Finance & economics | Doesn’t compute

What happened to the artificial-intelligence investment boom?

Perhaps AI is a busted flush. Perhaps the revolution will just take time

An illustration of a dollar bill that’s half pixelated as if it’s being generated by a computer.
Illustration: The Economist/Unsplash
|San Francisco

Many economists believe that generative artificial intelligence (AI) is about to transform the global economy. A paper published last year by Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu of Epoch, a research firm, argues that “explosive growth”, with gdp zooming upwards, is “plausible with ai capable of broadly substituting for human labour”. Erik Brynjolfsson of Stanford University has said that he expects ai “to power a productivity boom in the coming years”.

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This article appeared in the Finance & economics section of the print edition under the headline “The missing investment boom”

From the January 13th 2024 edition

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