Reflections on Vibe Researching - Joshua Gans' Newsletter

I tried that prompt (and nothing more than it) this morning with ChatGPT 5.2 Pro and it actually produced an entire paper. Here it is. I have no idea what it is saying or whether it is complete nonsense or not. But it took 19 minutes and 10 seconds to produce. To be clear, ChatGPT didn’t think it was a publishable paper and that it needed more work. So I decided to ask Gemini if the paper made any sense and it said: The paper is scientifically coherent. It identifies a genuine gap in a top-tier paper (the computational slowness of OT-GMM) and applies the correct mathematical tool (Debiased Sinkhorn) to fix it. If implemented, this would likely be a publishable contribution in econometrics. I’ll leave it to others to work that all out. For the moment, let me reflect on my own more serious attempts at ‘vibe researching.’ The first reasoning LLM (ChatGPT-o1-pro) came out just over a year ago. It was the first model that opened up the possibility of using AI write at the start and through

I tried that prompt (and nothing more than it) this morning with ChatGPT 5.2 Pro and it actually produced an entire paper. Here it is. I have no idea what it is saying or whether it is complete nonsense or not. But it took 19 minutes and 10 seconds to produce. To be clear, ChatGPT didn’t think it was a publishable paper and that it needed more work. So I decided to ask Gemini if the paper made any sense and it said: The paper is scientifically coherent. It identifies a genuine gap in a top-tier paper (the computational slowness of OT-GMM) and applies the correct mathematical tool (Debiased Sin