Video: Daryl Morey Says 76ers Use Artificial Intelligence for Input on Team Decisions

The Philadelphia 76ers' season has been an unmitigated calamity, and the prevailing belief has been that unrelenting injuries have been the primary factor for the team's 22-43 record.

But perhaps artificial intelligence can be scapegoated as well.

"We absolutely use models as a vote in any decision," Sixers president Daryl Morey told journalist Pablo Torre when asked if he utilized large language models in basketball moves. "How much of that decision depends on how much the assumptions behind those models don't change, and their past success rate. So if you have a highly successful model for picking draft picks, and [the NBA] hasn't changed the rules yet, then the models get a lot of weight in those decisions.

"It turns out LLMs do fairly well at prediction. They still are not beating human, like, super forecasters ... They do add signal over just scouts and things like that. So we'll treat them almost like one scout. Now 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."

Professional sports franchises will seek any potential competitive advantage they can find, so at a time when artificial intelligence appears to be the next great technological frontier, it isn't surprising that Morey in particular—long a central figure in the NBA's adaptation of advanced analytics—is dipping into one subset of AI with the Sixers.

Philly fans would probably be happier if artificial intelligence could give Morey advice on how to keep Joel Embiid and Paul George healthy, however.