Computers unleashed economic growth. Will artificial intelligence?

Almost two years have passed since OpenAI released GPT-3.5 to great fanfare. Three main factors contributed to the eventual arrival of a computer-age productivity boom: companies ramped up investment in information technology, computer and software prices fell rapidly, and bosses found new ways to integrate the tech into their operations. Growth in software investment over the past year was about three times lower than in the late 1990s in real terms, and remains well below the long-term average. The AI era has yet to see a corresponding decrease in prices: over the past five years, those for software and information-processing equipment have barely budged. In the 1990s the retailer boosted productivity by embedding a new software system—Retail Link—into its operations, granting suppliers real-time access to sales and inventory data.