How A.I. Has Already Changed Sports

EPISODE 213: A conversation with a genius and a "genius."

A few weeks ago, I was asked if I wanted to record an episode from onstage at the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. Which, if you didn’t know, is an event that started at a lecture hall at MIT, when I first attended it 16 years ago, but soon moved into a convention center in Boston on account of the thousands of people who wanted to attend — a list which annually includes the most powerful people in sports and beyond.

League commissioners; billionaire owners; Barack Obama, one year; and also pretty much every data-driven team executive in America. Most prominently, of course, the conference’s co-founder: Daryl Morey. Who is now the president of basketball operations for the Philadelphia 76ers… and also a listener of this show.

And Daryl’s Sixers, by the way, are about 20 games under .500 this season. It’s been a painful year, as we’ll discuss.

But the question I really wanted to answer at Sloan, even more pressingly, was something I did not have a good answer to, despite how much everyone everywhere is always talking about large language models — LLMs — like ChatGPT. And, relatedly, how soon the robots are going to achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI) and truly think like human beings.

I wanted to know what A.I. is already doing to sports, in particular.

And so our guests today, onstage with me at Sloan, are Daryl Morey and MIT’s incomparable Sendhil Mullainathan: a certified genius, as per the MacArthur Foundation, whose body of work stretches across computer science, behavioral economics, and, crucially, the RealGM.com message boards.

I hope you enjoy this as much as I did.

YOUTUBE SPOILER ALERT:

Sincerely,

Pablo