The entire U.S. economy is being propped up by the promise of productivity gains that seem very far from materializing.
Posted by TrixoftheTrade
The entire U.S. economy is being propped up by the promise of productivity gains that seem very far from materializing.
Posted by TrixoftheTrade
3 Comments
I think this is prior-confirming for lots of folks here. 50% of S&P 500 gains based on a promise and AI spending adding more to GDP than all consumer spending should make people a bit nervous.
I feel like the narrative of productivity gains is a sleight of hand. Pure productivity gains are great, but ultimately even then your overall profit is still constrained by gross revenue. The promise should be akin to industrial revolution ie how new sectors of demand open up promising new revenue streams in order to justify the valuations and whatnot
Seems like a good time to re-up [this recent WSJ article](https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/china-has-a-different-vision-for-ai-it-might-be-smarter-581f1e44).
> The U.S. is spending billions of dollars and burning gigawatts of energy in a rush to beat China to the next evolutionary leap in artificial intelligence—one so great, some boosters say, that it will rival the atomic bomb in its power to change the global order. China is running a different race.
> Since the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT nearly three years ago, Silicon Valley has spent mountains of money in pursuit of AI’s holy grail: artificial general intelligence that matches or beats human thinking. Enthusiasts say it will give the U.S. insurmountable military advantages, help cure cancer and solve climate change, and eliminate the need for people to perform routine work such as accounting and customer service.
> In China, by contrast, leader Xi Jinping has recently had little to say about AGI. Instead, he is pushing the country’s tech industry to be “strongly oriented toward applications”—building practical, low-cost tools that boost China’s efficiency and can be marketed easily.
> The diverging visions represent a head-to-head bet with significant stakes. If China’s gamble turns out to be wrong, it could find itself lagging far behind the U.S. in the most consequential technology of the 21st century. But if AGI remains a distant dream, as more people in Silicon Valley now believe, China will be in position to steal a march on its global rival in wringing the most out of AI in its current form, and spread its applications worldwide.