Economic impacts of AI-augmented R&D
Tamay Besiroglu, Nicholas Emery-Xu, Neil Thompson · Research Policy · 8 Jun 2024
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Where this sits in the debate
- Will AI actually boost productivity and growth? · its finding supports the claim (why studies differ)
- How fast will the impact arrive?
Direction of the finding as read from the abstract by an AI model (AI-written).
Abstract
Since its emergence around 2010, deep learning has rapidly become the most important technique in Artificial Intelligence (AI), producing an array of scientific firsts in areas as diverse as protein folding, drug discovery, integrated chip design, and weather prediction. As scientists and engineers adopt deep learning, it is important to consider what effect widespread deployment would have on scientific progress and, ultimately, economic growth. We assess this impact by estimating the idea production function for AI in two computer vision tasks that are considered key test-beds for deep learning and show that AI idea production is notably more capital-intensive than traditional R&D. Because increasing the capital-intensity of R&D accelerates the investments that make scientists and engineers more productive, our work suggests that AI-augmented R&D has the potential to speed up technological change and economic growth.
About this publication
Leading field journal. A leading journal in economics or a neighbouring field (on the Tinbergen Institute’s A list or near the top of the RePEc ranking), or a top-rated computer-science venue.
Placed by: Leading field journal. How sources are ranked.
- Published
- 2024 (29 months ago)
- Citations
- 64 (OpenAlex)
Citations in context
64 citations — 74th percentile among the 23 indexed papers from 2024 in this collection. Citation counts favor older papers; this compares only same-year papers here, not the whole literature.
□ added to this collection in 2026.
Neil Thompson signed the wemustactnow.ai letter · author affiliation matches seed institutions massachusetts institute of technology, university of california — part of why this paper is in the collection.
Related by theme, not necessarily by method or conclusion.
- A Research Agenda for the Economics of Transformative AI
Communications of the ACM · 2026 - Economic Growth Under Transformative AI
Annual Review of Economics · 2023 - A Framework for Economic Growth with Capital-Embodied Technical Change
American Economic Review · 2024 - The Potentially Large Effects of Artificial Intelligence on Economic Growth
Goldman Sachs · 2023
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