The potential of generative artificial intelligence dominated discussions at Davos this month. Business leaders and policymakers are wondering if last year’s hype over large language models (LLMs), which fuelled a stock market rally, will actually be matched by productivity gains. This year — as the technology is increasingly adopted and commercialised — we will start to see its impact on our economies, societies and institutions.

Erik Brynjolfsson, a professor, author and senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, is an authority on gen-AI’s potential impact on productivity. He was among the first researchers to measure the productivity contributions of information technology. One of his mentors was Robert Solow, the Nobel Prize winner, who passed away last month.

In this interview he discusses Solow’s influence on his work, how gen AI ranks relative to historic technologies, and his concepts of the productivity “J-curve” and the “Turing trap”.