[seydor]

Because some idiots can't read the disclaimer on the page telling them that the model is inaccurate

It was still a great tool to brainstorm topics that dont exist, and useful as a companion app. Shame that academics can be so cringe now. People like emilymbender deserve to be called out as ethics-nazis

That's the problem with Lecun's group working in facebook now: they have to sumbit to all kinds of corporate BS to avoid bad PR

[tsimionescu]

What was it a great tool for? Definitely not what it was marketed for (access the world's knowledge).

To me it seems it was about as significant and useful as IBM Watson playing Jeopardy.

[seydor]

brainstorming for research fields that don't have substantial review papers / wiki pages

How i know: I tried it. It is discovery of citations and ideas you might not be aware of. Also a lot of garbage, but any scientist worth her salt can weed that out. It's the best thing to happen since google scholar and scihub

[tsimionescu]

How would a system that generates false information (especially likely for fields that are not well represented in the training set, based on the site) help with brainstorming for practitioners in that field?

[seydor]

This wasnt meant to generate valid scientific papers, and Lecun said so too. It generates interesting associations. It rambles sometimes and goes on tangents that are sometimes relevant sometimes not. It can inform you of related ideas that you were not aware of. It's like a fuzzy google scholar. It is in no way valid publishable research, but it's like a bicycle for researchers.

At least that was what i managed to find out for the brief time i toyed with it. This can save time instead of hunting down loads of citation trails.

What I really fail to see is what is wrong with having this buggy tool.

(Also, if you think that published papers contain true information, you should invest in my bridge)

[tsimionescu]

As far as I understand (and reading their Limitations page also), the system is quite likely to simply invent facts, particularly in niche fields - which may well mislead you and lead on a wild goose chase.

[seydor]

Yes , and that's great. Science is about inventing ideas and testing them, it's literally about chasing wild geese.

A typical scientific review paper or perspective contains tons of such speculation. But right now the process of hunting down citations is excruciating and most often done lazily. Even the best review papers contain erroneous citations to irrelevant papers, or improperly cited results , papers etc. Peer review can only do so much. This is why this tool is useful, it accelerates those things. It's not like anyone will cite Galactica.org

[dmix]

If you're a) believing the output wholesale or b) not occasionally going down random rabbit holes to explore new ideas (even ones that seemed silly or wasteful on the surface) you're probably doing something wrong as it is.

[UncleMeat]

If the purpose is to generate interesting associations, why is the output a paper? Why not a graph showing overlapping subfields worth investigating or relationships between papers via citations and shared ideas?

Is it really a surprise that people have a different reaction to machine generated scientific papers that contain a large amount of plain nonsense than they do to a machine generated piece of art?