April, 2, 2025: Growth of Products and Services
Peter Murmann writes: For two decades I wanted to get a good estimate of how the number of distinct products have grown in the economy. Once I thought I could simply use bar codes that have been attached to products for over decades but that tack proved a dead end. Today it asked two LLMs this question: “Can you provide estimate of the total number of products and services that are offered all over the world.” Claude answered: “The count would certainly be in the billions and possibly reaching into the tens of billions when including every variant, regional offering, and service permutation available worldwide.” The Amazon marketplace according to Claude has 300 to 600 million products. ChatGPT 4o was much more conservative put the total number at 100 million products. It also produced this graph show that the number of products and services has been growing exponentially.
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