Assoc. Prof. of Strategy, U Toronto Rotman | Chief Economist, CDL Toronto | Co-Founder, AllDayTA | Ars longa, vita brevis, occasio praeceps (especially now)
Toronto, ON, Canada
Joined February 2015
- Tweets17.1K
- Following20
- Followers24.4K
- Likes12.1K
Kevin A. Bryan retweeted
Very good explanation from one of the smartest French economists of why Mélenchon can cancel all French sovereign debt that was outstanding as of July 1st this year without any negative consequences, as long as he promises it’s a one-time default.
Let’s be clear: this is a highly inappropriate way to model the effect of Prop 40 on taxpayer behavior.
For one, it’s a basic violation of rational expectations, a cornerstone of modern economics.
In Jaros and @joshrauh world, the billionaires act irrationally: they respond to a policy that does not exist and will never exist.
Economics students around the world are taught this is not an appropriate way to model behavior — but apparently in this context (fighting Prop 40) it’s OK.
I think we will find out that the SMEs who try to vibe code critical software are going to be hacked five ways from sideways. Look at what is happening today to all of the "we will just self host" institutions! Software requires maintenance...
The dirty secret of SAAS is that subscription pricing allows you to keep charging customers who aren't really using the product.
The downside of this is that when your subscriptions finally churn, it's a *lagging indicator* of your business failing.
I strongly suspect that there are many, many "dead men walking" now in SAAS, both AI-native and traditional: businesses where the financials may still look fine -- just a quarter or two of stagnant growth, margins are still great, maybe there's an AI narrative going forward, etc. but the *product* is losing utilization and they will lose every single customer to {{AI-native competitor, possibly the big labs themselves}} as the customers encounter those solutions. Those customers become dormant users, but the subscriptions still run for the while.
The actual revenue churn only occurs months or quarters later when the question of "is anyone still using this? do we need to keep paying for this?" is finally answered with a "no" rather than an "i'm not sure".
Kevin A. Bryan retweeted
New essay in @ForeignAffairs with James Manyika and @elerianm on steps that can be taken to help AI deliver on its economic promise, drawing on lessons from cooperative game theory as a guide.
Most conversations treat AI as a general-purpose technology (GPT), and some compare it to the Industrial Revolution. But we think it is more than that: it is also a method for creating new inventions, like the microscope or the scientific method. Economist Zvi Griliches famously called such discoveries IMIs--inventions of a method of invention. Seen this way, AI carries the potential of the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment combined.
Yet realizing this potential is a coordination problem. Delivering on the promise of AI requires progress not just on furthering its capabilities, but on building out infrastructure, deep adoption across the economy, and buy-in from many different groups. This is unlikely to happen if people do not feel they have a stake in the upside of the technology. Promises of abstract scientific and medical breakthroughs in the future won't change this when anxieties about near-term disruption are running hot.
Rather than treating AI like a zero-sum game, we argue that it is useful to look to cooperative game theory as a guide. Because models, compute, organizational change, and human upskilling are strong complements, AI has the structure of a "convex game": Each group that joins makes everyone else's contributions more valuable. That makes it possible to form stable coalitions of workers, communities, firms, and developers where incentives are aligned and everyone has a stake in the gains.
The cooperative approach will of course not be easy, but we will make the case that coalitions can start small and grow as the mutual gains become tangible. We provide concrete examples of how this can be done in practice and at scale.
Link to essay here: foreignaffairs.com/guest-pas…
Fun fact from an American: Canadians, like everyone else, have free speech in the US, and are free to do or say whatever they want. Just because the temporary + soon-to-be-evicted occupants at 1600 have Unamerican beliefs on this doesn't mean you need to care about their nonsense
Game theory: wars end when both sides choose to not continue fighting. Unambiguous victory is very rare. I suspect that political targeting during war will become more common: drone/remote warfare makes the "cost" of war for decisionmakers too low (they are barely affected).
No modern conflict has ended by destroying the enemy’s ability to resist—not even World War II. To end a war, both sides must choose to stop fighting, and those choices always require nontrivial bargaining. Misunderstanding the relationship between bargaining and fighting produces systematic failures to integrate negotiating strategy with campaign planning, from Afghanistan to Ukraine to the US war with Iran.
New piece in @ForeignAffairs with Stephen Biddle and Yuri Zhukov on the myth of military victory.
True. And also, "today in lots of the world only works as is because of frictions". This is true in terms of safety and fraud (on and offline) but also in terms of many social interactions. Intriguingly, it offers an obvious "proof of human work" scope for value creation...
