Jeffrey Funk

Fellow, Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence

Jeffrey Funk is the winner of the NTT DoCoMo Mobile Science Award and the author of five books. His forthcoming book (Unicorn, Hype and Bubbles: A Guide to Spotting, Avoiding and Exploiting Investment Bubbles In Tech) will be published by Harriman House this fall.

Archives

The State of Innovation and the Impact of AI

Robert J. Marks and Jeffrey Funk
March 28, 2024
In this episode, host Robert J. Marks discusses the state of innovation and the impact of AI with guest Jeffrey Funk, author of the book Technology Change and the Rise of New Industries. They discuss the hype around AI, the limitations of large language models like GPT-3, the slowing rate of innovation, the impact of Goodhart’s Law on academia, and the need for a shift in metrics and a focus on practical applications. They also touch on the role of universities and corporations in driving innovation and the need for cross-fertilization and collaboration. Overall, they express skepticism about the current state of AI and emphasize the importance of measuring success based on real-world impact rather than just publications and metrics. Additional Resources Technology …

Sundar Pichai Says AI Will Be as Big as Fire

The AI bubble is going to pop.
Jeffrey Funk
March 27, 2024
Ask someone how big AI will be, and the answer is likely huge. But how big is huge? Why does this matter? Because big forecasts encourage big investments, trials, and purchases. After big consulting companies predicted eight years ago that AI would have economic gains of about $15 trillion by 2030, many countries and companies felt the need to pay for their own reports from those same consultants. Of course, those consultants said that those countries could experience rapid productivity gains and those companies could experience rising profits if they implemented AI in the right way, which was of course under the guidance of the consulting companies! Eight years later and few of their predictions have come true. But their optimistic predictions are back again, with big forecasts …

Sora: Life Is Not a Multiple-Choice Test

With Sora, as with other generative AI developments, some are quick to proclaim that artificial general intelligence has arrived. Not so fast.
Jeffrey Funk and Gary Smith
March 6, 2024
The hallucinations are symptomatic of generative AI models’ core problem: they can’t identify output problems because they know nothing about the real world.

Why Do Universities Ignore Good Ideas?

Funding agencies see if the researcher is tenured or has already received funding. It's a vicious cycle.
Jeffrey Funk
March 1, 2024
Katalin Karikó’s Nobel Prize didn’t prove that universities don’t fund good ideas. It merely reminded us that they rarely do.

Are Good Ideas Hard to Find?

This academic paper tells us a lot about why innovation has slowed
Jeffrey Funk
January 11, 2024
Many do not think of these small ideas, most of them highly technical, that enabled the improvements in chips, crop yields and new drugs.

When it Comes to New Technologies Like AI, Tempers Run Hot

So far, the most tangible LLM successes have been in generating political disinformation and phishing scams.
Gary Smith and Jeffrey Funk
January 8, 2024
LLMs often remind us of clueless students who answer essay questions by writing everything they think is relevant, hoping the right answer is in there somewhere

How Do We Define Successful Use Cases for Generative AI?

Current generative AI systems are designed to give us the most common solutions, instead of the new ones we need.
Jeffrey Funk
December 19, 2023
Evidence that existing ideas aren’t so good can be seen in the big startup losses, slow diffusion of technology, and slow rate of productivity improvement.

Why Are We Obsessed With How Smart AI Is?

The people with the most specific knowledge should be assessing applications for AI and their risks.
Jeffrey Funk
October 12, 2023
The biggest lesson from giving university exams to ChatGPT is that students should be tested in other ways.

Using Data Like a Drunk Uses a Lamppost

Startup companies can be tempted to use statistics for support instead of real illumination
Jeffrey Funk and Gary Smith
July 21, 2023
Karl Pearson, the great English mathematician and statistician, wrote, “Statistics is the grammar of science.” But it can be used to mislead, too.

