Research

As AI plays a larger economic role in society, a critical question emerges: who should own AI? Recent controversies, such as the Youtube creators realizing their videos had been used to train leading AI video models, highlight the urgent need for data ownership and transparency in AI.

In our new paper, we introduce data economics as a coherent field and define open problems that have not yet been formalized. Most AI economics research focuses on downstream effects like productivity and labor displacement, not production. We argue that understanding AI's economic impact requires studying how data, compute, and labor interact to create AI systems.