- Gen AI: Too Much Spend, Too Little Benefit?: https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/top-of-mind/gen-ai-too... (Goldman Sachs)
- AI’s $600 Billion Question: https://sequoiacap.com/article/ais-600b-question/ (Sequoia Capital)
- The Simple Macroeconomics of AI: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w32487/w324... (MIT / Daron Acemoglu)
Obviously there is risk, but can't we really extrapolate the AI gains forward and just see how big it's ahead to become?
I was called quite disruptive in class when I was young. I'm sure my teachers never meant it as a compliment.
Isn't that the point here? That everyone thinks massive disruption is happening and everyone is 100xing their productivity, but it's not actually showing up in the numbers anywhere?
Lenders are doubting their return. People's benefits have nothing to do with it. The benefits would go in a minute, if doing so yielded a better return.
Because what many of us are seeing is meaningless “productivity” improvements.
If at the end of the day you don’t have more users paying for your product or the same users and paying more, then what’s the point of being more productive?
Where is this disruption? The longer we go, the more people report that the supposed net-gain of easily 100s of percents is not visible.
I do strongly believe "It's just a tool" - A powerful one, but not one like the invention of the steam machine.
You increased the amount of code written by 10x but unless there’s a 10x increase in demand, its worth nothing
Prior to the steam engine, almost all energy used by the human civilization has been generated by human and/or animal muscles. Yes, there have been other (water/wind mills, sailing boats), but the application of those has been rather limited to very specific tasks and/or locations.
Prior to current AI, almost all 'mental' work has been done by human minds. There have been some intrusion by calculators/computer systems, but their applicability has been rather limited. AI promises to do to mental labour what steam engine (and later power tools) did for manual labour. (Including the atrophy of muscle/mind ...)
Regarding 'It's just a tool': How much emphasis do you put on 'just'? Starting to use a new tool (especially if it is a powerful one) has many downstream consequences, and 'how' the tool is used (not only by an individual, but as a society as a whole) matters a lot.
That’s the point: making growth sustainable over time.
The internet and railroads were highly beneficial, still crashed the economy.
Writing a lot of code doesn’t mean much when the moat was never “writing a lot of code”
The benefit is neither here nor there - it's whether the borrowed money will ever be repaid on the lenders' terms.
It’s just coding. It’s not every technical profession at all.
We’ll see how they develop but so far they are not capable of operating independently.