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Comment by kulahan | Hacker News Reader

As a % of GDP it doesn’t seem very large, but that’s because our GDP is so massive. This is still an entire Norway’s worth of GDP.

Like 1.2% isn’t a big percentage, but neither is 3.4% - our total military expenditures this year.

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You’re right that it’s large in an absolute sense, but any sector of the US economy is going to be large in an absolute sense. It’s not a very meaningful statement. Using percentages allows comparison to other items, which for some purposes gives a more useful sense of size. For instance, based on your numbers, AI expenditure is about 1/3 the total military expenditure. I tend to agree that this is less than I expected, and generally makes me feel a bit better about the (imo excessive) hype.

It's small as a part of the economy. It's huge as a completely new thing. The US economy in total has been growing something like an average of 2.5% over recent years. Something that is all-the-growth-of-the-last-year-in-one-place is pretty significant.

AI didn’t happen in one year. Netflix’s famous recommender system challenge kicked off in _2006_! And “Big Data” was all the rage ten years ago. The category “AI” includes these things.

We both know the NN boom of the 2010s pales in comparison to the post GPT3.5 era of LLMs.

Not in terms of the progress that was made. Almost everything relevant was invented back then.

agreed! only in terms of the perception of progress to the user

The entire population of Norway fits in Queens and Brooklyn. If everyone there decided to whittle spoons we'd be midly concerned about just what got in their water, but it won't be an existential crisis for the rest of us.

I will never understand people who use tiny European countries as meaningful comparisons to continent sized ones.

It helps people understand scale, since there is only one other kinda similar economic machine, and it's China. The EU is too loosely coordinated to really compare.

The population of Queens and Brooklyn is one of the most densely populated areas on the planet. I will never understand people who use massively outlier-sized cities as meaningful comparisons to nations.

Queens and Brooklyn are not outliers on the global scale. Most Asian countries has similar population densities if not higher. It's really the small cities in Europe that are the outliers here.

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