This is a complete misrepresentation of what the Apollo piece can actually show, because it's not measuring the "payoff" of AI investments, but only the top level revenue of those companies (https://www.apollo.com/wealth/insights-news/insights/daily-s...).

This is a healthy corrective to the most insane AI maximalist takes (mass disemployment in late 2027, 10% GDP growth in a year), but it shows nothing about whether the actual economic impact of AI spending is.

First, to show that, you'd have to justify the counterfactuals (if those companies hadn't spent on AI, would their position be better or worse?)

Second, while AI spending is increasing rapidly, normal companies aren't spending 1% of their revenue on it. So how can you look at a noisy chart of revenue and expect that "oh, it's not up, the AI spending must be useless?" Those companies could be spending < 1% of their revenue on AI, deriving value from it, and it wouldn't be guaranteed to show in a chart like this.

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quixoticelixer- 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I saw something like the average anthropic employee thinks there will be 5% GDP growth because of AI, which is totally insane when a 1-2% extra growth will be an incredibly good result.

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mullingitover 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I suspect there is a lot of demand destruction that AI will end up causing, so many companies are running with inefficiencies that it's really easy to ferret out and fix with agents.

I wouldn't be surprised to see a 5% GDP drop with all the wasteful spend that will end up getting deleted.

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judge2020 an hour ago | parent [-]

I think you're mistaken. The US uses the expenditure approach to GDP, so (I believe) it doesn't matter if it's a LLM or an engineer doing the work to generate revenue.

(Of course this breaks down heavily if the human buying power stops constantly rising and there's de-facto less demand for goods and services)

	▲	mullingitover 44 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> (Of course this breaks down heavily if the human buying power stops constantly rising and there's de-facto less demand for goods and services) This is what I'm talking about. I can easily envision waves of layoffs in areas like the service industry that historically have been highly resistant to productivity increases in the past. Hell, there's a whole industry based on arguing with insurance companies over billing that could potentially evaporate overnight[1]. That alone is hundreds of billions of dollars, and that's just one example. [1] https://www.americanprogress.org/article/excess-administrati...

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3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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