SEA-HAWKS!!!

Great coverage of our paper J-curve paper on AI’s productivity impacts by @willagreer.bsky.social in @npr.org’s Planet Money newsletter! www.npr.org/sections/pla...

5 papers from the Super Bowl of Economics

Planet Money went to the annual meeting of the American Economics Association, and we saw some fascinating papers presented there.

npr.org

Thoughts of love (and maybe some whisky) to all toddler parents with no daycare this week

It's time to remove laptops from classrooms. 24 experiments: Students learn more and get better grades after taking notes by hand than typing. It's not just because they're less distracted—writing enables deeper processing and more images. The pen is mightier than the keyboard.

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...

In case you missed it: OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar insinuating OpenAI would be "open" to a bailout by the Federal Government for its 1.5 trillion chip purchase contracts... www.wsj.com/video/openai...

OpenAI CFO Would Support Federal Backstop for Chip Investments

Sarah Friar, OpenAI’s finance chief, says the company would support federal measures to make it easier to finance sizable investments in AI chips. She spoke at WSJ’s Tech Live event in California.

wsj.com

New WP (by me and others) on how disclosure mandates: (1) increase disclosure (primarily of negative outcomes), and (2) how expectations of increased disclosure by others slows down innovation. Link and more details in @florianederer.bsky.social's thread...

Florian Ederer @florianederer.bsky.social · 10mo ago

Transparency helps innovation ... until it doesn't. My new paper with Cunningham, Hodgson, and Wang (on the JM!) studies the 2017 FDA Final Rule, which required drug firms to publicly disclose all clinical trial results. Disclosure increased, but innovation slowed. cowles.yale.edu/sites/defaul...

PSA on United Airlines: If you miss your initial flight from a roundtrip they cancel all subsequent flights and keep your money. And airline is unwilling to rebook even though they have available seats. Just rebooked with Delta Air Lines, to leave SFO..

Very happy to see this paper in (online) print. Together with Michael Christensen, @raffasadun.bsky.social , @nickbloom.bsky.social and Jan Rivkin, we interviewed hundreds of CEOs to measure how they make business strategy. pubsonline.informs.org/doi/10.1287/...

Yes, the idea that LLMs pay uniform attention to everything in a paper (or are "better at paying attention that humans") is a widely believed myth.

Tuomas Pernu@tuomaspernu.bsky.social · 11mo ago

I've never understood the idea that LLMs could be used to summarise research papers. Papers already have an abstract & clearly divided sections (methods/discussion), enabling us to quickly focus on the information that interests us. What else but dross could these bullshitting machines add to this?

Financial crisis? "According to Moody’s, structured finance has become a popular way to pay for new data center projects, with more than $9 billion of issuance in the commercial mortgage-backed security and asset-backed security markets during the first four months of 2025." (Ian Frisch, NYTimes)

"Accenture, (...), in its most recent quarter reported a $100 million increase in new generative AI bookings quarter over quarter. That is down from a $200 million quarter-over-quarter increase the previous two periods." www.wsj.com/articles/how...

How the AI Boom Is Leaving Consultants Behind

Consultants have a lot to gain helping companies deploy the most transformative technology in decades. Some clients say so far they have overpromised and underdelivered.

wsj.com

PSA if you travel to SMS-SF: I used the SMS-provided promo code on United and compared it with exactly the same flight without the promo code. The code made my airfare $40 MORE expensive. Nice anecdote for price discrimination or business ethics? www.colorado.edu/today/2025/0...

Your next airline ticket could be priced by AI

Delta is testing an AI-powered pricing system that could charge two travelers different fares even if they are purchasing at the same moment. Pricing strategy

colorado.edu

On the Charlie Kirk assassination: "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent." (Isaac Asimov, Foundation) www.cnn.com/2025/09/12/u...

Full press conference: Governor names Charlie Kirk shooting suspect | CNN

Utah’s governor Spencer Cox says they have a suspect in the Charlie Kirk shooting in custody. Cox identified the suspect as Tyler Robinson and presented the evidence investigators have uncovered at a ...

cnn.com

The LLM turning point is coming ( = we may be close to the "peak of inflated expectations" in the Hype Cycle). www.economist.com/business/202...

Faith in God-like large language models is waning

That may be good news for AI laggards like Apple

economist.com

Have we learned nothing from conflicts of interest during the subprime housing crisis? "Both authors have a financial interest in www.expectedparrot.com. Horton is an economic advisor to Anthropic."

Ethan Mollick@emollick.bsky.social · 11mo ago

This is a cool paper that suggests that AI agents can indeed be used for social science experiments, but that just using a chatbot isn't good enough, instead prompts developed based on social & game theory makes AI agent actions predictive of real human outcomes. benjaminmanning.io/files/optimi...

