound that crazy given how quickly I can write code with Claude. I mean we're 90%-95% of the way there already. Yeah? So you must have a clear idea of where "there" is, and of the route from here to there? Forgive me my skepticism, but I don't believe you. I don't believe that you actually know.

The GO may be talking about Wordpress or something less than embedded code running on the hadron collider.

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

#135

Post by lattalayta »

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.

I've heard another version of this is that AI can speed up some tasks, but then employees still need to wait for meetings, approvals, other users to chime in, etc. that the net effect isn't as pronounced

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

#136

Post by testbjjl »

yifanl wrote: post #24
d_watt wrote: post #11

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

The difference being that AI's marketing has been significantly more prevalent than any early computing efforts.

More than Apple, on relative scale. Personally I don’t think that.

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

#137

Post by grogers »

boxedemp wrote: post #92
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'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 eventually.

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

#138

Post by testbjjl »

m4rtink wrote: post #114
jsheard wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention the investment is on another level. We've got companies with valuations in the hundred-billions talking about raising trillions to buy all of the computers in the world, before establishing whether they can even turn a profit, nevermind upend the economy.

I wonder how many actually beneficial projects will not be financed by investors too scared to try anything risky after the AI buble crashes and burns to the ground. :P

More than the last few crashes. Same players on different teams.

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

#139

Post by nanobuilds »

deterministic wrote: post #12

I completely agree. If AI can't do 100% of a job then you can't remove the job. And most jobs that can be automated already has been automated using traditional software.

Remove the job.. but have one super skilled coordinator managing and teaching agents the last 10% (or doing the 10% of the job)

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

#140

Post by whattheheckheck »

ozim wrote: post #47
preommr wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

AI companies don’t have 20 years, they have max 5 years where they have to turn to profit. They don’t have time to wait for all the companies to pick up use of AI tooling in their own pace. So they lie and try to manufacture demand. Well demand is there but they have to manufacture FOMO so that demand materializes now and not in 20 or 10 years.

Try 3
Post reply on HN