This essay begins to unpack the potential impact of advances in artificial intelligence on
innovation, and to identify the role that policy and institutions might play in providing effective
incentives for innovation, diffusion, and competition in this area. We begin in Section II by
highlighting the distinctive economics of research tools, of which deep learning applied to R&D
problems is such an intriguing example. We focus on the interplay between the degree of
generality of application of a new research tool and the role of research tools not simply in