Yaxel Lendeborg showed up for the Lakers game in a Michael Meyers costume

I joined @GoogleDeepMind to develop a research program on the economics of AGI. Today, together with Andrew Koh (@andrewjkoh) and Shane Legg (@ShaneLegg), we are incredibly excited to release The Economics of Intelligence, the first in a series of projects from our group on how AGI will change the economy. How do capability improvements transform the economy, and when? In this project, we define thresholds of economic capabilities, e.g., minimal AGI, based on how they transform the economy. We then track how the economy–market structure, employment, and wages–changes during the transition across capability regimes. We have seen exponential increases in what AI agents can do but the broader economy seems almost remarkably unchanged. Part of the reason is that the solo AI agent is the wrong economic object; economic transformation is an equilibrium outcome where organizations compete. Looking at how intelligence functions within organizations, transformation will depend on when two key capability thresholds are crossed: competence (gains on individual skills, e.g., coding, math) and coordination (gains on ability of agents to cooperate and work together). We show that what economic transformation looks like depends on whether AI becomes supercompetent, supercooperative, or both—the regime of artificial superintelligence (ASI). Tracking this transition shows why the real visible transformation may come from improvements in coordination—a capability most benchmarks don’t yet track. Past a certain threshold, AI capabilities can break the Coasian ceiling on firm size and lead to an economy that looks drastically different than the one we see today. Two main takeaways: 1. To understand the path of transformation, we should be tracking agentic coordination more closely. 2. The impact of AI will likely show up in wages before market structure or employment. We are really excited about this paper. Excited to hear people’s thoughts. Link: institute.deepmind.com/essay…

Excited to welcome @AnnieHLiang as an Economist in Residence at OpenAI. Annie is an economic theorist at Northwestern who has explored topics such as how we delegate decisions to AI and ownership of creative assets in the Intelligence Age. We are so excited to work with Annie. ...And we’re already searching for our next economist in residence, preferably an AGI-pilled labor economist to join us in 2027H1.

Thrilled to learn from Lily that my startup, Northwestern University, is hyperscaling.

Law of “straight lines on graphs”

SITUATION DETECTED: Sergey Brin says that with Gemini 4 Google is "starting to get on that RSI treadmill," and that researchers now work hand in hand with models to make the next version of Gemini.

not deadwood day came on october 10 this year! 🎉

Airbnb's entire rating scale is now 4.5 to 5.0 You can't make this up 😂

Training novices to think in the age of large language models @cfumagallipica & @agambardella61 @Unibocconi ow.ly/6bw550ZTnXC

Two more screenings of this doc @Metrograph left! Here’s a peek at the 16mm we screened a few years back! Though the new restoration at Metrograph with reinstated stereo should be equally revelatory.

TIL in 1830 half the students at Yale were expelled because they didn't want to use new tech -- the blackboard -- for math exams

I have been interested in LLM simulations of humans for a while, and recently saw lots of posters congratulating Aaru on these results. So I did what any curious person should do after reading the post, check the quality of the analysis by asking ChatGPT and Refine (if you want to be more thorough). Here's what both AI referees say. Aaru uses a mystery methodology, doesn't have a good baseline model hurdle to clear, has potential data leakage issues, and makes unjustified statistical claims and comparisons to the published literature. Perhaps Aaru has made a real advance and the above issues can be addressed. But without peer review or other pressure to force the authors to address them, we can't be sure. Until then, skepticism is warranted.