McKinsey Report Finds Generative AI Could Add Up To $4.4 Trillion a Year To the Global Economy (venturebeat.com) 39
According to global consulting leader McKinsey and Company, Generative AI could add "2.6 trillion to $4.4 trillion annually" to the global economy. That's almost the "economic equivalent of adding an entire new country the size and productivity of the United Kingdom to the Earth ($3.1 trillion GDP in 2021)," notes VentureBeat. From the report: The $2.6 trillion to $4.4 trillion economic impact figure marks a huge increase over McKinsey's previous estimates of the AI field's impact on the economy from 2017, up 15 to 40% from before. This upward revision is due to the incredibly fast embrace and potential use cases of GenAI tools by large and small enterprises. Furthermore, McKinsey finds "current generative AI and other technologies have the potential to automate work activities that absorb 60 to 70% of employees' time today." Does this mean massive job loss is inevitable? No, according to Alex Sukharevsky, senior partner and global leader of QuantumBlack, McKinsey's in-house AI division and report co-author. "You basically could make it significantly faster to perform these jobs and do so much more precisely than they are performed today," Sukharevsky told VentureBeat. What that translates to is an addition of "0.2 to 3.3 percentage points annually to productivity growth" to the entire global economy, he said.
However, as the report notes, "workers will need support in learning new skills, and some will change occupations. If worker transitions and other risks can be managed, generative AI could contribute substantively to economic growth and support a more sustainable, inclusive world." Also, the advent of accessible GenAI has pushed up McKinsey's previous estimates for workplace automation: "Half of today's work activities could be automated between 2030 and 2060, with a midpoint in 2045, or roughly a decade earlier than in our previous estimates."
Specifically, McKinsey's report found that four types of tasks -- customer operations, marketing and sales, software engineering and R&D -- were likely to account for 75% of the value add of GenAI in particular. "Examples include generative AI's ability to support interactions with customers, generate creative content for marketing and sales and draft computer code based on natural-language prompts, among many other tasks." [...] Overall, McKinsey views GenAI as a "technology catalyst," pushing industries further along toward automation journeys, but also freeing up the creative potential of employees. "I do believe that if anything, we are getting into the age of creativity and the age of creator," Sukharevsky said.
However, as the report notes, "workers will need support in learning new skills, and some will change occupations. If worker transitions and other risks can be managed, generative AI could contribute substantively to economic growth and support a more sustainable, inclusive world." Also, the advent of accessible GenAI has pushed up McKinsey's previous estimates for workplace automation: "Half of today's work activities could be automated between 2030 and 2060, with a midpoint in 2045, or roughly a decade earlier than in our previous estimates."
Specifically, McKinsey's report found that four types of tasks -- customer operations, marketing and sales, software engineering and R&D -- were likely to account for 75% of the value add of GenAI in particular. "Examples include generative AI's ability to support interactions with customers, generate creative content for marketing and sales and draft computer code based on natural-language prompts, among many other tasks." [...] Overall, McKinsey views GenAI as a "technology catalyst," pushing industries further along toward automation journeys, but also freeing up the creative potential of employees. "I do believe that if anything, we are getting into the age of creativity and the age of creator," Sukharevsky said.
And I could win the lottery tonight. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Generative AI Could Add Up To $4.4 Trillion a Year To the Global Economy
Wrong. It will not "add" anything. It will merely shift $4.4 Trillion from one place to another.
That's a stupid theory. You're saying noting we do can make any difference to the economy, and the economy will grow by exactly x amount regardless.
Re: (Score:3)
It all seems to be based on the premise that people will want to consume vast amounts of AI generated content. Even today we can see that a lot of people are turning away from AI content.
Re: (Score:1)
No, you see a bunch of blowhard "artists" making a big stink about it.
And then you see the same "artists" hypocritically sucking off Adobe and praising the generative fill AI feature when it finally came out in Photoshop "Because it makes life soo easy, they will be using it all the time in their workflow!". Which is what everyone had been telling them the whole time.
The common person doesn't give two shits OR a fuck if the text / picture was AI generated, and probably can't even differentiate between gener
Re: And I could win the lottery tonight. (Score:3)
I hardly see many anti-AI artists supporting Adobe when it comes to their AI efforts period. The lack of even an opt-out feature as well as non-existent quality control for Firefly burned pretty much almost all their good will. Generative Fill only really rubbed salt in the wound at best. Guess we see the ongoing debate from different angles.
As for SD images, the only ones I have seen that could be considered close to good enough to fool most people tend to be from some artists that reworked the outputs mul
Re: And I could win the lottery tonight. (Score:2)
Issue is that a lot (and I do mean a lot) of generative AI content is either generic porn or artstation knockoffs. I guess it is fine if you are addicted to those two, but the average quality is mediocre at best. Technology does not compensate for a lack of creativity clearly.
Some artists have managed to incorporate it into their workflow, but doing it right requires quite a bit of work and experimentation so as avoid making the mistakes gen AI typically does such as wonky hands, blurry details, or just bor
Re: (Score:2)
$4.4 Trillion, for who though? Corporation shareholders, I guess?
"Global economy" = whose pockets really? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:"Global economy" = whose pockets really? (Score:5, Insightful)
I doubt this adds $4.4 trillion to the economy, it's probably instead replacing a lot of existing economy. If there was this much money waiting to be used you could do it by hiring more people and getting unemployment way down. Probably someone has a formula that shows how much profit you could have if you could get cheap labor.
