AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox • Hacker News Board

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#201

Post by altmanaltman » Wed, Feb 18, 2026, 5:55 AM UTC

amrocha wrote: post #73

afavour wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone asked “where are all the small businesses”, this was a reply to that. Small businesses don’t have entire art departments.

Gotcha, so the impact of AI is small businesses get to save a couple hundred dollars and the cost is only 2% of your countries GDP. That’s good.

No, that's just the impact that you're not going to hear in the news ("Small business saves a couple of hundred dollars" is not a good headline). But that's not the only "impact of AI". The bigger impacts are reflected in the news and the stock market almost on a daily basis over the last two years.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#202

Post by casey2 » Wed, Feb 18, 2026, 5:56 AM UTC

Of course AI is bullshit. If you couldn't just use it yourself and figure that out then ask yourself why people like Bezos or Altman are perfectly happy "investing" other people's money but not their own. If they actually believed their own bullshit they would personally be investing all of their money AND taking on personal debt. Instead Bezos, a guy worth ~200B, sells 5B worth of stock to invest in "AI-adjacent" (power generation) industry, while making amazon invest 200B in data centers. Talk about conflict of interest! WTF!

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#203

Post by hawaiianbrah » Wed, Feb 18, 2026, 5:58 AM UTC

kamaal wrote: post #39

crazygringo wrote: post #21

Just to be clear, the article is NOT criticizing this. To the contrary, it's presenting it as expected , thanks to Solow's productivity paradox [1]. Which is that information technology similarly (and seemingly shockingly) didn't produce any net economic gains in the 1970's or 1980's despite all the computerization. It wasn't until the mid-to-late 1990's that information technology finally started to show clear benef…

One part of the system moving fast doesn't change the speed of the system all that much. The thing to note is, verifying if something got done is harder and takes time in the same ballpark as doing the work. If people are serious about AI productivity, lets start by addressing how we can verify program correctness quickly. Everything else is just a Ferrari between two traffic red lights.

Really? I disagree that verifying is as hard as doing the work yourself. It’s like P != NP.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#204

Post by autoexec » Wed, Feb 18, 2026, 5:58 AM UTC

slopinthebag wrote: post #169

whynotminot wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s also pretty wild to me how people still don’t really even know how to use it. On hacker news, a very tech literate place, I see people thinking modern AI models can’t generate working code. The other day in real life I was talking to a friend of mine about ChatGPT. They didn’t know you needed to turn on “thinking” to get higher quality results. This is a technical person who has worked at Amazon. You can’t expec…

> I see people thinking modern AI models can’t generate working code. Really? Can you show any examples of someone claiming AI models cannot generate working code? I haven't seen anyone make that claim in years, even from the most skeptical critics.

I've seen it said plenty of the times that the code might work eventually (after several cycles of prompting and testing), but even then the code you get might not be something you'd want to maintain, and it might contain bugs and security issues that don't (at least initially) seem to impact its ability to do whatever it was written to do but which could cause problems later.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#205

Post by transcriptase » Wed, Feb 18, 2026, 5:59 AM UTC

Mentioning AI in an earnings call means fuck all when what they’re actually referring to is toggling on the permissions for borderline useless copilot features across their enterprise 365 deployments or being convinced to buy some tool that’s actually just a wrapper around API calls to a cheap/outdated OpenAI model with a hidden system prompt.

Yeah, if your Fortune 500 workplace is claiming to be leveraging AI because it has a few dozen relatively tech illiterate employees using it to write their em dash/emoji riddled emails about wellness sessions and teams invites for trivia events… there’s not going to be a noticeable uptick in productivity.

The real productivity comes from tooling that no sufficiently risk adverse pubco IS department is going to let their employees use, because when all of their incentives point to saying no to installing anything ever, the idea of giving the permissions required for agentic AI to do anything useful is a non-starter.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#206

Post by thisoneisreal » Wed, Feb 18, 2026, 6:02 AM UTC

jurschreuder wrote: post #124

Workers may see the LLM as a productivity boost because they can basically cheat a their homework. As a CEO I see it as a massive clog up of vast amounts of content that somebody will need to check. A DDoS of any text-based system. The other day I got a document of 155 pages in Whatsapp. Thanx. Same with pull requests. Who will check all this?

Just yesterday one of my junior devs got an 800-line code review from an AI agent. It wasn't all bad, but is this kid literally going to have to read an essay every time he submits code?

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#207

Post by mrtksn » Wed, Feb 18, 2026, 6:02 AM UTC

alephnerd wrote: post #183

mrtksn wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a WhatsApp group full of doctors, managers, journalist and engineers (including software) in age of 30-60 I asked if anyone heard of openclaw and only 3 people heard of it from influencers, none used it. But from my social feed the impression was that it is taking over the world:) I asked it because I am building something similar since some tome and I thought its over they were faster than me but as it appears th…

> I asked it because I am building something similar since some tome and I thought its over they were faster than me If you have been working on a usecase similar to OpenClaw for sometime now I'd actually say you are in a great position to start raising now . Being first to market is not a significant moat in most cases. Few people want to invest in the first company in a category - it's too risky. If there are a cou…

Do you think that it is a good idea to release it first on iOS, announce on HN and Producthunt? How would you do?

On my app the tech is based on running agent generated code on JavaScriptCore to do things like OpenClaw, I’m wrapping the JS engine with the missing functionality like networking, file access and database access so I believe I will not have a problem with releasing it on Apple AppStore as I use their native stack. Then since this stack is also OS, I’m making a version that will run on Linux, the idea being users develops their solution on their device(iOS&Mac currently) see it working and and then deploys on a server with a tap of a button, so it keeps running.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#208

Post by thesmtsolver2 » Wed, Feb 18, 2026, 6:02 AM UTC

simonw wrote: post #65

amrocha wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s lots of slop out there, that doesn’t mean it’s actually good or useful code.

Keep moving those goal posts.

> where are all the amazing open source programs

> amazing

Nobody moved the goal posts.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#209

Post by bigbuppo » Wed, Feb 18, 2026, 6:03 AM UTC

whynotminot wrote: post #143

crazygringo wrote: post #21

Just to be clear, the article is NOT criticizing this. To the contrary, it's presenting it as expected , thanks to Solow's productivity paradox [1]. Which is that information technology similarly (and seemingly shockingly) didn't produce any net economic gains in the 1970's or 1980's despite all the computerization. It wasn't until the mid-to-late 1990's that information technology finally started to show clear benef…

It’s also pretty wild to me how people still don’t really even know how to use it. On hacker news, a very tech literate place, I see people thinking modern AI models can’t generate working code. The other day in real life I was talking to a friend of mine about ChatGPT. They didn’t know you needed to turn on “thinking” to get higher quality results. This is a technical person who has worked at Amazon. You can’t expec…

And it will get worse once the UX people get ahold of it.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#210

Post by slopinthebag » Wed, Feb 18, 2026, 6:05 AM UTC

autoexec wrote: post #204

slopinthebag wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I see people thinking modern AI models can’t generate working code. Really? Can you show any examples of someone claiming AI models cannot generate working code? I haven't seen anyone make that claim in years, even from the most skeptical critics.

I've seen it said plenty of the times that the code might work eventually (after several cycles of prompting and testing), but even then the code you get might not be something you'd want to maintain, and it might contain bugs and security issues that don't (at least initially) seem to impact its ability to do whatever it was written to do but which could cause problems later.

Yeah but that's a completely different thing.