Rob Wiblin

We immediately took the result super seriously, because in our heads, we're picturing a serious peer-reviewed paper coming out of MIT's business or management school, or at least a project conducted by people who specialise in doing this sort of social science research.

But no, there's no indication that it was intended to be an academic paper that would ever go through peer review.

And the authors are an MIT professor and a postdoctoral fellow, both now working on AI agent frameworks, a product manager at Microsoft who works on AI agents, and a startup founder also working on developing and commercializing agentic AI systems.

And that raises another really problematic aspect of all this.

One of the report's main conclusions is that AI tools aren't flourishing in business because they lack learning, memory, and contextual adaptation.

And it says that the solution to that is agentic AI frameworks.

Coincidentally, exactly the kind of thing that they're all either currently developing or trying to sell.

The report then specifically names Nanda, the project all four of them are involved with one way or another, as one of the best paths forward to solving the problem that they've just identified.

There are many other times reading this report that their interpretation of their survey results made extremely little sense to me, but would consistently seem to lead them to the conclusion that their AI agent frameworks are really essential for businesses.

Oh, and keep in mind too that the evidence shows that they should definitely be bought from an external organization, not developed internally.

We'll list some of the most striking examples in a document linked in the video description rather than go through them all here.

The bottom line is that this group published a research report with what I think is at best a strained interpretation of their data, concluding that current AI is failing, and the solution to that is exactly the technology they themselves are building and selling.

And this was marketed under the MIT brand, with no conflict of interest disclosure, just to note that it reflects their views and not those of their employers.

Now, to be fair, I'm sure these people generally believe that what they're building is useful and will help businesses adopt AI, and they might well be right about that.

They're even probably right about that.

But what we've got here is a very different beast from what journalists, the public, and investors had in their minds when they were told an MIT study had demonstrated that AI is completely failing to help businesses.

As you can see, the real lesson here isn't one about artificial intelligence.

This study isn't good enough to teach us anything new about that one way or the other.

It's a story about how a confusing report, based on 52 interviews and 153 survey results, opaque and very questionable data analysis, undisclosed conflicts of interest, and a remarkably convenient conclusion

can get the MIT stamp of approval, go viral through Fortune, move the Nasdaq, and become conventional wisdom remembered by literally tens of millions of people before anyone can even read the study.