Kevin A. Bryan
@afinetheorem.bsky.social
Assoc Professor of Strategic Management, University of Toronto; Chief Economist, Creative Destruction Lab Toronto; cofounder, AllDayTA; cofounder, NBER Innovation PhD Boot Camp. http://www.kevinbryanecon.com and @AFineTheorem on Twitter
Doing my part on CBC's natl econ show to get normies to learn what 'feeling the AI' means. (More importantly, "compute sovereignty nonsense b/c you don't control stack" & "options aren't adopt AI at car plant or don't adopt, but adopt & keep plant or it goes to China".) www.cbc.ca/listen/live-...
© CBC/Radio-Canada 2025. All rights reserved.
www.cbc.ca
November 5, 2025 at 2:50 AM
Doing my part on CBC's natl econ show to get normies to learn what 'feeling the AI' means. (More importantly, "compute sovereignty nonsense b/c you don't control stack" & "options aren't adopt AI at car plant or don't adopt, but adopt & keep plant or it goes to China".) www.cbc.ca/listen/live-...
What a great day: legends of innovation economics Mokyr, Aghion and Howitt win the Nobel. Joel was a PhD advisor of mine, so need a full article! Included: good & bad explanations of the Indus Rev, Aghion's charisma, influence of Jon Hughes, French fashion houses: kevinbryanecon.com/mokyraghionh...
A Nobel for Innovation: Mokyr, Aghion, and Howitt
kevinbryanecon.com
October 14, 2025 at 12:41 AM
What a great day: legends of innovation economics Mokyr, Aghion and Howitt win the Nobel. Joel was a PhD advisor of mine, so need a full article! Included: good & bad explanations of the Indus Rev, Aghion's charisma, influence of Jon Hughes, French fashion houses: kevinbryanecon.com/mokyraghionh...
I know it's my company, but All Day TA AI-driven quizzes are so good. Student cheat on all take-home work. How do you get them to learn? Do even better than we used to by having them learn *as they do low-staked hw*. Here's use just this week in a Texas univ course - students really use this. 1/4
October 6, 2025 at 8:43 PM
I know it's my company, but All Day TA AI-driven quizzes are so good. Student cheat on all take-home work. How do you get them to learn? Do even better than we used to by having them learn *as they do low-staked hw*. Here's use just this week in a Texas univ course - students really use this. 1/4
New class on Progress starting tomorrow - I'm amped! Trying to put some rigor from economics, economic history, and philosophy on a topic very much in the air. It will be awesome.
(And first class running slides in my all html browser-based slideshow program - details soon!) 1/2
(And first class running slides in my all html browser-based slideshow program - details soon!) 1/2
September 17, 2025 at 5:48 AM
New class on Progress starting tomorrow - I'm amped! Trying to put some rigor from economics, economic history, and philosophy on a topic very much in the air. It will be awesome.
(And first class running slides in my all html browser-based slideshow program - details soon!) 1/2
(And first class running slides in my all html browser-based slideshow program - details soon!) 1/2
Perhaps of interest to folks with social science PhD programs: at Rotman, we added an experimental 3 session "tech stack" training in addition to the math boot camp. My lecture was "how to do reproducible, open, quick research", aka version control, LaTeX, AI. 1/2 kevinbryanecon.com/techstack.html
September 8, 2025 at 8:24 PM
Perhaps of interest to folks with social science PhD programs: at Rotman, we added an experimental 3 session "tech stack" training in addition to the math boot camp. My lecture was "how to do reproducible, open, quick research", aka version control, LaTeX, AI. 1/2 kevinbryanecon.com/techstack.html
I know lots of skepticism about AI here, but let me show you something we put out which I think is a huge improvement for university assignments. This is "Intelligent Quiz", a feature on All Day TA (www.alldayta.com). Assignments now have tons of cheating + little feedback to us or the students. 1/9
September 5, 2025 at 7:15 PM
I know lots of skepticism about AI here, but let me show you something we put out which I think is a huge improvement for university assignments. This is "Intelligent Quiz", a feature on All Day TA (www.alldayta.com). Assignments now have tons of cheating + little feedback to us or the students. 1/9
Beautiful Day 1 of school here at U Toronto! Love seeing the students back, and that the undergrads all dress exactly like we did in '98 (I saw 3 Nirvana T-shirts, literally). I'm doing my best to crank up the rigor in my courses - we're taking the role of univs back to '98 also!
September 2, 2025 at 5:19 PM
Beautiful Day 1 of school here at U Toronto! Love seeing the students back, and that the undergrads all dress exactly like we did in '98 (I saw 3 Nirvana T-shirts, literally). I'm doing my best to crank up the rigor in my courses - we're taking the role of univs back to '98 also!
