In early February Openai, the world’s most famous artificial-intelligence firm, released Deep Research, which is “designed to perform in-depth, multi-step research”. With a few strokes of a keyboard, the tool can produce a paper on any topic in minutes. Many academics love it. “Asking OpenAI’s Deep Research about topics I am writing papers on has been incredibly fruitful,” said Ethan Mollick of the University of Pennsylvania. Some economists go further. “I am *sure* for B-level journals, you can publish papers you ‘wrote’ in a day”, said Kevin Bryan of the University of Toronto. “I think of the quality as comparable to having a good PhD-level research assistant, and sending that person away with a task for a week or two,” said Tyler Cowen of George Mason University, an economist with cult-like status in Silicon Valley.
