EA Forum Podcast (All audio) “A widely shared AI productivity paper was retracted, is possibly fraudulent” by titotal
Confidence notes: I am a physicist working on computational material science, so I have some familiarity with the field, but don't know much about R&D firms or economics. Some of the links in this article were gathered from a post at pivot-to-ai.com and the BS detector.
The paper "Artificial Intelligence, Scientific Discovery, and Product Innovation" was published as an Arxiv preprint last December, roughly 5 months ago, and was submitted to a top economics journal.
The paper claimed to show the effect of an experiment at a large R&D company. It claimed the productivity of a thousand material scientists was tracked before and after the introduction of an machine learning material generation tool. The headline results was that the AI caused a 44% increase in materials discovery at the firm, with a productivity increase of 81% for top-decile scientists.
This research was breathlessly reported on in [...]
The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.
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First published:
May 19th, 2025
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.