MIT says that as a consequence of considerations concerning the “integrity” of a high-profile paper on the results of synthetic intelligence on the productiveness of a supplies science lab, the paper needs to be “withdrawn from public discourse.”
The paper in query, “Synthetic Intelligence, Scientific Discovery, and Product Innovation,” was written by a doctoral scholar within the college’s economics program. It claimed to indicate that the introduction of an AI software right into a large-but-unidentified supplies science lab led to the invention of extra supplies and extra patent filings, however at the price of lowering researchers’ satisfaction with their work.
MIT economists Daron Acemoglu (who not too long ago received the Nobel Prize) and David Autor each praised the paper final yr, with Autor telling the Wall Avenue Journal he was “floored.” In a press release included in MIT’s announcement on Friday, Acemoglu and Autor described the paper as “already recognized and mentioned extensively within the literature on AI and science, though it has not been revealed in any refereed journal.”
Nevertheless, the 2 economists mentioned they now have “no confidence within the provenance, reliability or validity of the info and within the veracity of the analysis.”
In response to the WSJ, a pc scientist with expertise in supplies science approached Acemoglu and Autor with considerations in January. They introduced these considerations to MIT, resulting in an inner evaluate.
MIT says that as a consequence of scholar privateness legal guidelines, it can’t disclose the outcomes of that evaluate, however the paper’s creator is “now not at MIT.” And whereas the college’s announcement doesn’t identify the coed, each a preprint model of the paper and the preliminary press protection establish the creator as Aidan Toner-Rodgers. (TechCrunch has reached out to Toner-Rodgers for remark.)
MIT additionally says it has requested the paper be withdrawn from The Quarterly Journal of Economics, the place it was submitted for publication, and from the preprint web site arXiv. Apparently solely a paper’s authors are in a position to submit arXiv withdrawal requests, however MIT says “thus far, the creator has not completed so.”
