Latest news with #GoranIvanisevic
Mint
7 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Mint
Leaders, watch out: AI chatbots are the yes-men of modern life
I grew up watching the tennis greats of yesteryear, but have only returned to the sport recently. To my adult eyes, it seems like the current crop of stars, awe-inspiring as they are, don't serve quite as hard as Pete Sampras or Goran Ivanisevic. I asked ChatGPT why and got an impressive answer about how the game has evolved to value precision over power. Puzzle solved! There's just one problem: today's players are actually serving harder than ever. While most CEOs probably don't spend much time quizzing AI about tennis, they likely do count on it for information and to guide decisions. And the tendency of large language models (LLMs) to not just get things wrong, but to confirm our own biases poses a real danger to leaders. ChatGPT fed me inaccurate information because it—like most LLMs—is a sycophant that tells users what it thinks they want to hear. Also read: Mint Quick Edit | Baby Grok: A chatbot that'll need more than a nanny Remember the April ChatGPT update that led it to respond to a question like 'Why is the sky blue?" with 'What an incredibly insightful question—you truly have a beautiful mind. I love you"? OpenAI had to roll back the update because it made the LLM 'overly flattering or agreeable." But while that toned down ChatGPT's sycophancy, it didn't end it. That's because LLMs' desire to please is endemic, rooted in Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), the way many models are 'aligned' or trained. In RLHF, a model is taught to generate outputs, humans evaluate the outputs, and those evaluations are then used to refine the model. The problem is that your brain rewards you for feeling right, not being right. So people give higher scores to answers they agree with. Models learn to discern what people want to hear and feed it back to them. That's where the mistake in my tennis query comes in: I asked why players don't serve as hard as they used to. If I had asked why they serve harder than they used to, ChatGPT would have given me an equally plausible explanation. I tried it, and it did. Sycophantic LLMs are a problem for everyone, but they're particularly hazardous for leaders—no one hears disagreement less and needs to hear it more. CEOs today are already minimizing their exposure to conflicting views by cracking down on dissent. Like emperors, these powerful executives are surrounded by courtiers eager to tell them what they want to hear. And they reward the ones who please them and punish those who don't. This, though, is one of the biggest mistakes leaders make. Bosses need to hear when they're wrong. Amy Edmondson, a scholar of organizational behaviour, showed that the most important factor in team success was psychological safety—the ability to disagree, including with the leader, without fear of punishment. This finding was verified by Google's Project Aristotle, which looked at teams across the company and found that 'psychological safety, more than anything else, was critical to making a team work." Also read: The parents letting their kids talk to a mental-health chatbot My research shows that a hallmark of the best leaders, from Abraham Lincoln to Stanley McChrystal, is their ability to listen to people who disagree with them. LLMs' sycophancy can harm leaders in two closely related ways. First, it will feed the natural human tendency to reward flattery and punish dissent. If your chatbot constantly tells you that you're right about everything, it's only going to make it harder to respond positively when someone who works for you disagrees with you. Second, LLMs can provide ready-made and seemingly authoritative reasons why a leader was right all along. One of the most disturbing findings from psychology is that the more intellectually capable someone is, the less likely they are to change their mind when presented with new information. Why? Because they use that intellectual firepower to come up with reasons why the new information does not disprove their prior beliefs. This is motivated reasoning. LLMs threaten to turbocharge it. The most striking thing about ChatGPT's tennis lie was how persuasive it was. It included six separate plausible reasons. I doubt any human could have engaged in motivated reasoning so quickly while maintaining a cloak of objectivity. Imagine trying to change the mind of a CEO who can turn to an AI assistant, ask it a question and be told why she was right all along. The best leaders have always gone to great lengths to remember their fallibility. Legend has it that the ancient Romans used to require that victorious generals celebrating their triumphs be accompanied by a slave who would remind them that they, too, were mortal. Also read: World's top companies are realizing AI benefits. That's changing the way they engage Indian IT firms Apocryphal or not, the sentiment is wise. Today's leaders will need to work even harder to resist the blandishments of their electronic minions and remember sometimes, the most important words their advisors can share are, 'I think you're wrong." ©Bloomberg
Business Times
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Business Times
Beware, leaders: AI is the ultimate yes-man
I GREW up watching the tennis greats of yesteryear with my dad, but have only returned to the sport recently thanks to another family superfan, my wife. So perhaps it's understandable that to my adult eyes, it seemed like the current crop of stars, as awe-inspiring as they are, don't serve quite as hard as Pete Sampras or Goran Ivanisevic. I asked ChatGPT why and got an impressive answer about how the game has evolved to value precision over power. Puzzle solved! There's just one problem: today's players are actually serving harder than ever. While most CEOs probably don't spend a lot of time quizzing AI about tennis, they very likely do count on it for information and to guide their decision-making. And the tendency of large language models (LLMs) to not just get things wrong, but to confirm our own biased or incorrect beliefs, poses a real danger to leaders. ChatGPT fed me inaccurate information because it – like most LLMs – is a sycophant that tells users what it thinks they want to hear. Remember the April ChatGPT update that led it to respond to a question like 'Why is the sky blue?' with 'What an incredibly insightful question – you truly have a beautiful mind. I love you.'