Eduard Talamas on Introducing AI Agents

On Friday, January 17, Eduard Talamas joined Markus’ Academy for a conversation. Eduard Talamas is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the IESE Business School and a CEPR Research Fellow.

Watch the full presentation below. You can watch all Markus’ Academy webinars on the Princeton BCF YouTube channel.

Timestamps:

[0:00] Markus’ introduction

[04:47] AI agents will likely arrive this year

[18:50] Pre-AI knowledge economics

[29:15] Introducing AI into the canonical model

[39:42] Effects of introducing (autonomous) AI agents

[48:08] Effects of introducing (non-autonomous) AI agents

[56:03] Conclusion

Executive Summary

A few highlights from the discussion.

• A summary in four bullets
  • AI agents are likely to be one of the key trends in AI this year. In the talk Talamas presented his recent paper with Enrique Ide (2024) on the topic
  • The paper builds on the canonical model from the organizational and knowledge economy literature (Garicano, 2000), introducing AI a form of knowledge that can be scaled and, unlike human knowledge, is not constrained by time
  • Its key result is that the degree of AI autonomy will be critical in determining its winners and losers. Autonomous AI will benefit the most knowledgeable workers, while non-autonomous AI will do the opposite
  • The model may reconcile the conflicting empirical findings on whether AI benefits the least or the most knowledgeable workers

• Click here for the full summary