I introduce a survey of economic expectations formed by querying a large language
model (LLM)’s expectations of various financial and macroeconomic variables based
on a sample of news articles from the Wall Street Journal between 1984 and 2021. I
find the resulting expectations closely match existing surveys including the Survey of
Professional Forecasters (SPF), the American Association of Individual Investors, and
the Duke CFO Survey. Importantly, I document that LLM based expectations match
many of the deviations from full-information rational expectations exhibited in these
existing survey series. The LLM’s macroeconomic expectations exhibit under-reaction
commonly found in consensus SPF forecasts. Additionally, its return expectations are
extrapolative, disconnected from objective measures of expected returns, and negatively
correlated with future realized returns. Finally, using a sample of articles outside of the
LLM’s training period I find that the correlation with existing survey measures persists
– indicating these results do not reflect memorization but generalization on the part
of the LLM. My results provide evidence for the potential of LLMs to help us better
understand human beliefs and navigate possible models of nonrational expectations.