Eight rules to regain trust in universities. All can be done today. They're absolutely not the core beliefs about the role of the university for some faculty right now, but are essential if we're to contribute to the trusted production and diffusion of knowledge. kevinbryanecon.com/trust.html
September 1, 2025 at 10:31 PM
Eight rules to regain trust in universities. All can be done today. They're absolutely not the core beliefs about the role of the university for some faculty right now, but are essential if we're to contribute to the trusted production and diffusion of knowledge. kevinbryanecon.com/trust.html
Incredibly excited for my brand new class at Rotman this fall: Progress! Econ history + theory + history of thought + philosophy on why rare orgs at rare times in rare places accomplish new things. Trying to put rigor onto an idea that is very much in the air. kevinbryanecon.com/Bryan-Progre... 1/3
August 25, 2025 at 5:43 PM
Incredibly excited for my brand new class at Rotman this fall: Progress! Econ history + theory + history of thought + philosophy on why rare orgs at rare times in rare places accomplish new things. Trying to put rigor onto an idea that is very much in the air. kevinbryanecon.com/Bryan-Progre... 1/3
I've built a bunch of tools this summer to move my whole workflow to using things that are "pure text" so I can use AI on top. Here's the first: a modern paper reader. PDFs suck. Ugly, terribly interface, big files, fixed. I want papers that are adaptive, interactive, pretty. 1/5
August 8, 2025 at 7:17 PM
I've built a bunch of tools this summer to move my whole workflow to using things that are "pure text" so I can use AI on top. Here's the first: a modern paper reader. PDFs suck. Ugly, terribly interface, big files, fixed. I want papers that are adaptive, interactive, pretty. 1/5
Cleaned up and updated my AI-driven text editor - controllable 'style' editing smart enough to ignore your LaTeX commands. Based on your red pen-editor preferences, your own complex style rules then use this simple UI to edit. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_Pj...
A modern AI-driven text and style editor
YouTube video by Kevin Bryan
www.youtube.com
July 11, 2025 at 10:33 PM
Cleaned up and updated my AI-driven text editor - controllable 'style' editing smart enough to ignore your LaTeX commands. Based on your red pen-editor preferences, your own complex style rules then use this simple UI to edit. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_Pj...
I'm worried about universities. We *have to* be seen as neutral, truth-seeking, unbiased, rigorous, or public support will continue to fall. Floating around today was Columbia's core curriculum "Contemporary Civ". Here's the entire post-1865 reading list www.college.columbia.edu/core-curricu... 1/10
July 9, 2025 at 3:06 PM
I'm worried about universities. We *have to* be seen as neutral, truth-seeking, unbiased, rigorous, or public support will continue to fall. Floating around today was Columbia's core curriculum "Contemporary Civ". Here's the entire post-1865 reading list www.college.columbia.edu/core-curricu... 1/10
Editing our writing is a common academic task. I *hate* how spell/grammar checks annoy me by thinking proper nouns or LaTeX code are misspellings (yes, I want `` ''). I also want *style* tips like a good editor would give me. Problem solved. 1/5
June 12, 2025 at 9:55 PM
Editing our writing is a common academic task. I *hate* how spell/grammar checks annoy me by thinking proper nouns or LaTeX code are misspellings (yes, I want `` ''). I also want *style* tips like a good editor would give me. Problem solved. 1/5
I hate picking on government at the time the high value parts of it are facing so much scrutiny, but we can't do things like this. $6250/sq ft renovation, w parking being a big cost driver? Does no one see the problem? Like California HSR, such an insane estimate that project literally not worth it.
The Federal Reserve Building in San Francisco already has the largest surface parking lot Downtown (despite having an entrance to the Embarcadero BART/Muni station on the same block). They're going overboard with putting parking into their DC HQ now
The completely ridiculous cost of building in the U.S., Federal Reserve edition: The Fed is spending $2.5 BILLION on renovating their DC HQ building. www.mercatus.org/research/pol...
June 3, 2025 at 11:25 PM
I hate picking on government at the time the high value parts of it are facing so much scrutiny, but we can't do things like this. $6250/sq ft renovation, w parking being a big cost driver? Does no one see the problem? Like California HSR, such an insane estimate that project literally not worth it.
Harvard situation (plus NIH/NSF news) is terrible and hopefully will be resolved soon. That said (and this is Devil's Advocate, please don't kill me here!), in Earth 2 where faculty are very Trumpian, many students are somewhere from "race realist" to bigots, what is outcome? 1/6
May 23, 2025 at 3:45 PM
Harvard situation (plus NIH/NSF news) is terrible and hopefully will be resolved soon. That said (and this is Devil's Advocate, please don't kill me here!), in Earth 2 where faculty are very Trumpian, many students are somewhere from "race realist" to bigots, what is outcome? 1/6
Why we started alldayta.com in a graph - the ed gains per $ from AI assistants are insane. This paper, schoolkids in Nigeria, is using GPT4 + Copilot, which are technically way behind today's frontier and not user friendly. Still: *massive* learning gains.
May 20, 2025 at 8:14 PM
Why we started alldayta.com in a graph - the ed gains per $ from AI assistants are insane. This paper, schoolkids in Nigeria, is using GPT4 + Copilot, which are technically way behind today's frontier and not user friendly. Still: *massive* learning gains.
