Tom Cunningham
Economist who co-organised the Stanford 'We Must Act Now' statement.
Tom Cunningham, an economist at METR and former OpenAI Economic Research team member, helped organise Stanford's 13 July 'We Must Act Now' letter, whose wide coalition of economists and researchers included 16 Nobel laureates, warning governments may have only a few years to adapt.
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16 Nobel laureates sign Stanford's alarm
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Tom Cunningham is an economist and AI researcher at METR who helped organise Stanford's "We Must Act Now" statement, published 13 July; the letter he co-organised with Erik Brynjolfsson, Ajay Agrawal and Anton Korinek went on to draw a wide Coalition of economists and AI researchers, 16 Nobel laureates among them, warning that governments may have only a few years to prepare. His own framing of the problem, that economists are 'driving in the fog' with no standard model of AI's economic impact, gives the statement its central metaphor for why urgency and uncertainty coexist.
He previously worked as a senior data scientist at Meta, Twitter and OpenAI, where he sat on OpenAI's Economic Research team and contributed to research on how people use ChatGPT, before moving to METR to focus on AI capability assessment and the economics of transformative AI.
His vantage point, watching AI capability from inside the labs that build it rather than from a university economics department, distinguishes him from the mostly academic Nobel laureates whose signatures give the statement its authority, and is part of why he frames the coming years as unusually hard to model.
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