We've passed 100 paying institutions for www.alldayta.com! Super exciting to see profs using it in 26 countries, from Ivy League grad courses on down. About to release updates to our AI-driven, prof-in-loop, adaptive quiz: first thing we've done some students dislike (but that's a good thing!) 1/2

All Day TA

All Day TA is an AI EdTech company focused on higher education that enables professors to build customized AI teaching assistants for their courses. Available 24/7, it provides students with instant, ...

alldayta.com

Folks who know things: what has led so many universities to make speakers "register as suppliers" to get reimbursed? There is no way the law requires this and it's incredibly annoying. I assume the answer is "bureaucrats create bureaucracy", as always, but am I missing something?

Something I didn't expect that we can see in www.alldayta.com data: study effort is so correlated with exams. Across courses, if use on Finals week is "1", relative use on midterm week is .7, and on non-exam weeks .05-.1. For courses with no exam, use always sticks at the lower level.

A must watch - Mokyr's Nobel Prize speech on how ideas matter for progress, where AI fits here, and where bad institutional decisions might harm things. His ageless energy and unlimited memory for history are exactly today as I remember as his student 15 years ago. www.youtube.com/live/jQCkCcu...

2025 prize lectures in economic sciences | Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt

YouTube video by Nobel Prize

youtube.com

A theorem: AI debate today is a rehash of CP Snow's Two Cultures & the Bluesky-level-hostile response by Leavis. But Snow was right - it *should* be as embarrassing for educated people to not know to Laws of Thermodynamics (or basics of how ML works!) as to not read Shakespeare.

Hiring this year in economics or management? I try to read every JMP on innovation, entrepreneurship, or econ of AI; why not make the list public? Here's 54 candidates on the market this year (link below). Many great papers + NBER Innovation PhD boot camp grads! kevinbryanecon.com/2025innovati...

Doing my part on CBC's natl econ show to get normies to learn what 'feeling the AI' means. (More importantly, "compute sovereignty nonsense b/c you don't control stack" & "options aren't adopt AI at car plant or don't adopt, but adopt & keep plant or it goes to China".) www.cbc.ca/listen/live-...

© CBC/Radio-Canada 2025. All rights reserved.

cbc.ca

What a great day: legends of innovation economics Mokyr, Aghion and Howitt win the Nobel. Joel was a PhD advisor of mine, so need a full article! Included: good & bad explanations of the Indus Rev, Aghion's charisma, influence of Jon Hughes, French fashion houses: kevinbryanecon.com/mokyraghionh...

I know it's my company, but All Day TA AI-driven quizzes are so good. Student cheat on all take-home work. How do you get them to learn? Do even better than we used to by having them learn *as they do low-staked hw*. Here's use just this week in a Texas univ course - students really use this. 1/4

New class on Progress starting tomorrow - I'm amped! Trying to put some rigor from economics, economic history, and philosophy on a topic very much in the air. It will be awesome. (And first class running slides in my all html browser-based slideshow program - details soon!) 1/2

Perhaps of interest to folks with social science PhD programs: at Rotman, we added an experimental 3 session "tech stack" training in addition to the math boot camp. My lecture was "how to do reproducible, open, quick research", aka version control, LaTeX, AI. 1/2 kevinbryanecon.com/techstack.html

I know lots of skepticism about AI here, but let me show you something we put out which I think is a huge improvement for university assignments. This is "Intelligent Quiz", a feature on All Day TA (www.alldayta.com). Assignments now have tons of cheating + little feedback to us or the students. 1/9

Beautiful Day 1 of school here at U Toronto! Love seeing the students back, and that the undergrads all dress exactly like we did in '98 (I saw 3 Nirvana T-shirts, literally). I'm doing my best to crank up the rigor in my courses - we're taking the role of univs back to '98 also!

Eight rules to regain trust in universities. All can be done today. They're absolutely not the core beliefs about the role of the university for some faculty right now, but are essential if we're to contribute to the trusted production and diffusion of knowledge. kevinbryanecon.com/trust.html

Incredibly excited for my brand new class at Rotman this fall: Progress! Econ history + theory + history of thought + philosophy on why rare orgs at rare times in rare places accomplish new things. Trying to put rigor onto an idea that is very much in the air. kevinbryanecon.com/Bryan-Progre... 1/3

I've built a bunch of tools this summer to move my whole workflow to using things that are "pure text" so I can use AI on top. Here's the first: a modern paper reader. PDFs suck. Ugly, terribly interface, big files, fixed. I want papers that are adaptive, interactive, pretty. 1/5

Cleaned up and updated my AI-driven text editor - controllable 'style' editing smart enough to ignore your LaTeX commands. Based on your red pen-editor preferences, your own complex style rules then use this simple UI to edit. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_Pj...

