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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

#281

Post by enraged_camel »

bgitarts wrote: post #267
enraged_camel wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Software firm, small, privately held.

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

#282

Post by DrewADesign »

rfv6723 wrote: post #211
DrewADesign wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like there’s a lot of resources being dumped into those data centers that will not be very useful. Saying it will all be worthwhile because we’ll have the buildings and the modest power grid updates (which are largely paid for by tax payers, anyway,) feels like saying a PS5 is a good long-term investment because the cords and box will still be good long ag after the PS5 has outlived its usefulness.

The "PS5" analogy fails to account for how "useless" hardware often triggers the next paradigm shift. For decades, traditionalists dismissed high-end GPUs as expensive toys for gamers, yet that specific architecture became the accidental engine of the AI revolution.

And you imagine these incredibly expensive-to-operate, environmentally damaging, highly specialized, years-outdated GPUs will trigger some sort of technological revolution that won’t be infinitely better served by the shiny new GPUs of the day that will not only be dramatically more powerful, but offer a ton more compute for the amount of electricity used?

The AI use of GPUs didn’t stem from a glut of outdated, discarded units with nearly no market value. All of those old discarded GPUs were, and still are, worthless digital refuse.

The closest analog i can think of to what you’re referring to is cluster computing with old commodity PCs that got companies like Google and Hotmail off the ground… for a few years until they could afford big boy servers and now all of those, and most current PCs on the verge of obsolescence, are also worthless digital refuse.

The big difference is that Google et al chose those PC clusters because they were cheap, commodity pieces right off-the-bat, not because they were narrowly scoped specialty hardware pieces that collectively cost hundreds of billions of dollars.

Your supposition fails to account for our history with hardware in any reasonable way.

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

#283

Post by BobbyJo »

judahmeek wrote: post #279
BobbyJo wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've raise 70-ish billion (which they have not spent all of) and have a run rate of 14 billion/y as of now. All said and done those are great economics so far, even accounting for those extra expenses.

Your argument requires the run rate to reduce over time until OpenAI reaches profitability. However, even OpenAI has publicized that they expect their expenses to exponentially increase for their models to remain competitive. So they are not profitable now & they have no idea of when they ever will be. Worse, Gemini has guaranteed funding for continued training whenever the AI hype bubble pops. Anthropic & OpenAI's o…

> Your argument requires the run rate to reduce over time until OpenAI reaches profitability

I was talking about Anthropic, but run rates don't need to go down, they just need to scale with revenue. For Anthropic specifically, this seems to already be the case.

OpenAI I don't know much about, but it would make sense if they were running at a terrible loss due to the ubiquity of free ChatGPT.

> Worse, Gemini has guaranteed funding for continued training whenever the AI hype bubble pops.

I don't see a scenario in which Anthropic has any problem financing their activity given their conversion rate of inputs to recurring revenue. Generally, bubbles popping means companies with bad balance sheets and bad economics die, but that just doesn't apply to Anthropic IMO.

OpenAI though, hard to say. They've lost all of the good will being the first mover gave them at this point, so they'll need to really lead product to make the economics work for them.

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

#284

Post by rfv6723 »

DrewADesign wrote: post #282
rfv6723 wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "PS5" analogy fails to account for how "useless" hardware often triggers the next paradigm shift. For decades, traditionalists dismissed high-end GPUs as expensive toys for gamers, yet that specific architecture became the accidental engine of the AI revolution.

And you imagine these incredibly expensive-to-operate, environmentally damaging, highly specialized, years-outdated GPUs will trigger some sort of technological revolution that won’t be infinitely better served by the shiny new GPUs of the day that will not only be dramatically more powerful, but offer a ton more compute for the amount of electricity used? The AI use of GPUs didn’t stem from a glut of outdated, disca…

Focusing exclusively on the physical decay and replacement cycle of hardware is a classic case of tunnel vision. It ignores the fact that the semiconductor industry’s true value lies in the evolution of manufacturing processes and architectural design rather than the lifespan of a specific unit. While individual chips eventually become obsolete, the compounding breakthroughs in logic and efficiency are what actually drive the technological revolution you are discounting.

