Excited to share what I've been up to this year!

On the cover of this week's @TheEconomist is a 6-part special report on India’s economy by Tom Easton+me. It asks

- What it would take for India beat 6% growth?
- And is Modi up to the task?

🧵on the key arguments 1/

2/ India is growing at 6-6.5% a yr, slower than China’s heyday of 10%+

But that's still solid. Growth is harder today bc manufacturing is less of a route to riches

India has the world's #5 economy, by 2027 it will be #3. #1 is even plausible by 2070 economist.com/special-report…

NEW in @TheEconomist. Industry labs have driven rapid progress in large-scale AI leading to @OpenAI's ChatGPT. I ask:

1. Why did academia pass the baton to firms?
2. Does Google's LaMDA (which I got access to) or ChatGPT give better dating advice?
3. Where are things headed? 1/ First, industry is leading the way in large-scale AI (though it builds on years of work from academia). Why?

- Training big models is computationally intensive and therefore expensive
- In AI research outputs can rapidly be commercialised (a herald to the era of Bell Labs) 2/

New piece in @TheEconomist! An important second-order impact of remote work: Firm “boundaries” are blurring.

Remote work changes the calculus of what to do, and crucially, what not to do. It boosts freelancing, outsourcing and offshoring, just as Coase would predict: 1/ First, skilled jobs are more distributed across geographies, in part reflecting a rise in remote work.

Second, cross-border service exports, including IT services, are booming.

Third, the market for skilled freelancers has doubled since 2018.