Christian Catalini

1/ Some Simple Economics of AGI—🔥🧵 Right now, there is a low-grade panic running through the economy. Everyone is asking the same anxious question: what exactly is AI going to automate, and what will be left for us?

@Tim_Org Sorry to hear! I guess podcast-binge time?

If you were asking yourself, "I wonder if I would enjoy it if my retina detached," I am here to tell you: Probably not.

@alive_eth Although the bottleneck may shift to the class of security problems that do not lend themselves to automation? Maybe because they require a deeper understanding of context and architecture?

“Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow” —Linus’s Law We now have infinite AI eyeballs. Exploits on legacy code will first go up, but then they will go down forever. Computer security will be solved.

1/ Last week, I hosted #rcnyc5 where we dissected @ccatalini's new paper "Some Simple Economics of AGI" (with Xiang Hui & Jane Wu). The paper discussed how the costs of intelligence and execution tend to the commoditized cost of compute and are no longer the binding constraint on value. Rather, with infinite outputs, ground-truth verification of these outputs is the new constraint. A thread on what we learned🧵

Nothing says "we let the AI write our policy memos" like citing an academic paper that argues the opposite of your position. @bankpolicy filed evidence against itself and called it advocacy. 🍿

@tbpn @FerdiDabitz Excited to see what's next @FerdiDabitz ! 🔥

.@FerdiDabitz: "The dollar is the best product in the history of the world. Insane PMF. There's quasi-infinite global demand for it, especially outside of the United States." "There are all kinds of quantitative ways to think about this. Europe and the US contribute 40% of global GDP, but they contribute 80% of global reserve holdings and money movement." "There are also qualitative ways to think about it. The existence and frankly commercial success of the stablecoin stack is a pure expression of this thesis."

@raintures And they’ll read us back

@ccatalini We are getting scary close to readable machine thoughts

Closing the measurability gap between AI and humans x.com/AnthropicAI/st…

@nickgrossman Yes! But the key question is which type? Only verification-grade network effects truly survive (see 8.2.5): #S8" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">arxiv.org/html/2602.2094…

When software is a commodity, data is portable, and agents have unlimited time to do the heavy lifting: it all comes back to network effects

@mentalgeorge Consistent with what we wrote here arxiv.org/abs/2602.20946 and hbr.org/2025/06/what-g…

I don't think automation of AI R&D will rapidly lead to domain-general super-intelligence. I think this will be true even if AIs can do *literally everything* a human AI researcher does today. Even after the full automation of AI R&D, further capabilities progress will only happen through (1) widespread deployment of AI throughout the economy, accompanied by data collection; and/or (2) the wholesale recreation of much of the economy by AI labs. Without access to the real-world signal provided by either of the above, I think that the only thing produced by automated AI researchers would be a "Goodhart Singularity". If I'm right, this is obviously good news. I make the case for this in a new piece on my substack

@alexolegimas @GoogleDeepMind @ShaneLegg 🔥 congrats!

Some news: This week I am starting at @GoogleDeepMind as Director of AGI Economics on @shanelegg’s team. I will be joining the other amazing cross-disciplinary scientists researching AGI there. My team will study how frontier AI could reshape the economy: what happens to work and labor, how wealth and power are distributed, how institutions adapt, how AI agents shape markets, and what kinds of models can help us reason clearly about futures that may look very different from the past. I’m incredibly excited to help build this research agenda. If AGI changes how society operates, economics is going to be critical for shaping our shared future. Many more announcements soon.

@Tim_Org It could have been bigger than the internet if it wasn’t for @pmarca.

@ccatalini I'd never heard of this -- but I do love that one description of it says it was a "free, taxpayer-subisized" service. Um.

Stablecoins are not an efficient way to strengthen the international role of the euro, says President Christine @Lagarde. The best solution remains deeper capital market integration through the savings and investment union and a stronger safe asset base ecb.europa.eu/press/key/date…

@stable_currency @Lagarde For sure! The problem with top-down approaches is not that they don’t get anything right, it’s what they inevitably miss.

@ccatalini @Lagarde Considering that EU short-term treasuries dont exist like in the US, onchain central bank reserves sounds genuinely innovative (for a central bank)

Bullish Minitel: @Lagarde looked at dollar stablecoins and decided what Europe really needs is a publicly-built interoperable settlement network, ready in 2028.

@Shtihmas11 @Lagarde Bullish IRIS2 too. May have to trade-in my @Starlink...

@ccatalini @Lagarde About time Europe builds real infra instead of complaining

@Jokerbernrin @Lagarde 💯%

@ccatalini @Lagarde Europe finally reacting to stablecoin pressure

@alexatallah @drupeek 🔥

Vibe investing. Who's doing it? Would love for this to become a category on openrouter.ai/apps While the models don't do a great job yet on Alpha Arena, I'm seeing some developers have success with deep research agents (high alpha, likely high volatility)

@_lamaahmad You be the judge! arxiv.org/html/2602.2094…

who are the social scientists with the most ambitious ideas around the future with AGI? let's talk!

Move up the value stack or be replaced. Flight simulators for work up next to accelerate the (re)training.

@Sei_Labs @curiousgurnoor Enjoyed the conversation and great questions! NYC is clearly 👩‍🍳👨‍🍳

MIT's @ccatalini was at the Sei offices to talk about the economics of AGI for rcnyc. What happens when intelligence is abundant and commoditized? The emerging solution is a verification economy, the only scarcity left. s/o @curiousgurnoor for the collab