Breaking Down the Economics of AI

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muckrAIkers

Jacob Haimes and Igor Krawczuk

18 episodes

4 weeks ago

Join us as we dig a tiny bit deeper into the hype surrounding "AI" press releases, research papers, and more. Each episode, we'll highlight ongoing research and investigations, providing some much needed contextualization, constructive critique, and even a smidge of occasional good will teasing to the conversation, trying to find the meaning under all of this muck.

All content for muckrAIkers is the property of Jacob Haimes and Igor Krawczuk and is served directly from their servers with no modification, redirects, or rehosting. The podcast is not affiliated with or endorsed by Podjoint in any way.

Technology

Science,

Mathematics

Breaking Down the Economics of AI

muckrAIkers

1 hour 6 minutes

5 months ago

Breaking Down the Economics of AI

Jacob and Igor tackle the wild claims about AI's economic impact by examining three main clusters of arguments: automating expensive tasks like programming, removing "cost centers" like call centers and corporate art, and claims of explosive growth. They dig into the actual data, debunk the hype, and explain why most productivity claims don't hold up in practice. Plus: MIT denounces a paper with fabricated data, and Grok randomly promotes white genocide myths.

(00:00) - Recording date + intro
(00:52) - MIT denounces paper
(04:09) - Grok's white genocide
(06:23) - Butthole convergence
(07:13) - AI and the economy
(14:50) - Automating profit centers
(29:46) - Removing the last cost centers
(47:16) - "This time is different" (explosive growth)
(57:55) - Alpha Evolve, optimization, and slippage

Links

University of Chicago working paper - Large Language Models, Small Labor Market Effects
OECD working paper - Miracle or Myth? Assessing the macroeconomic productivity gains from Artificial Intelligence
Epoch AI blogpost - Explosive Growth from AI: A Review of the Arguments
Business Insider article - Anthropic CEO: AI Will Be Writing 90% of Code in 3 to 6 Months
Preprint - Transformative AGI by 2043 is <1% likely

Automating profit centers

Pivot to AI blogpost - If AI is so good at coding … where are the open source contributions?
Ben Evans' Mastodon post - "Show me the pull requests"
NY Times article - Your A.I. Radiologist Will Not Be With You Soon
FastCompany article - More companies are adopting 'AI-first' strategies. Here's how it could impact the environment
Forbes article - Business Tech News: Shopify CEO Says AI First Before Employees
Newsroom article - IBM Study: CEOs Double Down on AI While Navigating Enterprise Hurdles
PNAS research article - Evidence of a social evaluation penalty for using AI
Ars Technica article - AI use damages professional reputation, study suggests

Removing cost centers

The Register article - Anthopic's law firm blames Claude hallucinations for errors
Fortune article - Klarna plans to hire humans again, as new landmark survey reveals most AI projects fail to deliver
Wikipedia article - The Market for Lemons

AlphaEvolve

Deepmind press release - AlphaEvolve: A Gemini-powered coding agent for designing advanced algorithms
Deepmind white paper - AlphaEvolve: A coding agent for scientific and algorithmic discovery

Off Topic

VelvetShark blogpost - Why do AI company logos look like buttholes?
MIT Economics press release - Assuring an accurate research record
Pivot to AI blogpost - How to make a splash in AI economics: fake your data
Pivot to AI blogpost - Even Elon Musk can’t make Grok claim a ‘white genocide’ in South Africa