AI and Economic Development: Opportunities, Challenges, and Policy Implications

As artificial intelligence capabilities advance rapidly, they are beginning to reshape patterns of economic development, productivity growth, and labor markets around the world. The emergence of open-source AI is transforming how these technologies diffuse across economies and who can access them. These shifts raise fundamental questions about which sectors and regions will benefit most and what policy frameworks are needed to navigate them.

Thomas Wolf, Co-founder and Chief Science Officer of Hugging Face, will discuss how AI is influencing dynamics in economic development, and explore the key challenges facing policymakers and researchers as they work to understand and guide these transformations. HuggingFace operates the leading open platform for collaboration in AI.

Speaker: Thomas Wolf, Co-founder and Chief Science Officer of Hugging Face

Moderator: Pierre-Alex Balland, Visiting Fellow at the Growth Lab, and Chief Data Scientist at the Center for European Policy Studies (CEPS)

Whether attending in person or virtually, please register in advance. Room attendance is permitted for the Harvard community. The Zoom session is open to the public.

The Growth Lab’s “Development Talks” is a series of conversations with policymakers and academics working on economic growth and development in countries, regions, states, and cities in the US and around the world. The seminar provides a platform for practitioners and researchers to discuss both economic growth and development and analytical work centered on policy.