Just going to preregister here that I believe the computer security overhang is not a few dozen bugs that get patched and then we're good, there are 100,000s of vulns that are extremely discoverable with infinite free tokens and we're probably going to have to move away from systems that presuppose that perfection is possible.
AI is incredibly useful, including in education (heck that's why we started @alldaytahelps!), but clearly not everywhere: phones are useful but you don't pick up at Thanksgiving dinner or in the middle of church or during a board meeting...
Inexpensive design, massive driver of quality of life. Partly because the design means that people care enough not to leave it looking terrible when they have to do repairs!
Kevin A. Bryan retweeted
OpenAI says the PHP security flaw (found with GPT-5.6 Sol) is the tip of the iceberg, and they have several more discoveries to announce.
OpenAI models helped researchers—operating as part of our Patch the Planet initiative—discover critical security flaws in PHP, an open-source programming language used to run an estimated 70% of websites.
Over the past two months, we led a coalition of maintainers, researchers, and security providers to prepare fixes and protections ahead of disclosure. This duration was necessary because the fix was quite intricate and required a major change to the PHP engine. Every site using PHP can now safely upgrade their version to stay secure, in addition to applying mitigations from various security vendors.
Due to the severity of these flaws and PHP’s widespread use, we consider this bug to be one of the most impactful vulnerabilities in recent memory. It also marks a new phase, where AI can find security bugs with internet-scale impact.
This is an example of the Defender’s Window in action: to our knowledge, frontier AI was able to find this vulnerability ahead of attackers, giving defenders time to prepare.
openai.com/index/coordinated…
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Wiz Research wasn't the first one to discover the exploit. An independent researcher first discovered it: x.com/calif_io/statu…
Amen.
There is a common view in the new right, particularly the downstream-of-thiel part of the new right, that the rise digital technology and financial services caused american stagnation. This was and I guess still is a fashionable view. “Innovation in bits, but not atoms”; “where is my flying car?” etc. I have heard it suggested, for example, that nuclear fusion could have happened sooner if the physics PhDs hadn’t disproportionately been tempted away from scientific R&D and into working on statistical-mechanics problems in finance and tech.
This view turned out to be almost entirely the product of negativity bias toward the status quo. If we solve fusion it will be paid for by the ai industry, and will also be aided by ai itself. If we cure cancer we will do it using chips designed originally to play video games. The achievement of almost all the technological dreams of the thielian dynamists will happen because of algorithmic research subsidized by, and in some cases done in service of, serving people digital ads and quantitative trading, the things the thielian dynamists say are so bad.
The tech industry was right, and the markets were right: the best use of those physicists’ time was not in the lab working on fusion reactors, it really was on the trading floor in New York, or the standing desk in Menlo Park.
Kevin A. Bryan retweeted
OpenAI just released hundreds of AI-generated results on open math problems.
If AI solves more problems with less human input, is human input worth less?
Short answer: not necessarily. It can be worth more—depending on which problems are left and how solvable they are for humans.
Thread, partly inspired by my paper with @EduardTalamas, “The Turing Valley” (accepted, JHC). (1/n)
Our @creativedlab AI accelerator, afaik the world's oldest, kicked off year 12 today. Last year, we switched whole program to AI for Science: self-driving labs, tools, downstream. Some great companies in bio, chem, defense, spatial, robotics, edge. What an exciting time! 1/2
I do love @WorksInProgMag - if you are the kind of person that wants a high design magazine with articles about Victorian era infrastructure and why we can and should kill all mosquitos, it is worth a subscription! (Bonus - my magazine rack right now...)
Kevin A. Bryan retweeted
We gave GPT-6 Astra and Claude Fable 5.1 open-ended AI research questions from unpublished papers, with a $10,000 budget each, and had the original authors grade the papers they produced. Compared to our first tests with Claude Opus 4.8 in July, we saw meaningful improvements in experimental design and resource management, but persistent limitations in creative problem solving, judgment, calibration, and communication; both papers were rejected by our experts.
cruxevals.com/research-notes…
Kevin A. Bryan retweeted
“Actually, in America, the reading of books is up. Sales of print books have increased nearly twenty-five per cent from a decade ago. The number of independent bookstores in the United States has climbed steeply since 2009, with a seventy-per-cent increase since 2020.”
These nuggets & more in this delightful @NewYorker profile of James Daunt, founder of Daunt Books, CEO of Barnes & Noble, and Managing Director of Waterstones: newyorker.com/magazine/2026/…
