Justified Posteriors

Economists generally see AI as a production technology, or input into production. But maybe AI is actually more impactful as unlocking a new way of organizing society. Finish this story: * The printing press unlocked the Enlightenment — along with both liberal democracy and France’s Reign of Terror * Communism is primitive socialism plus electricity * The radio was an essential prerequisite for fa...

Many of today’s thinkers and journalists worry that AI models are eating their lunch: hoovering up these authors’ best ideas and giving them away for free or nearly free. Beyond fairness, there is a worry that these authors will stop producing valuable content if they can’t be compensated for their work. On the other hand, making lots of data freely accessible makes AI models better, potentially i...

In our first ever EMERGENCY PODCAST, co-host Seth Benzell is summoned out of paternity leave by Andrey Fradkin to discuss the AI automation paper that’s making headlines around the world. The paper is Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence by Erik Brynjolfsson, Bharat Chandar, and Ruyu Chen. The paper is being heralded as the first evide...

In this episode, we discuss a new theoretical framework for understanding how AI integrates into the economy. We read the paper Artificial Intelligence and the Knowledge Economy (Ide & Talamas, JPE), and debate whether AI will function as a worker , a manager , or an expert . Read on to learn more about the model, our thoughts, timestamp, and at the end, you can spoil yourself on Andrey and Seth’s...

In this special episode of the Justified Posteriors Podcast , hosts Seth Benzell and Andrey Fradkin dive into the competitive dynamics of large language models (LLMs). Using Andrey’s working paper, Demand for LLMs: Descriptive Evidence on Substitution, Market Expansion, and Multihoming , they explore how quickly new models gain market share, why some cannibalize predecessors while others expand th...

In a Justified Posteriors first, hosts Seth Benzell and Andrey Fradkin sit down with economist Daniel Rock, assistant professor at Wharton and AI2050 Schmidt Science Fellow, to unpack his groundbreaking research on generative AI, productivity, exposure scores, and the future of work. Through a wide-ranging and insightful conversation, the trio examines how exposure to AI reshapes job tasks and why...

In this episode of Justified Posteriors , we tackle the provocative essay “ The Intelligence Curse ” by Luke Drago and Rudolf Laine. What if AI is less like a productivity booster and more like oil in a failed state? Drawing from economics, political theory, and dystopian sci-fi, we explore the analogy between AI-driven automation and the classic resource curse . * [00:03:30] Introducing The Intel...

In this episode of Justified Posteriors , we examine the paper " Demographics and Automation " by economists Daron Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo. The central hypothesis of this paper is that aging societies, facing a scarcity of middle-aged labor for physical production tasks, are more likely to invest in industrial automation. Going in, we were split. One of us thought the idea made basic economi...

Andrey and Seth examine two papers exploring how both humans and AI systems don't always say what they think. They discuss Luca Braghieri's study on political correctness among UC San Diego students, which finds surprisingly small differences (0.1-0.2 standard deviations) between what students report privately versus publicly on hot-button issues. We then pivot to Anthropic's research showing that...

In this episode, we tackle the thorny question of AI persuasion with a fresh study: "Scaling Language Model Size Yields Diminishing Returns for Single-Message Political Persuasion." The headline? Bigger AI models plateau in their persuasive power around the 70B parameter mark—think LLaMA 2 70B or Qwen-1.5 72B. As you can imagine, this had us diving deep into what this means for AI safety concerns...

In this episode, we tackle a brand new paper from the folks at Epoch AI called the "GATE model" (Growth and AI Transition Endogenous model). It makes some bold claims. The headline grabber? Their default scenario projects a whopping 23% global GDP growth in 2027! As you can imagine, that had us both (especially Andrey) practically falling out of our chairs. Before diving into GATE, Andrey shared a...

We hear it constantly: social media algorithms are driving polarization, feeding us echo chambers, and maybe even swinging elections. But what does the evidence actually say? In the darkest version of this narrative, social media platform owners are shadow king-makers and puppet masters who can select the winner of close election by selectively promoting narratives. Amorally, they disregard the he...

In this episode of Justified Posteriors, we dive into the paper "Which Economic Tasks Are Performed with AI: Evidence from Millions of Claude Conversations." We analyze Anthropic's effort to categorize how people use their Claude AI assistant across different economic tasks and occupations, examining both the methodology and implications with a critical eye. We came into this discussion expecting...

In this episode, we tackle one of the most pressing questions of our technological age: how much risk of human extinction should we accept in exchange for unprecedented economic growth from AI? The podcast explores research by Stanford economist Chad Jones, who models scenarios where AI might deliver a staggering 10% annual GDP growth but carry a small probability of triggering an existential cata...

Dive into the intersection of economics and healthcare with our latest podcast episode. How much can AI systems enhance high-stakes medical decision-making? In this episode, we explore the implications of a research paper titled “Diagnosing Physician Error: A Machine Learning Approach to Low Value Health Care” by Sendhil Mullainathan and Ziad Obermeyer. The paper argues that physicians often make...

In this episode, we tackle an intriguing question inspired by a recent working paper: If artificial general intelligence (AGI) is imminent, why are real interest rates so low? The discussion centers on the provocative paper, "Transformative AI, Existential Risk, and Real Interest Rates" , authored by Trevor Chow, Basil Halperin, and Jay Zachary Maslisch. This research argues that today's historica...

Does the U.S. auto industry prioritize consumers or corporate profits? In this episode of Justified Posteriors, hosts Seth Benzell and Andrey Fradkin explore the evidence behind this question through the lens of the research paper “The Evolution of Market Power and the U.S. Automobile Industry” by Paul Grieco, Charles Murry, and Ali Yurukoglu. Join them as they unpack trends in car prices, market...

Does scaling alone hold the key to transformative AI? In this episode of Justified Posteriors, we dive into the topic of scaling laws in artificial intelligence (AI), discussing a set of paradigmatic papers. We discuss the idea that as more compute, data, and parameters are added to machine learning models, their performance improves predictably. Referencing several pivotal papers, including early...

Are we trapped by the social media we love? In this episode of the “Justified Posteriors” podcast, hosts Seth Benzell and Andrey Fradkin discuss a research paper examining the social and economic impacts of TikTok and Instagram usage among college students. The paper, authored by Leonardo Bursztyn, Benjamin Handel, Rafael Jimenez, and Christopher Roth, suggests that these platforms may create a “c...

In this episode, we discuss Artificial Intelligence Technologies and Aggregate Growth Prospects by Timothy Bresnahan. * We contrast Tim Bresnahan's paper on AI's impact on economic growth, with Daron Acemoglu's task-replacement focused approach from the previous episode. * Bresnahan argues that AI's main economic benefits will come through: * Reorganizing organizations and tasks * Capital deepenin...

Will AI's impact be as modest as predicted, or could it exceed expectations in reshaping economic productivity? In this episode, hosts Seth Benzell and Andrey Fradkin discuss the paper “The Simple Macroeconomics of AI” by Daron Acemoglu, an economist and an institute professor at MIT. Additional notes from friend of the podcast Daniel Rock of Wharton, coauthor of “ GPTs are GPTs: An Early Look at...

How close are we to AGI, and what might its impact be on the global stage? In this episode, hosts Seth Benzell and Andrey Fradkin tackle the high-stakes world of artificial intelligence, focusing on the transformative potential of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). The conversation is based on Leopold Aschenbrenner’s essay 'Situational Awareness', which argues that AI's development follows a p...