A modern AI-driven text and style editor

YouTube video by Kevin Bryan

youtube.com

I'm worried about universities. We *have to* be seen as neutral, truth-seeking, unbiased, rigorous, or public support will continue to fall. Floating around today was Columbia's core curriculum "Contemporary Civ". Here's the entire post-1865 reading list www.college.columbia.edu/core-curricu... 1/10

Editing our writing is a common academic task. I *hate* how spell/grammar checks annoy me by thinking proper nouns or LaTeX code are misspellings (yes, I want `` ''). I also want *style* tips like a good editor would give me. Problem solved. 1/5

I hate picking on government at the time the high value parts of it are facing so much scrutiny, but we can't do things like this. $6250/sq ft renovation, w parking being a big cost driver? Does no one see the problem? Like California HSR, such an insane estimate that project literally not worth it.

David Kissling@xtdave.bsky.social · last yr.

The Federal Reserve Building in San Francisco already has the largest surface parking lot Downtown (despite having an entrance to the Embarcadero BART/Muni station on the same block). They're going overboard with putting parking into their DC HQ now

Harvard situation (plus NIH/NSF news) is terrible and hopefully will be resolved soon. That said (and this is Devil's Advocate, please don't kill me here!), in Earth 2 where faculty are very Trumpian, many students are somewhere from "race realist" to bigots, what is outcome? 1/6

Why we started alldayta.com in a graph - the ed gains per $ from AI assistants are insane. This paper, schoolkids in Nigeria, is using GPT4 + Copilot, which are technically way behind today's frontier and not user friendly. Still: *massive* learning gains.

Ethan Mollick@emollick.bsky.social · last yr.

Big: The final version of a randomized, controlled World Bank study finds using a GPT-4 tutor with teacher guidance in a six week afterschool program in Nigeria had "more than twice the effect of some of the most effective interventions in education" ("equating to 1.5 to 2 years" of standard school)

"Where in the world is this place" is a surprising skill of multimodal LLMs. But as Geoguessr fans know, road markings, words on signs, etc. make it much easier. I made my own benchmark to fix this. 1/x kevinbryanecon.com/HardGeoBench/

Sunday economics: who knew that gardening was Hayekian? I thought - plants grow in nature, how hard can it be? Answer is that nature grows a given plant where the shade, pH, neighbors, wind, temp are all right. Very hard for a "central planner" (, in particular, me!) to do this.

Many students are cheating with LLMs: true. Being able to use AI to help with tasks (in addition to knowing fundamentals!): true. The nature of how you teach and evaluate must change given the above: also true. It's the 3rd one that too many people are missing. nymag.com/intelligence...

Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College

ChatGPT has unraveled the entire academic project.

nymag.com

In the Star today (Canada's biggest paper) on why Canada can't redirect trade away from the US without making the country much poorer, why the (many) attempts to do this historically failed, and what to do instead: www.thestar.com/news/insight...

Study in Nature: “Across 30 out of 32 evaluation axes from the specialist physician perspective & 25 out of 26 evaluation axes from the patient-actor perspective, AMIE [Google Medical LLM] was rated superior to PCPs [primary care docs] while being non-inferior on the rest.” (& AIME is an older LLM)

To be honest, I am much more nervous posting here than on LinkedIn or X. It feels like one post talking about a paper on AI getting to the wrong parts of BlueSky will result in death threats (I only say that because I have seen it happen). Very weird dynamic that I am not others want to deal with.

The "we have cultural differences with big universities so nihilism, let's kill of science funding" attitude is nuts. No doubt. But also: for same reason we should be mad about the fact that half the population who was right of center was also really driven out of academic research.

A good measure of Abundance/Progress: how upset are you about reg restrictions slowing self-driving rollout? Self-drive cars drop serious crashes by 80%+, even though remainder almost entirely are caused by others. Waymo's swerve away from even many of these! www.understandingai.org/p/human-driv...