Economic models provide little insight into when the next big idea and its associated productivity dividend will come along. Once a general purpose technology (GPT) is identified, the economist's toolkit does provide an understanding when firms will adopt a new technology and for what purpose....

We model a key step in the innovation process, hypothesis generation, as the making of predictions over a vast combinatorial space. Traditionally, scientists and innovators use theory or intuition to guide their search. Increasingly, however, they use artificial intelligence (AI) instead. We...