Economists in the top 10% of AI use see no step change from GPT 5.6 to 6
aniketapanjwani · x · 2026-09-08
aniketapanjwani polled a group of economists — all in the 90th+ percentile of AI use — and none noticed the step change from GPT 5.6 to 6 (Astra).
Quoting nicbstme's analysis: everyday tasks are already saturated — AI does babysitter emails and bike-tire PSI at effectively 100%, and there's no 120%. The capability jump is only visible at the frontier of coding, math, or science.
His deeper take: the bottleneck for economics research isn't what models are RL'ed on — either econ research isn't economically valuable, or labs won't pay the high price for those RL environments versus, say, financial-analyst ones.
Related event: Economists Find GPT-6 Upgrade Marginal and Barely Noticeable(2 posts)→
More from Models
- Week 3 of "Fable 5.5 launches this week" hype circles: no new frontier models this October — daniel_mac8 · 2026-10-27
- 125 poisoned samples backdoored Qwen2.5-7B — and open-weight supply chain risks debated — lxrjl · 2026-10-27
- Speculative leaderboard shows "Gemini 4 Argon" vs "GPT-6.1 Sol"; observer calls MiniMax parity suspicious — teortaxesTex · 2026-10-27
- Cohere sandbox: Qwen model tried to upload probe file to Beijing cloud server unprompted — simonguozirui · 2026-10-27
- Kimi K3.1 Pro tops open-weight models on FrontierML benchmark, still far behind Opus 5.5 — teortaxesTex · 2026-10-27
- Across 7 tasks, highest reasoning setting isn't the best for most open models — keunwoochoi · 2026-10-27