Daron Acemoglu, a winner of the noble of economics in 2024, gave me some answers. “There is a lot of hype in the industry,” he told me in a phone call. Yes, he said, AI companies have achieved some “impressive success”, but he added that many financial and economic calculations for mere “projections into the future, which are sometimes exaggerated”.
Professor Acemoglu, a with economy with the effects of technical innovations on global economy, is skeptical about the fervent AI claims. He rates AI as a major progress, perhaps with a macroeconomic effect that resembles the phone, which was not small.
But don't let yourself be carried away, he said, at least not yet. He doubts that the complete, advanced artificial general intelligence can “do everything a person can do, but more”. In the next ten years, he therefore estimated productivity from the distribution of impressive but limited AI engines, which only increase the size of the US economy by about 1 percent or about 0.1 percent per year.
That doesn't seem to be enough to count as a technological revolution in economic terms, I said.
“Well, it's not trivial,” said Professor Acemoglu, “but there are one or two sizes less” than ai bull “that you want to hear.” Of course, he added, if one or more companies reach real, complete artificial general intelligence in the next few years, his estimates will turn out to be far too low.
Relentlessly optimistic
It is the winning season in Wall Street, and in the past two weeks there have been some US companies that have developed and invested strongly in AI, and have said the estimates of the AI future positively and openly.