Baala Shakya, Staff Photographer

Tyler Cowen, a prominent economist, New York Times columnist and chair of economics at George Mason University, preached his affirmative stance on the resolution “Resolved: Unleash American AI” to the Yale Political Union on Monday evening

Cowen, who coauthors the “Marginal Revolution” blog and writes about the intersections of technology, economic policy and artificial intelligence, was introduced by YPU President Leo Greenberg ’26 to an audience of around 80 students.

“[Cowen] is the first person to write a column on the Chinese DeepSeek AI,” Greenberg said at the event. “[You] are talking to an oracle tonight.” 

Greenberg referenced Cowen’s column in Bloomberg, published over two weeks ago, which discussed the innovative promise that DeepSeek-V3, a new large-language model from China, showed.

DeepSeek-V3 is a Chinese open-source reasoning model that is an AI-powered chatbot, which looks, feels and works similarly to ChatGPT. DeepSeek claims that its artificial intelligence model matches, or even surpasses, OpenAI’s ChatGPT o1. The company also claims that it trained its model for only $6 million — a small fraction of what American AI companies spent to train comparable models. 

On Monday morning, DeepSeek became the most downloaded free app on Apple’s U.S. app store, ousting ChatGPT in the process. 

Because the company developed DeepSeek-V3 amid a U.S. export ban on advanced processing chips to China — which suggests that such models can be trained on less sophisticated chips — the stocks of chip manufacturers plunged on Monday morning. 

Cowen began the debate by explaining the nature of artificial intelligence, highlighting how the technology can be prone to “hallucinations,” which occur as a result of generating false information or making predictions based on insufficient or biased data. 

However, Cowen claimed that “training AI is easier, say, than training a dog or a horse” and that “AI could create a century worth of progress.”

Cowen then preached upon the many merits of incorporating AI into everyday life, weaving together the possibility of AI producing solutions to climate change and improving education as “people [would] have a world class tutor at their disposal.”

“Yale degrees would be worth a whole lot less,” claimed Cowen half-jokingly, as he was met with a flurry of hisses and stomps.

Cowen then proceeded to unpack the concept of “freedom,” particularly in the context of how society would be blessed with endless opportunities for leisure as a result of the unleashment of AI into the workforce.

Cowen argued that AI would ultimately make life easier.

“Waking up to pre-written responses to email drafts [would] make my life easier,” said Cowen. “I already get emails written by ChatGPT.” He argued why society couldn’t take AI further to complete such mundane tasks.

In his speech, Cowen also painted an alternate reality — a possible American future — where major projects, large non-profits and even top educational institutions are all run by only two to three individuals and an “army of AI robots.” He added that office work would be largely automated and that the field of law would be largely obsolete the way it currently is.

“[Having] lots of legal knowledge would be useless, but plenty of lawyers would be needed to write laws for the AI, [thus] the job would be fundamentally different,” said Cowen.

In an answer to a question posed to him after the talk by Riya Bhargava ’26, Cowen added that “the content of jobs is going to change … alternative jobs [will be] better and the quality of jobs is going to get a lot better.”

Cowen then espoused that “slowly but surely our world would transform” as status relations come under challenge and higher status is given to those who are good at working with AI — which he believes would be largely those majoring in the humanities, a belief that was met with some hisses from the audience.

Because “[AI] won’t have the inspiration of Kurt Cobain … or Elvis Presley,” Cowen argued that those of artistic character and who are working “with their hands” would be valued more.

Cowen then pivoted into his argument that the U.S. needs to combat China in leading AI, which he sees as the two dominant powers.

“The choice is not number one and two, it’s number one and way down there,” said Cowen in reference to the AI race taking shape between the two countries. “[People] think we are about a year ahead of China, but no one says five.”

At the conclusion of his speech, Cowen posed to the audience the question, “Do we want American AI to win or China?” and reflected with his own philosophical answer: “If I’m going to be turned into a paper clip, I’m going to want to be an American paper clip.”

After the talk, John Byler ’28 — also in an affirmative position — argued that AI is lower on the scale of intelligence than humans or animals, and that “AI is definitely not self-aware.”

“AI is a mathematical formula that takes zero and ones,” said Byler. “AI is metal with electricity running through it … I can’t understand how metal has a consciousness like humans … [It] can’t generalize problems outside of what it is fed.”

Countering Byler’s speech, Brock McNeel ’28, the YPU floor leader of the left, posed a question arguing that just because a threat isn’t viewed as real, “it doesn’t mean it isn’t.” 

McNeel proceeded to argue that AI is indeed a real threat to society, which must be met with caution, and that the current atmosphere around recent innovations in AI is eerily similar to the lack of concern when the atom was first split in 1932 — a breakthrough which eventually led to the disastrous bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan and an impending future for nuclear warfare.

At the conclusion of the debate, the affirmative prevailed 26-23 on “Resolved: Unleash American AI.”

The Yale Political Union is the oldest collegiate debate society in the U.S., founded in 1934.

BAALA SHAKYA
Baala Shakya covers Student Life and Campus Politics for the News. She is also a staff photographer and writes for the WKND. Originally from San Antonio, Texas, she is a first-year in Trumbull College majoring in History.