"Where in the world is this place" is a surprising skill of multimodal LLMs. But as Geoguessr fans know, road markings, words on signs, etc. make it much easier. I made my own benchmark to fix this. 1/x kevinbryanecon.com/HardGeoBench/
May 12, 2025 at 8:54 PM
"Where in the world is this place" is a surprising skill of multimodal LLMs. But as Geoguessr fans know, road markings, words on signs, etc. make it much easier. I made my own benchmark to fix this. 1/x kevinbryanecon.com/HardGeoBench/
Sunday economics: who knew that gardening was Hayekian? I thought - plants grow in nature, how hard can it be? Answer is that nature grows a given plant where the shade, pH, neighbors, wind, temp are all right. Very hard for a "central planner" (, in particular, me!) to do this.
May 11, 2025 at 2:32 PM
Sunday economics: who knew that gardening was Hayekian? I thought - plants grow in nature, how hard can it be? Answer is that nature grows a given plant where the shade, pH, neighbors, wind, temp are all right. Very hard for a "central planner" (, in particular, me!) to do this.
Many students are cheating with LLMs: true. Being able to use AI to help with tasks (in addition to knowing fundamentals!): true. The nature of how you teach and evaluate must change given the above: also true. It's the 3rd one that too many people are missing. nymag.com/intelligence...
Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College
ChatGPT has unraveled the entire academic project.
nymag.com
May 7, 2025 at 2:54 PM
Many students are cheating with LLMs: true. Being able to use AI to help with tasks (in addition to knowing fundamentals!): true. The nature of how you teach and evaluate must change given the above: also true. It's the 3rd one that too many people are missing. nymag.com/intelligence...
In the Star today (Canada's biggest paper) on why Canada can't redirect trade away from the US without making the country much poorer, why the (many) attempts to do this historically failed, and what to do instead: www.thestar.com/news/insight...
May 4, 2025 at 5:10 PM
In the Star today (Canada's biggest paper) on why Canada can't redirect trade away from the US without making the country much poorer, why the (many) attempts to do this historically failed, and what to do instead: www.thestar.com/news/insight...
Reposted by Kevin A. Bryan
Study in Nature: “Across 30 out of 32 evaluation axes from the specialist physician perspective & 25 out of 26 evaluation axes from the patient-actor perspective, AMIE [Google Medical LLM] was rated superior to PCPs [primary care docs] while being non-inferior on the rest.”
(& AIME is an older LLM)
(& AIME is an older LLM)
May 4, 2025 at 1:27 PM
Study in Nature: “Across 30 out of 32 evaluation axes from the specialist physician perspective & 25 out of 26 evaluation axes from the patient-actor perspective, AMIE [Google Medical LLM] was rated superior to PCPs [primary care docs] while being non-inferior on the rest.”
(& AIME is an older LLM)
(& AIME is an older LLM)
Reposted by Kevin A. Bryan
To be honest, I am much more nervous posting here than on LinkedIn or X. It feels like one post talking about a paper on AI getting to the wrong parts of BlueSky will result in death threats (I only say that because I have seen it happen).
Very weird dynamic that I am not others want to deal with.
Very weird dynamic that I am not others want to deal with.
April 26, 2025 at 3:08 AM
To be honest, I am much more nervous posting here than on LinkedIn or X. It feels like one post talking about a paper on AI getting to the wrong parts of BlueSky will result in death threats (I only say that because I have seen it happen).
Very weird dynamic that I am not others want to deal with.
Very weird dynamic that I am not others want to deal with.
The "we have cultural differences with big universities so nihilism, let's kill of science funding" attitude is nuts. No doubt. But also: for same reason we should be mad about the fact that half the population who was right of center was also really driven out of academic research.
April 16, 2025 at 2:36 AM
The "we have cultural differences with big universities so nihilism, let's kill of science funding" attitude is nuts. No doubt. But also: for same reason we should be mad about the fact that half the population who was right of center was also really driven out of academic research.
A good measure of Abundance/Progress: how upset are you about reg restrictions slowing self-driving rollout? Self-drive cars drop serious crashes by 80%+, even though remainder almost entirely are caused by others. Waymo's swerve away from even many of these! www.understandingai.org/p/human-driv...
March 31, 2025 at 9:21 PM
A good measure of Abundance/Progress: how upset are you about reg restrictions slowing self-driving rollout? Self-drive cars drop serious crashes by 80%+, even though remainder almost entirely are caused by others. Waymo's swerve away from even many of these! www.understandingai.org/p/human-driv...
What Matt means here is he used to uncritically write articles about "paper in top journal finds result consistent with progressive policy" & now he's worried those articles were refereed and accepted with a less critical and unbiased eye than he had thought. Like, clearly true! Everyone knows this!
I absolutely regret my role in this — it turns out that academic social science is shot through with dramatically more ideological bias than I realized 20-15 years ago and all the stuff you guys churn out should come with huge warning labels before it’s presented to laypeople.
March 27, 2025 at 2:06 AM
What Matt means here is he used to uncritically write articles about "paper in top journal finds result consistent with progressive policy" & now he's worried those articles were refereed and accepted with a less critical and unbiased eye than he had thought. Like, clearly true! Everyone knows this!