AI

In new research, Claire Liu and Jared Stanfield examine how relationships between corporate leaders and the United States president enable firms to capture regulation and avoid antitrust scrutiny.

Stigler Center Assistant Director Matt Lucky reviews Khan Academy CEO Sal Khan’s recent book, Brave New Words: How AI Will Revolutionize Education (and Why That’s a Good Thing). The book presents an optimistic vision for the educational and pedagogical role of AI-assisted chatbots as personal tutors and teaching assistants. Khan discusses his book with Bethany McLean and Luigi Zingales on this week’s Capitalisn’t episode, which you can listen to here.

The artificial intelligence market is rapidly developing but antitrust regulators are failing to update their policies, write Tennessee Attorney General and Reporter Jonathan Skrmetti and Kevin Frazier. Regulators’ passiveness risks repeating what happened to social media markets, where a few tech giants were able to acquire nascent competitors and dominate the market. The authors propose three policies to help maintain a competitive AI market.

The United States power grid is increasingly strained by the surging electricity demand driven by the AI boom. Efforts to modernize the power infrastructure are unlikely to keep pace with the rising demand in the coming years. Barak and Eli Orbach explore why competition in AI markets may create an electricity demand shock, examine the associated social costs, and offer several policy recommendations.

Vivek Ghosal reviews the data, economics, and market conditions of the growing artificial intelligence market and finds that it is quite dynamic in terms of evolving partnerships and firms, and is relatively competitive. Thus, Big Tech investments into AI startups do not warrant investigation by the government at this time.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is poised to permeate across different industry sectors, offering unprecedented opportunities alongside significant risks. Effective governance necessitates coordinated cross-border efforts to build institutional expertise, dispel misconceptions, foster innovation, and align global safety priorities. Advocating structured dialogue and a bottom-up approach, Oscar Borgogno and Alessandra Perrazzelli present a proposal which aims to avoid institutional redundancy and legal unpredictability for individuals and firms.

Texas Instruments’ TI-84 calculator has been the standard graphing calculator for American students for twenty years, despite its high cost and lack of innovation. Barak and Eli Orbach explore how Texas Instruments created its entrenched calculator monopoly and the lessons it offers educators as they grapple with the emerging possibilities of artificial intelligence in the classroom.

Axel Gautier, Ashwin Ittoo, and Pieter van Cleynenbreugel write that the practice of pricing algorithms tacitly colluding remains theoretical for now, and technological obstacles render it very unlikely in the short term. However, regulators must still prepare for a future in which artificial intelligence achieves the necessary sophistication to collude.

Antonio Capobianco, the deputy head of the OECD Competition Division and one of the authors of the 2023 OECD report on algorithmic competition and collusion, explains the risks that algorithms and artificial intelligence pose to competition and how regulators can approach the changing competition paradigm.

Two recent articles by Michal Gal and Ramsi Woodcock look at pricing algorithms and consumer harm. Both identify potential nightmare scenarios and question the...