I have been doing some research on the 'productivity paradox'. Fascinating stuff.

Turns out productivity growth stalled after the 1960s and has been very low ever since. No one can properly explain why. One thing stands out: investment in compute drives economic growth, but crucially doesn't demonstrably increase productivity either of labor or capital, or total factor productivity.

What I suspect is happening is: computers and software drive wealth concentration. 60 years on from the first general commercial computer, IBM 360, the entire industry has been driven by redistributing wealth towards an ever diminishing number of public companies.

With that perspective, what is happening with LLMs seems to fall right into the 6 decade pattern. I'm still in the middle of reading the 2 dozen papers or so I found about it so far but it has been fascinating.