Bill Ackman: A Four-Thousand Word Tweet
& then there are six hundred more words in his next tweet...
& then there are six-hundred more words in his next tweet...
How it begins:
…& then it continues for another 4,000 words:
Why? Because of Business Insider:
Katherine Long & Jack Newsham: Bill Ackman's celebrity academic wife Neri Oxman's dissertation is marred by plagiarism: ‘The billionaire hedge fund manager and major Harvard donor Bill Ackman seized on revelations that Harvard's president, Claudine Gay, had plagiarized some passages in her academic work to underscore his calls for her removal…. [There is a] similar pattern of plagiarism by Ackman's wife, Neri Oxman…. Oxman plagiarized multiple paragraphs of her 2010 doctoral dissertation, Business Insider found, including at least one passage directly lifted from other writers without citation…
We will probably never know the real story underlying this—which is probably that:
there is someone who knows the literature well,
who is really pissed at Neri Oxman for some reason,
but who thought (rightly) that there was no mileage here:
that copying-wikipedia-paragraphs plagiarism could be shrugged off,
and dropping-quotation-marks-from-near-boilerplate-paragraphs plagiarism ditto,
until the whole thing was energized by the zap of the neofascist culture war lightning strike.
Plus there is the most batshit element:
Every faculty member knows that once their work is targeted by AI, they will be outed. No body of written work in academia can survive the power of AI searching for missing quotation marks, failures to paraphrase appropriately, and/or the failure to properly credit the work of others…
Checking for plagiarism is a hugely parallel problem of checking for string matches that could surely be done much more efficiently than CPUs can by GPUs (and perhaps NPUs). But “AI”? Simple string-matching algorithms would be an order of magnitude more efficient, or two, than GPTs and their ilk. Plus string-matching creates few false positives. While if GPTs can be trained to do this they will create a lot of hallucinated false positives.
It appears that, for Ackman, “AI” is some kind of magical genie that he doesn’t understand, but that has its own Cave of Wonders…
Is it just me, or are the top 0.001% becoming increasingly annoying and dangerous? Given the effectiveness of today's family trusts in preserving wealth from taxes, stupidity, and fraud, this problem may only get worse. The risk free returns on billions is tens to hundreds of millions per year, mostly in tax free shelters. They can't buy yachts and tropical islands fast enough, and Congressmen are surprisingly affordable. Nor will their heirs.
It is most certainly very clear that Ackman has scarcely any grasp of what present neural network AI is truly all about and just how fundamental its limitations really are. It is possible that our "AI" friends will someday manage to find a way to truly intelligent AI but right now it is far from clear how, and Ackman is one of the last people whose advice on such matters should be heeded. Unfortunately, he and the thundering hordes of those of like mind suck a great deal of energy and resources out of serious research.