This newsletter typically focuses on the latest ideas, thinkers, student programs, initiatives, or policy proposals we’re working on here at Mercatus.
This week, I get to showcase a new web product, our AI Research Assistant. Powered by OpenAI’s ChatGPT, this chatbot aims to elevate how you interact with specific research and enhance your experience on our site.
The AI Research Assistant is embedded within each research publication page, providing an interactive way to explore the content. Whether you're reading a short testimony or policy brief, an extensive working paper, a PDF, or a web post, the AI Research Assistant has an in-depth understanding of the topic and responds to your queries. You can use simple prompts like "Summarize" or ask more complex questions about the material. To my knowledge, this is the first use of AI in this way amongst organizations like Mercatus.
We’ve long been bullish on the potential of AI to create new opportunities and abundance in our economy, and it seemed like a no-brainer to leverage the same technology for our research. This tool is still in its infancy, and we anticipate that ChatGPT’s ability to distill and explain our research will only get better. By some accounts, in 2022, AI was answering questions at a high school level; in 2023, at an undergraduate level; and now at a PhD level. AI is already answering some questions better than the experts can.
Head over to our research library and select any of our publications, and you'll be able to ask any question about the research, have it summarized, get a tweet written for you, or any other query that strikes your fancy. Test out the tool and send me an email with your thoughts or feedback.
Ben Brophy Director of Marketing
Mercatus Center at George Mason University
Topics & Issues
Tom Hoenig and Stephen Matteo Miller respond in American Banker to criticism of their argument, first made in FinRegRag, that risk-weighted capital regulation fails at determining whether a bank has adequate capital. FinRegRag, the little Substack that could.
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