‘Superintelligence’ may never arrive, Deutsche Bank says. What that could mean for the U.S. economy.

Deutsche Bank’s Jim Reid has pushed back on the idea that artificial general superintelligence is an inevitable or imminent arrival. His argument, as reported, centers on a more incremental path: AI adoption that delivers productivity gains and, in his view, has the potential to create new jobs rather than simply displace existing ones.

The distinction matters for how markets price the technology cycle. Much of the recent enthusiasm around AI has rested on expectations of transformative, economy-wide leaps in output. A slower, more ordinary diffusion of productivity tools would still be economically meaningful, but it would look different — spread across industries and years rather than concentrated in a single breakthrough moment.

For the U.S. economy, the key variables to watch are measured productivity growth, labor-market churn, and whether firms convert AI spending into actual output gains. Reid’s framing suggests the debate is less about whether superintelligence appears and more about how unevenly and gradually its economic effects show up in the data.