“Reports Of AI Not Progressing Or Offering Mundane Utility Are Often Greatly Exaggerated” by Zvi

In the wake of the confusions around GPT-5, this week had yet another round of claims that AI wasn’t progressing, or AI isn’t or won’t create much value, and so on. There were reports that one study in particular impacted Wall Street, and as you would expect it was not a great study. Situational awareness is not what you’d hope.

I’ve gathered related coverage here, to get it out of the way before whatever Google is teasing (Gemini 3.0? Something else?) arrives to potentially hijack our attention.

We’ll start with the MIT study on State of AI in Business, discuss the recent set of ‘AI is slowing down’ claims as part of the larger pattern, and then I will share a very good attempted explanation from Steven Byrnes of some of the ways economists get trapped into failing to look at what future highly capable AIs would [...]

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Outline:

(01:02) Standing On Lack of AI Business

(04:23) Claims Of Zero Returns Do Not Mean What You Might Think

(05:35) Crossing The Divide

(09:23) Unrealistic (or Premature) Expectations

(10:40) Claims Of Prohibitive Lock-In Effects Are Mostly Hype

(12:10) Nothing Ever Changes About Claims That Nothing Ever Changes

(14:20) Ask What AI Can Do For You

(15:48) The Pattern Of Claiming a Slowdown Continues

(18:28) A Sensible Move

(18:39) Who Deserves The Credit And Who Deserves The Blame

(20:39) Mistakes From Applying Standard Economics To Future AIs

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First published:

August 26th, 2025

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EAdzemvd5kT8PyKnR/reports-of-ai-not-progressing-or-offering-mundane-utility

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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