Alex Imas
@alexolegimas
Professor at @ChicagoBooth. Economics + Applied AI.
🚨New paper (link in reply)🚨 Are we underestimating AI use in self-report surveys? YES, by as much as 30 percentage pts. We find 60% self-reported vs. truth closer to ~90% (!) Why? Social desirability bias, people embarrassed/worried to admit AI use, so they underreport.
As confirmed by the new IMO rankings, Grok 4’s eye-popping benchmarks were driving by the following innovations: - train on test - train on test - train on test
When you don’t know that a “sound bite” is both audio and video. Happy three years to me finally making it to Reddit.
Only guy in the world who could somehow blame this on Coldplay. Just a first ballot hall of fame, generational hater. They don’t make them like this anymore.
Cheating CEOs are safe at Oasis concerts, Liam Gallagher told the crowd at a concert. “Do we have any lovebirds in the house? Don’t worry, we ain’t got any of that Coldplay, snidey f*cking camera sh*t. It doesn’t matter to us who you’re f*cking mingling with, or tingling with or…
New paper, with @AgranovMarina , Doug Bernheim, and Tom Palfrey: we show theoretically and experimentally that egalitarianism can be a strategic response to complex bargaining situations. Link: sites.psu.edu/nageebali/file…
What my mind goes to when people complain about coding agents breaking their application - "OH, STUPID BIRD! I NEVER SHOULD HAVE PUT YOU IN CHARGE. WHY, YOU..!
Nothing justifies this barbarism. And only one explanation: make Gaza unlivable, drive Palestinians out.
Breaking News: Israeli troops killed more than 60 Palestinians after crowds gathered near a border crossing where aid trucks enter, Gaza officials said. nyti.ms/3GRuuTp
Excited to be heading to Cambridge this week for the NBER Summer Institute! Our paper "Interviews" will be presented on Wednesday, July 23 in a joint session of Labor Studies and Personnel Economics.
This will surprise no one who has looked at the research on the performance of active management. It’s still extremely important
Chicago’s pension funds pay millions in fees to over 80 investment firms, yet a simple index strategy outperformed them all during the past decade. These firms are getting paid to underachieve. Over $500 million in fees and forgone returns over the past decade.
There will be hundreds of posts from “skeptics” arguing that, actually, IMO problems are not that hard. Ignore it and look at the predictions. A few years ago even optimists thought Gold at IMO was further away than 2025.
Such bs. The majority of math majors or even math phds and faculty could not win a gold in imo.
Two cents on AI getting International Math Olympiad (IMO) Gold, from a mathematician. Background: Last year, Google DeepMind (GDM) got Silver in IMO 2024. This year, OpenAI solved problems P1-P5 for IMO 2025 (but not P6), and this performance corresponds to Gold. (1/10)
OpenAI's announcement of winning gold at IMO using an unreleased model is particularly interesting in light of public models (including o3/o4-mini) performing pretty poorly on the same test. Suggests that the AI labs have something new and important brewing....
So, all the models underperform humans on the new International Mathematical Olympiad questions, and Grok-4 is especially bad on it, even with best-of-n selection? Unbelievable!
have you considered simply getting good
The solution is clear but requires political courage: cut the visas! We must prioritize American workers in American jobs and stop pretending that flooding the market with foreign labor helps our grads. Full Article: ifspp.substack.com/p/data-on-how-…
To summarize this week: - we released general purpose computer using agent - got beaten by a single human in atcoder heuristics competition - solved 5/6 new IMO problems with natural language proofs All of those are based on the same single reinforcement learning system
This is such a nice expression of the problems with using ai when (learning) programming
"I use AI in a separate window. I don't enjoy Cursor or Windsurf, I can literally feel competence draining out of my fingers." @dhh, the legendary programmer and creator of Ruby on Rails has the most beautiful and philosophical idea about what AI takes away from programmers.
1/N I’m excited to share that our latest @OpenAI experimental reasoning LLM has achieved a longstanding grand challenge in AI: gold medal-level performance on the world’s most prestigious math competition—the International Math Olympiad (IMO).
Wishing @CAAI_Booth's Rafael M. Batista the best of luck in his next role at the @PrincetonSPIA! During his time at @ChicagoBooth, Batista explored ideas at the intersection of behavioral science, algorithms, and hypothesis generation: chicagobooth.edu/research/cente…
I have long held the (unpopular) position that one of the most damaging things that happened to the political health of this country was the Daily Show. One side laughing at the other causes the former to become unserious and the latter to become resentful.
Actually, we need fewer shows where politics is entertainment. And also we should stop treating politics as entertainment.
This suggests tech’s hiring contraction of 2023-24 may not have been primarily a story of AI job displacement, but rather the downslope of the sector’s meteoric post-pandemic hiring boom, with recruitment now rebounding from that trough.