[vjk800]

We've had the AI tools for maybe two years, and they have only gotten really good in the past half a year or so. For fuck's sake, adopting electricity took like 50 years, why would you expect to see any kind of effect from the AI so quickly? The tools are still developing - rapidly - and people are still figuring out the best usage patterns for it.

[graeber_28927]

Electricity analogy is fairplay, but ChatGPT had something like 110% global adoption 5 minutes after its release. The infrastructure and the electrical appliances had to catch up, but the Internet is all built out already.

So I think it's fair to be looking at results a few years in.

Andrey Karpathy famously mentioned in an interview with Dwarkesh Patel [0], that the computer doesn't show up on GDP numbers, there's no noticeable jump or change in slope. Even if Excel is so damn fast, people are likely not drawing its full potential, and institutions are likely actively resisting change anyway.

My take is that the general population hasn't found the productive levers yet, they're at the stage where they're happy to drag down and auto generate the date list in Excel, but don't know to adjust diagrams or read function docs, not to even mention VBS scripting. And the enthusiast (dev) community I'd say is starting adoption with internal tools, and shot-in-the-dark apps, but big successes need time to mature in all the other ways (design, reliability, user feedback, marketing...), which comes back to what you said also, that needs time. Product Market Fit isn't happening automatically by chance or good prompting, I would like to think.

[0] https://youtu.be/lXUZvyajciY?is=CBJI4hIr6w_UHVs9

[stephbook]

"the computer doesn't show up on GDP numbers, there's no noticeable jump or change in slope."

That's certainly an interesting take. Where do these people think the 1-2% annual growth came from — steam machine late adopters?

[AnimalMuppet]

There was 1-2% annual growth in the 1950s. It didn't come from the computer revolution.

The conundrum in the 1980s and 1990s was, growth hasn't increased, despite all the computer adaptation. Why not?

[whstl]

I agree. I'd also argue that local effects of productivity were already visible since the start of ChatGPT. I was already using it a lot back then for writing tests and as a "smarter scaffolding", even before Copilot and such. Often cutting the time of doing something from half an hour to a few seconds.

IMO the bottleneck remains the same: doing proper engineering is more than writing code. Even 20 years ago a big corp would spend a few years writing something that a startup would do in weeks (and yes: even 20 years ago) just because of laser-focused requirements, better processes/less bureaucracy, using the right tools for the job and having less friction in tooling. That hasn't changed.