REAL AI AGENTS AND REAL WORK

Summary from the TLDR AI newsletter

Quietly and all at once, frontier AIs crossed a threshold into economically valuable work. OpenAI tested experts against AI on multi-hour tasks, and humans won, but barely, with AI's weakness being formatting rather than accuracy. Claude Sonnet 4.5 reproduced an economics paper's findings in minutes, work that would take academics hours of tedious conversion, potentially solving academia's replication crisis at scale. The difference between transformation and waste lies entirely in human judgment about what's worth doing, not merely what can be done.