Excited to have my research (co-authored with the dream team of @mjyang.bsky.social, Zachary Kroff, and @erikbryn.bsky.social) featured in the New Yorker!

John Cassidy@johncassidysays.bsky.social · 11mo ago

In Silicon Valley, people like to move at breakneck pace and break things. Economic history says: not so fast. My latest column argues that the economic payoffs from AI may take longer than expected to appear. www.newyorker.com/news/the-fin...

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

Seems Sam Altman thinks "Yes", AI is in a bubble? Yet, he wants to let OpenAI employees convert stock to cash with an implied valuation of $500 Billion? (with a B!). What happend to getting "PhD level" ChatGPT-5 expertise, .. (checks notes) .. two weeks ago?!? www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...

Sam Altman says ‘yes,’ AI is in a bubble

Is the bubble about to burst?

theverge.com

There is an.....interesting op-ed in today's WSJ from a 22 year old entrepreneur telling everyone that work life balance will "keep you mediocre" It is completly wrong. Let me tell you why with citations. [gift link to the very wrong op-ed] 1/n www.wsj.com/opinion/work...

Odd, or signal that ChatGPT-5 is lower quality, but cheaper to run, because it decides when a high-token test-time compute run is triggered..

Ethan Mollick@emollick.bsky.social · 12mo ago

Suddenly retiring every other model without warning was a weird move by OpenAI … and they did it without explaining how switching models worked or even details of various GPT-5 models …and they did it after many built workflows & training & assignments around older models, maybe breaking them. Odd

There are two Bs!

Jack Bailey@jack-bailey.co.uk · 12mo ago

Didn’t want to believe this was true. It’s true.

ChatGPT-5 is here.

You should read @noahpinion.blogsky.venki.dev on the data centre investments and whether they will lead to a financial crisis. I think he downplays the risk. It is potentially very high. www.noahpinion.blog/p/will-data-...

Will data centers crash the economy?

This time let's think about a financial crisis before it happens.

noahpinion.blog

Disruption of the traditional MBA is here, whether we want it or not..

Guillaume Carton@cartonguillaume.bsky.social · last yr.

‘WE’RE NOT LEARNING ANYTHING’: Stanford GSB Students Sound The Alarm Over Academics poetsandquants.com/2025/07/23/w...

Consider: Google has a 90% market share in web and mobile searches. And has Gemini LLM results on top by default on any search. Are 1 trillion processed tokens really a sign of usefulness? (Same question about MSFT forcing LLMs on their developers..) We see "revealed preference", just not for LLMs.

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

Three things to note about this: 1) AI has obvious utility to many, this is a tremendous amount of use already 2) There is room for multiple frontier model providers, at least for now 3) Any losses from subsidizing cost of AI use (and it is not clear this is happening) are now relatively small

I have been thinking about this a lot, lately, after finding the troubling productivity impacts of AI on older firms ( conference.nber.org/conf_papers/... ), combined with prior work showing the impacts of digitization on older workers (www.nber.org/papers/w28094). #EconSky

Center for Retirement Research at Boston College@crrbc.bsky.social · last yr.

"Here’s What a Late-Career Layoff Looks Like in America, in 5 Charts" on.wsj.com/413HEDy @wsj.com #EconSky

Naked self-promotion: My fantastic co-author @kmcelheran.bsky.social will present our empirical paper on "Industrial AI" (self-driving forklifts, self-optimizing production lines, autonomous quality control) and its effect on productivity in US manufacturing. www.nber.org/conferences/...

SI 2025 Digital Economics and Artificial Intelligence

nber.org

Its not me, its the LLMs: in domains including coding, math, mapping, logic and now simple physics, they overfit and are unable to generalize. Still waiting for ChatGPT-5 btw..

Keyon Vafa@keyonv.bsky.social · last yr.

Can an AI model predict perfectly and still have a terrible world model? What would that even mean? Our new ICML paper (poster tomorrow!) formalizes these questions. One result tells the story: A transformer trained on 10M solar systems nails planetary orbits. But it botches gravitational laws 🧵

I agree that teachers (=experts) using LLMs has clear benefits. I think the evidence of benefits of LLMs for students is less consistent and more context dependent. LLMs are not a hoax, but also clearly over-hyped.

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

The repeated argument that I see on this site that AI is not actually useful to real people needs to be retired based on the representative national surveys we now have on AI users. Teachers using AI report 6 hour a week time savings. Workers using AI report 3x productivity gains on 1/5 of tasks.