Simon Johnson: belief

Transcript context

…Working with Daron — how would you describe what that’s like? Obviously, he’s super productive, as are you, but he might be renowned as the very most productive person in the entire profession. How does that manifest itself through daily interactions? It’s hard to keep up with Daron, to be totally honest. We talked about writing this book, and we kicked ideas around for about five years. And then all of a sudden — it was a pre-planned moment, but all of a sudden, pretty much January last year, Daron said, “Right, let’s start writing.” We’d got some pieces already, but we worked flat out for six months, and that was super intense. Then we spent a lot of time doing fact checking and cleaning things up and tightening text. It was probably the most intense six months of my working life, I would say. That’s more intense than working at the IMF during the financial crisis, so that’s quite a benchmark. Have you and he been surprised at how rapidly AI has evolved? Large language models in particular.…

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