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.
More from Models
- Repeating instructions in prompts still makes models adhere better, like it's 2023 — tokenbender · 2026-09-08
- Model slips on a science knowledge test, author calls it acceptable — felpix_ · 2026-09-08
- Native video inference beats sampled frames, but OpenRouter providers don't support it yet — spillai · 2026-09-08
- Users game Tibo's token reset: spend 80% fast, stagger reset cycles to dodge surprise resets — tinyfool · 2026-09-08
- Mathematician: Astra solved two of my unpublished theorems in ~60 hours each, $20k in API — basedjensen · 2026-09-08
- Drop-in Claude.md patch claims to fix Claude's degraded prose in Opus and Fable — myriable · 2026-09-08