News
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
view the rest of the comments
MIT standing up to the pro-AI momentum tastes kinda odd, but I'll accept it.
The paper must be really fucking inaccurate for this move.
Here's the thing: They're actually a natural fit for it, because if anyone ought to understand the use cases, strengths, weaknesses, and implications of a technology, it would be a university that's centered around research on technology.
So they looked carefully at this guy's paper, realized he was making outrageous and unsupportable claims about what AI could do, failed to reproduce his results, and concluded he was full of shit. That's what we really should be able to expect from MIT.
I feel 50% of research funding should be for reproduction studies.
I volunteer as a tribute😏
Absolutely. It might be the janitorial work of "the academy" but that work is important.
I'm actually not sure if the problem right now is funding that work or the unfortunate fact that there's rarely any accolades for it. And "publish or perish" is still too true.
Especially in Medicine when it comes to wetlab stuff
it would be a great way to fund early labs to trying to get on their feet.
I guess most of the universities and big labs would be very opposed to this thanks to the dead corpses lying around in their caves
It wasn't peer revised and shouldn't be treated as anything but an opinion piece?
Not just inaccurate, by the fact the author is "no longer at MIT" is a soft implication that they were kicked out (quite possibly for fraud).
Or graduated and moved on.
Quick search says he was a second year PhD for 2024-2025. So doubtful about the graduation.
The guy fabricated it completely. Just made the experiment and data up and got caught when the company he mentioned in the paper sued him. What a waste of a Stanford phd.
Exactly, this has nothing to do with MIT being anti-AI.
A student made up a research paper and was kicked out. The fact that the topic of the research paper was AI is largely irrelevant.
Here's a story of a behavioral science professor (who, ironically, studies dishonesty) at Harvard who was caught making up results: https://www.npr.org/2023/06/26/1184289296/harvard-professor-dishonesty-francesca-gino
You wouldn't look at that article and come to the conclusion that "Harvard is standing up to the pro-Behavioral Science momentum", because fake research has always been against the rules.
Or just the average AI: hallucinations galore. If you can't trust the output it confidently gives you, what's even the fucking point!?
For LLMs, yes.
But, theoretically, AI should be extremely good at sifting through mountains of data, and much faster than all other methods we have, identifying which data a human should take a closer look at. That's what I presume this paper supposedly demonstrated.
My guess here is that a lazy student decided to take the easy path and fake data to "demonstrate" results that nobody would be surprised by and want to look closer at the data, but somebody looked anyway, probably because the student was a known slacker, and it wasn't the results of the research that surprised them, but just that the student did the research at all.
Thank you. As useful as LLMs can be under certain circumstances, they are not the only type of AI.
"The paper was championed by MIT economists Daron Acemoglu, who won the 2024 economics Nobel, and David Autor. The two said they were approached in January 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 had experienced gains in innovation."
It sounds like this hypothetical materials science lab maybe did not actually exist. Actual materials scientist reached out and went "Hey, I never heard of that lab, who are they and how did they use AI?" Oh... THAT lab? Yeah, it's in Canada, you don't know it...