Not sure where I heard this but it’s apparently a common trope that many of the politicians and leaders that treat The Economist as close to holy writ are often horrified to learn that most the staff is actually a bunch of very precocious 20-somethings that are good at research and writing in an authoritative tone.

Actually, now that I think of it, not so different from LLMs…

(Full disclosure, I’ve been a subscriber for a couple of decades)

Also true about every single consulting firm

They periodically advertise for science journalism interns, sometimes with the proviso "Our aim is more to discover writing talent in a science student or scientist than scientific aptitude in a budding journalist." So, I think they're at least trying to hire the qualified.

(Long-time Economist subscriber.)

Usually its the most credentialed I'm least interested in listening to, especially when the value of those credentials are dependant upon the future looking a particular way.

Using this logic, how are they qualified to answer 90% of the questions their articles deal with...

Yes and no. Most questions they answers are more politically leaning, meaning that they are not optimisation problems but they answer the question of the kind of society we want to be.

This specific article seems to be reporting on a very technical issue on how to continue to scale LLM. Even scientific papers have a hard time answering those kind of questions because unless in very special circumstances where we can show with a good confidence that there are limitations (P vs NP for instance) the answer will simply be given by the most successful approach.