Were you expecting Daryl Morey, Sixers to not use artificial intelligence to make decisions?

Daryl Morey ignited a small fire of outrage amongst the locals by admitting that he and the Sixers use artificial intelligence to help make decisions on a recent episode of Pablo Torre Finds Out.

We absolutely use models as a vote in any decision and how much of that decision depends on how much the assumptions behind those models don't change and their past success rates. So, if you have a highly successful model for picking draft picks and we think that the game...Evan [Wasch] hasn't changed the rules yet. So, the game isn't changing. Then, the models get a lot of weight in those decisions.

It turns out the LLMs (Language Learning Models) do fairly well at prediction. They still are not beating human super-forecasters, and human judgment project talks about it. But they do add signal over just scouts and things like that. So, we'll treat them almost like one scout.

Over time, if it's shown that they have a better track record than scouts, we might weight the LLMs or use multiple LLMs as one or two votes out of the process.

Let's be honest. None of this is surprising. If this stokes the flame in you, it's probably because you already don't like Morey anyway - which is not an unreasonable stance!

But, Morey is doing little more than telling the truth. Do you know for a fact that the other front offices that lean toward analytics don't do something similar? It only matters if his team is the only one doing it at this depth, which I'd find difficult to imagine being the case.

This was actually most interesting to me, perhaps because it was in layman's terms:

"It turns out I'm building on a lot of things that Sendhil [Mullainathan] knows and you know, that multi-model approaches can put you more on the decision frontier, the optimal decision frontier. When I say that, carefully, you get very similar accuracy with lower risk by using multi-model approaches. So, that's why we do that."

I say this genuinely - wonder what those models said about giving Joel Embiid his contract extension when the Sixers did.

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