Widely covered MIT paper saying AI boosts worker productivity is, in fact, complete bullshit it turns out.
Widely covered MIT paper saying AI boosts worker productivity is, in fact, complete bullshit it turns out.
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.
Machine learning is a field that uses statistics to do its thing. Its tools include neural nets but not LLMs. (I dislike the term "machine learning", but to the best I can tell, they're smart sensible folks, statisticians doing gradient descent in insanely high-dimensional spaces.)
Dunno how LLMs could be called "machine learning", since they're exactly and only random text generators.
But the Wikipedia for LLM begins with:
"A large language model (LLM) is a type of machine learning model designed "
Why is that wrong in your view? I'm not trying to gotcha you, this field is new and quite incomprehensible, so it irks me a bit when people reshuffle the categories I'm just learning.
Blokes building LLMs use machine learning.
Blokes doing machine learning don't use LLMs.