Gross Domestic Product is the monetary value of all final goods and services produced within a country's borders during a specified period (typically a quarter or a year). GDP is the standard headline measure of economic output and is used for cross-country comparison, growth-rate calculation, and macroeconomic policy analysis.
GDP has well-known limitations. It does not count unpaid labor, treats identical goods as equivalent regardless of quality, and can rise when activities like pollution cleanup substitute for prevention. Alternative measures — Genuine Progress Indicator, Human Development Index, various well-being indices — address specific GDP shortcomings but have not displaced it as the default.
For technology coverage, GDP matters mostly as context for productivity arguments. Claims that AI will add "trillions to global GDP" are dependent on how AI productivity gains flow through the statistical conventions that GDP is calculated with — and those conventions don't always capture gains from unpriced or intangible inputs, which complicates the measurement of AI's macroeconomic impact.