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   Kevin Beaumont (gossithedog@cyberplace.social)'s status on Saturday, 17-May-2025 16:30:31 JST Kevin Beaumont

   Widely covered MIT paper saying AI boosts worker productivity is, in fact, complete bullshit it turns out.

   https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/mit-says-it-no-longer-stands-behind-students-ai-research-paper-11434092?st=sF3Wvo&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

   • Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: likes this.
   • Rich Felker repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Gilgwath (gilgwath@social.tchncs.de)'s status on Saturday, 17-May-2025 22:44:57 JST Gilgwath

     in reply to

     @GossiTheDog This is total speculation, but I wouldn't put it past the AI techbros to pay some students to write some BS papers. 🤷 It's enough to have some papers out there you can cherry pick. They don't have to be valid, good, or peer reviewed. The revocation process for academic papers is even less effective than the one for TLS certs 😂 Most people outside academia just see that someone cites a paper and assumes the facts are good. If you are lucky someone checks wheter the paper actually exist.

     Rich Felker repeated this.
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     Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)'s status on Saturday, 17-May-2025 22:45:23 JST Rich Felker

     in reply to

     • Gilgwath

     @gilgwath @GossiTheDog Why pay them when you have college techbros drooling at the opportunity to simp for the industry for free?

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     maybenot (maybenot@mstdn.social)'s status on Saturday, 17-May-2025 22:45:42 JST maybenot

     in reply to

     • Gilgwath

     @gilgwath @GossiTheDog

     ^this

     even the dogforsaken antivax movement of today exists precisely because a *doctor was paid by VC pharmabros to write a BS paper*. Which has since been thoroughly debunked *and* eventually retracted, but as you say (and as we're constantly grimly reminded) the damage has been done.

     there's no reason to expect this bunch of them bros to be any better, evidence seems to suggest they're even worse.

   • Embed this notice
     Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)'s status on Saturday, 17-May-2025 22:47:47 JST Rich Felker

     in reply to

     • David, a Bostonian in Tokyo.

     @djl @GossiTheDog "AI" does not mean gradient descent. If you're doing gradient descent in high dimensions for some scientific purpose, awesome, call it that! Calling it "AI" tells us that you're willing to be an advertisement for scammers and pillagers for the sake of hyping your research.

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     David, a Bostonian in Tokyo. (djl@mastodon.mit.edu)'s status on Saturday, 17-May-2025 22:47:48 JST David, a Bostonian in Tokyo.

     in reply to

     @GossiTheDog

     FWIW, here's my take.

     0: "AI" means three things nowadays: neural nets, machine learning, and LLM stuff. They are different things.
     1: There was a paper in Science last year in which Materials Science types were doing some seriously kewl work on systems with 5 different metals using "machine learning" (gradient descent search in high dimensional spaces). And calling it AI.
     2: The Econ. grad student didn't understand this and thought they were doing LLM stuff. Oops.

     Rich Felker repeated this.
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     Duckbilled Plattypus. (pattykimura@beige.party)'s status on Saturday, 17-May-2025 22:48:07 JST Duckbilled Plattypus.

     in reply to

     • David, a Bostonian in Tokyo.

     @djl @GossiTheDog

     Probably an incorrect take. This looks more like deliberate fraud, rather than an econ PhD student making an honest mistake because of the WSJ citation of how this fraud, in Jan 2025, was brought to the attention of the two MIT professors who championed the lie by a "...computer scientist with experience in materials science (who) questioned how the technology worked, and how a lab THAT HE WASN'T AWARE OF (caps added) had experienced gains in innovation".
     MIT is small enough that their star Nobel Econ laureate and any of his little army of econ PhDs could have easily checked with Materials Science. Straight up professional humiliating embarrassment.
     Toner-Rodgers MIT second year student PhD web page was deleted by MIT. Signs point to an expulsion (fraud) not a suspension (honest mistake).

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     God Emperor of Mastodon (mms@mastodon.bsd.cafe)'s status on Saturday, 17-May-2025 22:48:48 JST God Emperor of Mastodon

     in reply to

     @GossiTheDog it certainly makes them productive in saying how productive they are. They simply won’t shut up about their prompts and how many learning opportunities it saved then from.

   • Embed this notice
     Gilgwath (gilgwath@social.tchncs.de)'s status on Sunday, 18-May-2025 02:30:20 JST Gilgwath

     in reply to

     • Rich Felker

     @dalias @GossiTheDog I assumed that suiciding your academic credibility would be something people wouldn't consider without ample compensation, even if they didn't intend to go into classic academia. I projected myself ascribing value to my own integrity onto other people. My mistake 😞

     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: likes this.