Auyon Siddiq

Associate Professor @UCLAAnderson. Markets, competition, AI. @UCBerkeley PhD; secretly Canadian.

[Auyon Siddiq @auyonomous]

I've been called a lot of names but "economist" is a bit harsh

[ISMAIL @iamaniku]

Controversial idea of the day - from economist Auyon Siddiq,
Agentic Workflows as Veblen goods

[Auyon Siddiq @auyonomous]

How much did Meta pay you to post this?

[Niall Ferguson @nfergus]

The unfolding history of artificial intelligence has now arrived at what may be its most dangerous moment. There are two barely controlled AI races, one between around five American companies—@Anthropic, @GoogleDeepMind, @Meta, @OpenAI, and @xai lead the field—and the other between the two geopolitical superpowers: the United States and China, with its own competing companies. The leadership of the competitors in this race is, to say the least, of mixed quality. 1/10

[Auyon Siddiq @auyonomous]

@bocowgill @alexolegimas Interesting. Would also appreciate thoughts on what The Lorax (1971) teaches us about unchecked consumption of AI and associated environmental harms thx

[Auyon Siddiq @auyonomous]

@emollick what about lowkenuinely

[Auyon Siddiq @auyonomous]

@LeRoyDesCimes this is underappreciated by the algo, my condolences

[Louise 🔸 @LeRoyDesCimes]

So many AI safety people on here. Some of you are worried about the wrong post training

[Auyon Siddiq @auyonomous]

@AdkHomeroom because 3D printers are incredibly cool

[Auyon Siddiq @auyonomous]

@akoustov Probably a good lesson in here -- academia would be better off as a collective if we all made good faith efforts to understand the priorities and concerns of folks* in other disciplines.

*except the ones who disagree with us and are therefore wrong

[Auyon Siddiq @auyonomous]

@SethLargo I'm actually ok with this. At the end of the day its up to faculty to decide what is worth testing, and how to test it. I had to write code on paper in undergrad and it was honestly pretty effective.

[Auyon Siddiq @auyonomous]

@ShriramKMurthi @tallinzen But an immediate use case in the humanities shouldn't be a requirement for at least some curiosity about the impacts in STEM. If anything, the big questions around AI and knowledge discovery belong firmly in the humanities

[Auyon Siddiq @auyonomous]

@tallinzen True, that's entirely sensible. Although hopefully it's not a huge ask to at least arrive at "this seems important to science-y nerds"

[Auyon Siddiq @auyonomous]

Some headlines from 2001-2003:

[Auyon Siddiq @auyonomous]

Can someone give me the steelman version of the rationale behind giving students access to the *internet* in their *dorm rooms* where they *write papers*?

[Auyon Siddiq @auyonomous]

@TambourineManDN @binarybits Yes but IPO pricing is based on sheer market enthusiasm. Who needs guardrails?

[Auyon Siddiq @auyonomous]

@ethayarajh old reddit, respect

[Auyon Siddiq @auyonomous]

@johnjhorton Harvard says wine is both good AND bad for your heart. which one is it??

[Josh Hochschild @JoshHochschild]

There is no policing use of LLMs in "academia" or "scholarship". The various little niches of academic endeavors, each different in its priorities and purposes in reading, writing, and analyzing texts, needs to articulate and enforce its own standards from within.

[Auyon Siddiq @auyonomous]

@JoshHochschild this is far too much nuance for this platform

[Auyon Siddiq @auyonomous]

@JoyfulSisyphean @C_W_England Agree -- it's going to be much tougher. It'll be up to educators to figure out solutions.

[Auyon Siddiq @auyonomous]

Can someone give me the steelman version of the rationale behind giving students access to the *internet* in their *dorm rooms* where they *write papers*?

[Tyler Austin Harper @Tyler_A_Harper]

Genuinely, can someone give me the steel man version of the rationale behind the new “give everyone AI” university strategy? What is the theory of the case here? Do universities think it’s sustainable to ask students to pay over $90k per year to cheat their way through college?

[Auyon Siddiq @auyonomous]

@sfmcguire79 Agreed. Unfortunately it will probably be left to individual faculty to figure out and there won't be a campus-wide strategy.