Were economists 'dead wrong' about AI? The GPT-as-GPT debate resurfaces
soumitrashukla9 · x · 2026-08-28
The spat started when Dave Shapiro argued economists were "dead wrong" about AI: as non-technologists they saw a chatbot, missed how generative AI scales, and some still don't accept it as a General Purpose Technology — a key reason the establishment "misprices the future".
Rebuttals from Abhishek Nagaraj and others call that extreme: economist Daniel Rock's team literally called LLMs a GPT in their 2023 paper "GPTs are GPTs" — and economists invented the term GPT in the first place. That paper estimated 80% of the US workforce could see at least 10% of tasks affected by LLMs, 19% could see half their tasks impacted, and that with LLM-powered software the share of tasks that could be done significantly faster rises from 15% to 47–56%.
More from AGI Musings
- Paras Chopra: The manager-team dynamic will wither as AI agents outcompete those who wait to be told — paraschopra · 2026-08-28
- The Atlantic: applicants write with ChatGPT, HR screens with AI, no one gets hired — esporx · 2026-08-28
- Goertzel: decentralized watermarking could beat World's Orb for proof of humanity — bengoertzel · 2026-08-28
- Anthropic's 'Model Welfare' Is Making Claude Worse as an Assistant — Nouni2 · 2026-08-28
- Why isn't growth 30% if AI and robots do all the work? — TheKanter · 2026-08-28
- Terence Tao warns of AI-generated proofs that no human understands — liuzhuang1234 · 2026-08-28