Google DeepMind paper argues AI coordination, not just competence, will drive economic change

Google DeepMind researchers Alex Imas, Andrew Koh and Shane Legg published The Economics of Intelligence, a paper arguing that AI's economic impact depends on agents learning to coordinate, not only on individual models getting smarter.

Rohan Paul, summarizing the paper on X, reports that the authors expect the impact to appear first in wages, before changes in market structure or employment.

The paper cites a 32% gain for well-matched human pairs over random pairs in a 100-person quiz. The authors say coordination is a capability most benchmarks do not yet measure. The paper is described as the first in a series of projects from the group on how AGI will change the economy.