Prof. Balázs Kovács Named to OpenAI’s Inaugural Research Cohort

Balázs Kovács, professor of organizational behavior, will join the inaugural cohort of OpenAI’s Economic Research Exchange, a new program that supports scholarly research on the economic effects of AI.

Following a call for proposals in June, the program selected 14 projects submitted by researchers. They will receive grants, stipends, privacy-protected product and usage data, and project support from the Economic Research Exchange team.

Over the next year, Kovács will investigate whether AI-assisted search helps researchers reach a broader range of ideas and make more unusual connections, or whether it leads them to converge on the same sources and ideas.

“AI is rapidly changing how researchers find and synthesize prior knowledge, but we know much less about how that changes the science and inventions that ultimately get produced,” he says.

Kovács’s team at SOM includes Iris Wang, a doctoral student in organizational behavior, and Alex Tyulyupo, a postdoctoral researcher studying innovation, search, categories, and large language models.

Kovács joined the SOM faculty in 2015. Before coming to Yale, he was an assistant professor at the University of Lugano in Switzerland. Kovács studies how organizing knowledge into categories shapes search, recombination, and changing perceptions of novelty.