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

#285

Post by DrewADesign »

rfv6723 wrote: post #284
DrewADesign wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you imagine these incredibly expensive-to-operate, environmentally damaging, highly specialized, years-outdated GPUs will trigger some sort of technological revolution that won’t be infinitely better served by the shiny new GPUs of the day that will not only be dramatically more powerful, but offer a ton more compute for the amount of electricity used? The AI use of GPUs didn’t stem from a glut of outdated, disca…

Focusing exclusively on the physical decay and replacement cycle of hardware is a classic case of tunnel vision. It ignores the fact that the semiconductor industry’s true value lies in the evolution of manufacturing processes and architectural design rather than the lifespan of a specific unit. While individual chips eventually become obsolete, the compounding breakthroughs in logic and efficiency are what actually…

Tunnel vision is ignoring the astonishing amount of money and environmental resources our society is dumping into these very physical, very temporally useful chips and their housing because… of what we learn by doing that. We should have dumped 1/100th of that money into research and we’d have been further along.

This isn’t a normal tech expenditure— the scale of this threatens the economy in a serious way if they get it wrong. That’s 401ks, IRAs, pension plans, houses foreclosed on, jobs lost, surgeries skipped… if we took a tiny fraction of this race-to-hypeland and put towards childhood food insecurity, we could be living in a fundamentally different looking society. The big takeaway from this whole ordeal has nothing to do with semiconductors — it is that rich guys playing with other people’s money singularly focused on becoming king of the hill are still terrible stewards of our financial system.

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

#286

Post by melagonster »

mattclarkdotnet wrote: post #156
melagonster wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>LLMs will become sentient or conscious. People who declare that AGI is coming.

AGI is completely orthogonal to consciousness. Crows seem pretty conscious to me, as does my cat, but I have no way to test or prove it. They are intelligent though.

You are right, but many people trust it.

P.S., hope your cat have nice day.

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

#287

Post by rfv6723 »

DrewADesign wrote: post #285
rfv6723 wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Focusing exclusively on the physical decay and replacement cycle of hardware is a classic case of tunnel vision. It ignores the fact that the semiconductor industry’s true value lies in the evolution of manufacturing processes and architectural design rather than the lifespan of a specific unit. While individual chips eventually become obsolete, the compounding breakthroughs in logic and efficiency are what actually…

Tunnel vision is ignoring the astonishing amount of money and environmental resources our society is dumping into these very physical, very temporally useful chips and their housing because… of what we learn by doing that. We should have dumped 1/100th of that money into research and we’d have been further along. This isn’t a normal tech expenditure— the scale of this threatens the economy in a serious way if they ge…

Dismissing massive capital expenditure as "hypeland" ignores the historical reality that speculative bubbles often build the physical foundation for the next century. The Panic of 1873 saw a catastrophic evaporation of debt-driven capital, yet the "worthless" railroads built during that frenzy remained in the ground. That redundant, overbuilt infrastructure became the literal backbone of American industrialization, providing the logistics required for a global economic shift that far outlasted the initial financial ruin.

Divorcing research from "learning by doing" is a recipe for a bureaucratic ivory tower. If you only funnel money into pure research without the messy, expensive, and often "wasteful" reality of large-scale deployment, you end up with an economy of academic metrics rather than industrial power.

The most damning evidence against the "research-only" model is the birth of the Transformer architecture. It did not emerge from an ivory tower funded by bureaucratic grants or academic peer-review cycles; it was forged in the fires of industrial practice.

History shows that a fixation on immediate social utility or "rational" cost analysis can be a strategic trap. During the same era, Qing Dynasty bureaucrats employed your exact logic, arguing that the astronomical costs of industrialization and rail were a waste of resources better spent elsewhere. By prioritizing short-term stability over "expensive" technological leaps, they missed the industrial window entirely. Two decades later, they faced an industrialized Japan in 1894 and suffered a total collapse. The "waste" of one generation is frequently the essential infrastructure of the next.

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

#288

Post by keybored »

albatross79 wrote: post #127
co_king_5 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[dead]

I give it until the next model that you'll be proclaiming how NOW IT'S THE REAL THING FOR SURE THIS TIME GUYS.

You’re replying to a parody account. My comment was a joke as well.

> > I’ve been a nay sayer up till two weeks ago when I actually sat down and

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47145729

Just deep fry my head at this point.

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

#289

Post by raddan »

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…

If your company is unwilling to pay for software when writing software, what makes you think other companies or individuals will be willing to pay for yours? Can’t they just vibe code _your_ solution too?

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

#290

Post by mym1990 »

OneMorePerson wrote: post #250
mym1990 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Its interesting to me that over the last 10 years of working in agile teams, not one team has analyzed burn rates to see if we are doing better/worse over time. Its like every sprint is a clean slate and no one actually gets better at their job...
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