Also, one of my first thoughts, was that much money is great for taxing at a high rate. After all, the AI isn't a real person, you're not causing any financial hardship to someone by taxing them excessively. If we're not allowed to tax the wealthy out of the myth that this kills jobs, then why not instead just tax the AI that is stealing jobs? Free money, even the anti-tax conservatives have to love that idea.
Re: (Score:2)
I doubt this adds $4.4 trillion to the economy, it's probably instead replacing a lot of existing economy. If there was this much money waiting to be used you could do it by hiring more people and getting unemployment way down.
It is a pretty conservative estimate, only accounting for a 2.4-4% increase to global GDP. I could certainly see generative AI having at least that amount of impact on GDP. The efficiency savings from AI will ultimately result in more corporate projects being funded or more investment in new companies, causing that GDP increase. Unemployment already is a bottleneck for many companies, considering it is at record lows right now.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1, Interesting)
Absolutely, these AI builds on the accumulated knowledge of humanity to enable a tiny fraction of world owners to gain more wealth, scale, power, security (via barriers to entry usually through regulations) and monopolies (IP). Expect more misery, and not a more empowered, happier society because the economic structure is of value capture and hoarding, structures for monetization. Did we steal the planet relative to everything else because we outsmarted all other species? Yes. Well, if a small group of peop
Re: (Score:2)
That's a fancy way of saying consolidation of wealth and terrible loss of a huge number of jobs.
Precisely. It will make bigger businesses, the first up at bat with these AI chatbot things, a LOT of money, very quickly, as it seems everyone is obsessed with AI everything, whether it works well or not. But "global economy" has become code for "making the rich richer and damn the rest" for us. As long as Wall Street and the ultra-rich are happy? Who cares about anything else?
McKinsey Report? (Score:3)
What's AI got to do with sex?
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Nothing to do with Sex.
Everything to do with McSex.
McKinsey...high-end grifters (Score:5, Interesting)
The only value added segment I see are scams...making phising sites and false products that look convincing enough to fleece the gullible.
I've seen the code it generates and it's garbage. Generative AI can't generate good code. If it could, we wouldn't be reading McKinsey reports, but viewing amazing games built by Google, Microsoft, and others. We would be watching as JavaScript/Java/C# runtimes break new boundaries in performance. We would be kicking the tires on code generation tools that actually solved real-world problems.
The AI-generated code is even worse than the AI generated porn. Look at pornpen.ai. It takes like 10 minutes to generate an image and when it does: 1. it doesn't look very realistic at all 2. if there's more than one person, they often get fused...so while it was "interesting" to see 2 hot topless women share a torso, it was also horrifying and even ignoring the mistakes of extra fingers or fused pelvises, the find details like their breasts looked horribly fake. Why am I bringing up porn?...besides the fact that I'm a perv, it's a visual and understandable representation of the state of AI. It's also a VERY easy problem to solve. There's billions of times more tit pics floating around the internet than there are lines of code. The problem of making a convincing breast from trillions of images to train with is much easier than making correct code that works efficiently and has no serious vulnerabilities.
There are more boobies on the internet than anything. If generative AI can't generate convincing breasts with unfathomably large training sets...how is it going to solve your business problems?
This is a fad. It's amusing, but stupid. To quote mean girls, "Stop trying to make 'fetch' happen." I know many want to live out their science fiction fantasy of a world with functional AI, but it's not happening any time soon. The state of generative AI is that it is anything but intelligent. It has no clue what it's doing. It's fancy pattern matcher. If you tried to do anything with it we pay human beings to do now, it will lead to serious financial liability when it screws up. There's very little it can safely to that we actually pay people to do today.
Re: (Score:3)
I thought it was common knowledge that McKinsey peddles nothing but bullshit. They're good at selling ideas; that's all. The ideas themselves are pure shit. But they sell them really well.
Re: (Score:2)
This report confirms what I've always suspected: that McKinsey and Company are a bunch of high-end grifters.
Their entire business centers around management consultancy... so, what you say is basically a tautology.
Re: (Score:2)
Dude... I've been talking to chatbots for customer service for at *least* 3 years.
That ship has sailed.
If it all goes to the top (Score:1)
I get this with people on the left who want to bring in a bunch more immigrants because it raises the GDP. That's all well and good that the GDP goes up but I don't actually see any of that money. What I see is an H1B Visa applicant
McKinsey Report Generated by ChatGPT finds... (Score:3)
From the same guys who told AT&T ... (Score:2)
... in 1980 that the cell-phone market would only ammount to 900000 subscribers in 2000.
From the same company that in the late '90s after the Southall crash told Brtish rail to "maintain [the] infrastructure on an as-and-when basis", leading to the crashes of Paddington and Hatfield
Comes the gripping report of AI making 2.6~4.4 Trilllllllion U$D for the global economy.
Stay tuuuuuuuuned!
In the meantime, read the book "The Witch Doctors"
https://www.amazon.com/Witch-D... [amazon.com]
Link is NOT affiliated.
Re: (Score:1)
Yep, (Score:2)
and most of it will go to the .1%
Re: (Score:3)
Ultimately I guess we still have revolutions, if the system sucks too much, but that's a very painful way of fixing the system.
Thatâ(TM)s great but (Score:1)
This would be $540 for every living human. (Score:1)
Much more if you only give it to people with net worths under $50,000.
Something tells me, about 200 people will end up with all of it.
Not as much money as the Metaverse will make ... (Score:1)
$4.4T a year to the global economy (Score:2)
of pure BS and unemployment.
time to disband McKinsey and their ilk
Adding Money versuses Adding Jobs (Score:2)
Yep - the woke are on it (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I need to check my privilege.
Erm, does this mean I am cancelled?
Re: (Score:2)