Something Big Is Happening

Recently (February 12, 2026) my students asked me about this blog post: (https://shumer.dev/something-big-is-happening). I found it interesting, but the economics were not entirely clear to me. As a result I decided to reinterpret that blog post using something very close to what we were studying in class. We are studying the version of the Romer growth from chapter 6 in Jones’ Macroeconomics textbook. The result of the reinterpretation is the following note. A Professor Reads A Blog and Tries to Understand It.

If this had been a normal paper instead of a note for my class I might have called it something like: Growth in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: Endogenous Knowledge Creation with Self-Improving AI. That title probably gives you a better idea of what it contains. But for a paper I would first need a much better understanding of that literature than I currently have.

Back to Shumer’s point. In the model if the AI generated growth rate is too high, it is possible that the model collapses, i.e. `a singularity’. But that singularity is a modeling issue, not an issue about the world. If ideas are sufficiently plentiful and they are advancing fast enough, then they are no longer the limiting factor. Some other factor becomes the binding constraint. I am not sure about the origin of that observation. But I associate it with Jones and Tonetti: (https://web.stanford.edu/~chadj/JonesTonetti_Automation.pdf)

What seems entirely clear is that the advances in AI in late 2022 and again much more recently have been genuinely impressive. That affects both research and teaching. I wonder if the University systems as we have known them for more than a century can adapt well enough to survive? What will scholarship be like when everyone has instant access to machines that are massively smarter than we are? In chess they have the same issue. They responded by separating human and computer competitions. But for advancing scholarship I don’t think that solution makes much sense.

Virtual Corporate Finance Seminars

In early 2020 due to Covid-19, some of us were concerned about the potential impact on academic seminars and conferences in corporate finance. As a result Gordon Phillips (Dartmouth), Max Maksimovic (Maryland) and I, created a virtual weekly seminar series for corporate finance. It started May 2020, and we generally run during the teaching terms - except during the recruiting months. Michael Weisbach (OSU) joined us as an organizer in 2022. Seminar schedules, see: https://sites.google.com/site/uscfom/weekly-virtual-seminar