The Download: AI's impact on the economy, and DeepSeek strikes again

Any far-reaching new technology is always uneven in its adoption, but few have been more uneven than generative AI. That makes it hard to assess its likely impact on individual businesses, let alone on productivity across the economy as a whole. At one extreme, AI coding assistants have revolutionized the work of software developers. At the other extreme, most companies are seeing little if any benefit from their initial investments. That has provided fuel for the skeptics who maintain that--by its very nature as a probabilistic technology prone to hallucinating--generative AI will never have a deep impact on business. To students of tech history, though, the lack of immediate impact is normal.