MacroPolo was a think tank at the Paulson Institute, built by Damien Ma, that studied China's economy and U.S.–China dynamics (Source: carnegieendowment.org). It ceased operations in 2025 (Who's Ahead in the Global AI Talent Race? (Ma and Yang, Carnegie China, 2026)).
Global AI Talent Tracker
MacroPolo's Global AI Talent Tracker measured the balance of elite AI research talent across countries by tracing the undergraduate origin, graduate training and workplace of authors of papers accepted at NeurIPS. Its most recent MacroPolo edition, published in 2023 and covering the 2022 conference, used a manually coded random sample of authors; its methodology remains available in archived form at macropolo.org.
In September 2026 Carnegie China published a successor edition, AI Talent v3.0, which kept the same methodological approach but used scripted data collection from OpenReview, with Claude Code and OpenAI Codex assisting the data work, to cover all 2025 authors with complete career histories. It re-ran the 2022 cohort with the new method; the four reconstructed 2022 results differed from MacroPolo's hand-coded estimates by 1.7 to 3.2 percentage points, within the earlier edition's estimated uncertainty of ±5 to 7 points (Who's Ahead in the Global AI Talent Race? (Ma and Yang, Carnegie China, 2026)).
Relationships
- related: Who's Ahead in the Global AI Talent Race? (Ma and Yang, Carnegie China, 2026) — successor edition of the tracker
- related: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace — Carnegie China continued the series
- related: Damien Ma
- related: AI Talent Flows