The Microeconomics of Artificial Intelligence (2025)

nadetastic•about 1 hour ago

> Applied statistics is a far more precise descriptor, “but no one wants to use that term, because it’s not as sexy.”

This really hit me some time back when I was explaining AI to a friend. After about 10 mins of rambling about LLMs and mentioning the attention paper like I knew what I was talking about, it ended with “oh so it’s just a really advanced auto correct”

howunfortunate•25 minutes ago

As an MLE I feel these takes are too reductionist.

You could say the (nearly) same thing about search. And content recommendation. And clustering. And topic modeling. And outlier detection. And spam filtering. And image diffusion. And dimension reduction. And...

There's a lot in common between these things, but there's also a lot cool and different!

For transformers in particular, it's pretty cool that you get some WILD emergent properties simply from scaling up.

So yes, it's just a next token predictor, but I'm just a bundle of nerves and meat. I don't get a lot out of those descriptions.

oersted•18 minutes ago

Obligatory link to the classic copy-pasta:

> They're Made out of Meat

https://web.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think...

amelius•about 2 hours ago

Speaking how which, how are economists using AI? Are they getting better at making predictions?

garethsprice•about 2 hours ago

The added speed of AI tools means they're now able to predict 18 of the next 10 recessions.

WokeUp420•about 2 hours ago

That would require AI to be accurate

kulahan•about 2 hours ago

It wouldn't require perfect accuracy, just rough accuracy and a human to confirm, and it's already more than good enough for that. I do not understand this confusion surrounding modern math.

dismalaf•about 2 hours ago

Here's the thing about economists... The loudest ones don't want to be correct, they want to be influential. The ones who can actually make good predictions work for banks and hedge funds lol.

zzleeper•35 minutes ago

Honestly, it's a bit of a disappointment

- Many more mediocre papers written (mediocre ideas, implementation, claude-isms everywhere)

- Much easier to try every possible combination of a regression in order to show the result you want (same for theorists).

The one thing I'm happy about is it's now much easier to extract historical data from old documents from Google Books. Still not perfect, but takes you 95% there. And creating plots and datavis just for quick exploration is super fast.

The Microeconomics of Artificial Intelligence (2025)

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