Sports analytics may be outnumbered when it comes to artificial intelligence
When it comes to artificial intelligence, the sports analytics crowd may be outnumbered. The people who killed the sacrifice bunt and turned NBA games into a 3-point shooting contest aren't quite sure what will happen when AI fully invades sports — whether in the front office or on the field.
“I've been in computer science a long time. This is the first thing we don't understand,” Philadelphia 76ers team president Daryl Morey said Friday at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference.
“That's mind-boggling,” Morey said. “We've actually now created something, with 0's and 1's, where every step we've made the creation, but we don't understand the results.”
The MIT conference annually brings together thousands of number-crunching sports nerds, who turn their data models loose on hot topics such as diversity, gambling or reversing the slowing pace of baseball games. But this year's gathering had a decidedly AI focus, with panels and working papers on the potential for generative artificial intelligence to transform sports.
One talk looked at baseball strategy, another on how to provide Olympic content for the 200-plus countries competing in four dozen different sports, and a research paper used AI to provide player tracking data from a soccer broadcast.
Morey, one of the conference's founders, was on a panel called “Winning with AI: The future of AI in sports.” The discussion touched on potential for improvements in scheduling, player safety, advertising, ticket sales and broadcasts that convert the on-field action into a Disney cartoon.
Kevin Lopes, an ESPN vice president for development and innovation, compared AI to the iPhone, which transformed everyday life by giving everyone with some coding skills the chance to come up with their own applications.
“I think about that when I think about generative AI,” Lopes said. “I don't think anyone quite knows what that is yet. That's fascinating to me, and what's going to be the next thing.
“We exist in this moment in history, in my
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