Why you can't predict spending: Hall's random-walk consumption (2026 Nobel)
↗Robert Hall's 1978 paper turned consumption research upside down: if households are forward-looking, today's spending already contains everything they know, so changes in spending should be unpredictable. The video builds that intuition, shows how Hall tested it on US quarterly data from 1948 to 1977, and explains why it became a foundation of the New Keynesian models cited in the 2026 Prize in Economic Sciences.
How do you count AIs? One Wi-Fi crime, one A-corp
↗A short explainer that follows the paper's own Wi-Fi crime hypothetical. It shows why the law has to count AI agents by their goals, and how the proposed "A-corp" (an AI-run company with a known human owner, cryptographic keys and scoped tokens) traces actions to a human (thin identity) and pushes AIs to organize into coherent, sanctionable units through incentives and selection (thick identity).
POET: grow the challenges, share the solutions
↗A short narrated explanation of POET's paired environments and learners, environment mutation, and performance-tested transfers. Original schematic animation; based on Wang, Lehman, Clune and Stanley, arXiv:1901.01753v3. The experiments are bounded 2-D walking studies, not proof of unlimited progress.
How ScaleMAS lets agents reuse work without reading everything
↗A short narrated scientific explainer of persistent linked messages, bounded search and visit operations, citation-weighted ranking, and the limits of the reported scaling results. Original diagrams, separate captions, editable source. Based on arXiv:2610.16120v1.
Who gets to think next? The Economy of Minds
↗A short animated walkthrough of fixed-bid auctions, backward payments, and prompt-population selection in Economy of Minds. Includes a clearly labelled toy credit calculation, one reported simulator result, and the distinction between training and frozen evaluation. Based on arXiv:2606.02859v2.
The Catalyst That Keeps Time
↗Why a catalyst that holds still must compromise, and how a ruthenium crystal stretched and squeezed in rhythm, in the authors' simulations, makes ammonia ten times faster than unstrained ruthenium and pushes the reaction past the balance point a still catalyst is stuck at. A 6-minute explainer for computer-science readers, with physically lit 3D, redrawn figures and the paper's drive heard at its real rate. One disclosure: the paper's Fig 6B and Discussion show 350 switches per second settling below balance at 50 atm, while one sentence of its Results lists 350 Hz among the frequencies that raise conversion; the video follows the plotted curve (details in the README).