- cross-posted to:
- fuck_ai@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- fuck_ai@lemmy.world
The paper said that after an AI tool was implemented at a large materials-science lab, researchers discovered significantly more materials—a result that suggested that, in certain settings, AI could substantially improve worker productivity. That paper, by Aidan Toner-Rodgers, was covered by The Wall Street Journal and other media outlets.
The paper was championed by MIT economists Daron Acemoglu, who won the 2024 economics Nobel, and David Autor.
In a press release, MIT said it “has no confidence in the provenance, reliability or validity of the data and has no confidence in the veracity of the research contained in the paper.”
The university said the author of the paper is no longer at MIT.
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?