John Cochrane gushing about Refine, the AI-powered research tool:

This is the first time I’ve seen AI at work in something I do daily, and it really is revolutionary.

Refereeing and evaluating papers is one of the more unpleasant and time consuming tasks in our profession. I’ve read a lot of referee reports in my 40 years as an economist, and this is top 5% for sure. Most referee reports do not identify the major point of the paper, and do not assess if the paper backs up that point. They do not notice glaring gaps of logic, basic theorems violated, econometrics advice 101 ignored. Editors are lucky if one out of three reports is vaguely useful. Clearly, this task is going to be radically impacted by AI. If I were an editor, I’d feed every paper to refine on receipt. Or, I would require the author to spend the $50 and send in the last refine report! I will surely get refine’s opinion before any referee report I write in the future.

Will all the referees be out of jobs? No! You still have to read and evaluate what refine offers. But the speed, accuracy, and quality of reports will jump. And economists will save a lot of time.