Scientists Have Been Recommending Changes to Science Education for Decades

The modern education system seems designed to squelch curiosity
Jeffrey Funk
July 4, 2023
Gary Smith describes the problems with today’s science in his new book Distrust: Big Data, Data-Torturing, and the Assault on Science. He recounts endless examples of disinformation, data torture, and data mining, much of which we already knew. Taken together, however, and as I described in this review, they are mind-blowing. He argues that many of these problems come from things scientists do such as p-hacking during statistical analysis, too little emphasis on “impact” in statistical analyses, outright data falsification, and the creation of the Internet, which can be a huge disinformation machine in addition to a valuable resource. In the last chapter, he also offers some solutions such as ending the artificial thresholds for p-values such as 0.05, requiring online …

Review of Distrust: Big Data, Data-Torturing, and the Assault on Science

Tech expert Jeffrey Funk reviews Gary Smith's enlightening new book on data, disinformation, and the "assault on science"
Jeffrey Funk
June 14, 2023
Distrust: Big Data, Data-Torturing, and the Assault on Science by Gary Smith, Oxford University Press, 2023. The pandemic proved a lot of things, one of them being that science is under assault. In this enlightening and entertaining new book, Professor Gary Smith shows us how much of the assault has its roots in what scientists do. The easiest impact to understand is the Internet, which was originally created by scientists in the 1970s to exchange scientific information. Now it has become a great way to spread disinformation on almost every subject. A former chief historian of NASA noted that: “The reality is, the internet has made it possible for people to say whatever the hell they like to a broader number of people than ever before.” Smith recounts endless examples of …

Review of “Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity”

This new book on tech, AI, and economic prosperity by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson is incredibly timely
Jeffrey Funk
May 29, 2023
Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, published by John Murray Press, 2023. This book by two MIT economists is very timely because the world is now dealing with the latest in the “Thousand Year Struggle,” in the form of artificial intelligence, the claims that many white-collar jobs will be automated, OpenAI’s call for regulation, and the possibility that AI will bring a further concentration of power among the big tech companies. Much of the book sets the stage for this discussion by summarizing the history of technology. This review focuses on the economic and social impact of automation and information technology over the last 50 years. For instance, “the distribution of income between …

A World Without Work? Here We Go Again

Large language models still can't replace critical thinking
Gary Smith and Jeffrey Funk
April 24, 2023
On March 22, nearly 2,000 people signed an open letter drafted by the Future of Life Institute (FLI) calling for a pause of at least 6 months in the development of large language models (LLMs): Contemporary AI systems are now becoming human-competitive at general tasks, and we must ask ourselves: Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth? Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilization? FLI is a nonprofit organization concerned with the existential risks posed by artificial intelligence. Its president is Max Tegmark, an MIT professor who is no …

The Value and Drawbacks of ChatGPT

Robert J. Marks and Jeffrey Funk
April 6, 2023
In this week’s episode, Robert Marks resumes his conversation with tech consultant and expert Jeffrey Funk. They focus on ChatGPT, its value and limits, and the hype that often accompanies new developments in AI. Additional Resources Robert J. Marks at Discovery.org Jeffery Funk at Discovery.org Artificial Intelligence: Will Machines Take Over (Science Uprising) Three Things AI Machines Won’t Be Able to Achieve Podcast …

Where Does Innovation Come From? 

Robert J. Marks and Jeffrey Funk
March 23, 2023
In a continuation of last week’s conversation, technology experts Jeffrey Funk and Robert J. Marks explore the question of where today’s technological innovation is fostered. Academia? Private corporations? The military? Since many universities now prize publication over innovation, much of the real progress is being made elsewhere.  Additional Resources Robert J. Marks at Discovery.org Jeffery Funk at Discovery.org Podcast …

Jeffrey Funk on AI, Startups, and Big Tech

Robert J. Marks and Jeffrey Funk
March 16, 2023
In this podcast episode, technology consultant and author Jeffrey Funk joins Robert J. Marks to talk about the artificial intelligence industry, how it’s used by Big Tech, and AI’s exaggerated hype.  How do we respond to AI when technology is changing every year? Additional Resources Robert J. Marks at Discovery.org Jeffery Funk at Discovery.org Podcast …