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MIT asks arXiv to withdraw preprint of paper on AI and scientific discovery

(economics.mit.edu)
278 points carabiner | 1 comments | 16 May 25 15:09 UTC | HN request time: 0.264s | source
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intoamplitudes ◴[16 May 25 16:46 UTC] No.44007496[source]▶
First impressions:

1. The data in most of the plots (see the appendix) look fake. Real life data does not look that clean.

2. In May of 2022, 6 months before chatGPT put genAI in the spotlight, how does a second-year PhD student manage to convince a large materials lab firm to conduct an experiment with over 1,000 of its employees? What was the model used? It only says GANs+diffusion. Most of the technical details are just high-level general explanations of what these concepts are, nothing specific.

"Following a short pilot program, the lab began a large-scale rollout of the model in May of 2022." Anyone who has worked at a large company knows -- this just does not happen.

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raphman ◴[16 May 25 19:52 UTC] No.44009207[source]▶
FWIW, in the q&a after a talk, he claims that it was a GNN (graph neural network), not a GAN.

(In this q&a, the audience does not really question the validity of the research.)

https://doi.org/10.52843/cassyni.n74lq7

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1. mncharity ◴[16 May 25 21:50 UTC] No.44010079[source]▶
Wayback of the Sloan School seminar page shows him doing one on February 24, 2025. I wonder how that went.

I miss google search's Cache. As with the seminar, several other hits on MIT pages have been removed. I'm reminded of a PBS News Hour story, on free fusion energy from water in your basement (yes, really), which was memory holed shortly after. The next-ish night they seemed rather put out, protesting they had verified the story... with "a scientist".

That cassyni talk link... I've seen a lot of MIT talks (a favorite mind candy), and though Sloan talks were underrepresented, that looked... more than a little odd. MIT Q&A norms are diverse, from the subtle question you won't appreciate if you haven't already spotted the fatal flaw, to bluntness leaving the speaker in tears. I wonder if there's a seminar tape.