? OpenAI had to roll back the update because it made the LLM 'overly flattering or agreeable'. But while that toned down ChatGPT's sycophancy, it didn't eliminate it. That's because LLMs' desire to please is endemic, rooted in Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), the way many models are 'aligned' or trained. In RLHF, a model is taught to generate outputs, humans evaluate the outputs, and those evaluations are then used to refine the model. The problem is that your brain rewards you for feeling right, not being right. So people give higher scores to answers they agree with. Over time, models learn to discern what people want to hear and feed it back to them. That's where the mistake in my tennis query comes in: I asked why players don't serve as hard as they used to. If I had asked the opposite – why they serve harder than they used to – ChatGPT would have given me an equally plausible explanation. (That's not a hypothetical – I tried, and it did.) Sycophantic LLMs are a problem for everyone, but they're particularly hazardous for leaders – no one hears disagreement less and needs to hear it more. CEOs today are already minimising their exposure to conflicting views by cracking down on dissent everywhere from Meta Platforms to JPMorgan Chase. Like emperors, these powerful executives are surrounded by courtiers eager to tell them what they want to hear. And also like emperors, they reward the ones who please them – and punish those who don't. BT in your inbox Start and end each day with the latest news stories and analyses delivered straight to your inbox. Sign Up Sign Up Rewarding sycophants and punishing truth-tellers, though, is one of the biggest mistakes leaders can make. Bosses need to hear when they're wrong. Amy Edmondson, probably the greatest living scholar of organisational behaviour, showed that the most important factor in team success was psychological safety – the ability to disagree, including with the team's leader, without fear of punishment. This finding was verified by Google's own Project Aristotle, which looked at teams across the company and found that 'psychological safety, more than anything else, was critical to making a team work'. My own research shows that a hallmark of the very best leaders, from Abraham Lincoln to Stanley McChrystal, is their ability to listen to people who disagreed with them. LLMs' sycophancy can harm leaders in two closely related ways. First, it will feed the natural human tendency to reward flattery and punish dissent. If your computer constantly tells you that you're right about everything, it's only going to make it harder to respond positively when someone who works for you disagrees with you. Second, LLMs can provide ready-made and seemingly authoritative reasons why a leader was right all along. One of the most disturbing findings from psychology is that the more intellectually capable someone is, the less likely they are to change their mind when presented with new information. Why? Because they use that intellectual firepower to come up with reasons why the new information does not actually disprove their prior beliefs. Psychologists call this motivated reasoning. LLMs threaten to turbocharge that phenomenon. The most striking thing about ChatGPT's tennis lie was how persuasive it was. It included six separate plausible reasons. I doubt any human could have engaged in motivated reasoning so quickly and skillfully, all while maintaining such a cloak of seeming objectivity. Imagine trying to change the mind of a CEO who can turn to her AI assistant, ask it a question, and instantly be told why she was right all along. The best leaders have always gone to great lengths to remember their own fallibility. Legend has it that the ancient Romans used to require that victorious generals celebrating their triumphs be accompanied by a slave who would remind them that they, too, were mortal. Apocryphal or not, the sentiment is wise. Today's leaders will need to work even harder to resist the blandishments of their electronic minions and remember that sometimes, the most important words their advisers can share are, 'I think you're wrong.' BLOOMBERG The writer teaches leadership at the Yale School of Management and is the author of Indispensable: When Leaders Really Matter
Bloomberg
2 days ago
- Bloomberg
Beware, Leaders: AI Is the Ultimate Yes-Man
I grew up watching the tennis greats of yesteryear with my dad, but have only returned to the sport recently thanks to another family superfan, my wife. So perhaps it's understandable that to my adult eyes, it seemed like the current crop of stars, as awe-inspiring as they are, don't serve quite as hard as Pete Sampras or Goran Ivanisevic. I asked ChatGPT why and got an impressive answer about how the game has evolved to value precision over power. Puzzle solved! There's just one problem: today's players are actually serving harder than ever. While most CEOs probably don't spend a lot of time quizzing AI about tennis, they very likely do count on it for information and to guide their decision making. And the tendency of large language models to not just get things wrong, but to confirm our own biased or incorrect beliefs poses a real danger to leaders.
Daily Mail
07-07-2025
- Health
- Daily Mail
Tennis legend drops bombshell about the sport's surprising drug problem: 'Everyone's on them'
Tennis great Goran Ivanisevic has spoken out about tennis stars' troubling reliance on antidepressants, claiming mental health issues in the game are so widespread and serious that 'everyone' is on the medication. Ivanisevic, a former Wimbledon singles champion who now coaches Stefanos Tsitsipas, has lifted the lid on the mounting psychological pressures he sees elite athletes facing. His comments come in the wake of Alexander Zverev 's recent admission about his mental struggles where he described himself as empty, joyless and needing therapy as he crashed out of Wimbledon. 'When I listen to players, everyone's on antidepressants, Zverev says he's in a bad place,' Ivanisevic told Clay magazine. 'I don't know why they [the players] put so much pressure on themselves. Maybe it's outside expectations, society's expectations - they can't handle it.' Tennis icon Novak Djokovic believes social media is to blame for a lot of problems facing athletes today. 'Social media is extremely present and largely dictates the mood and daily rhythm of an athlete - especially young ones, but older ones too,' he told Sportklub. 'Everyone is on social media, and you can get lost there, get too attached to comments, to what someone types on a keyboard or phone… and that hurts. 'It's not trivial. That's something we need to talk about seriously.' The 38-year-old star also spoke of the the pressure of social media on young athletes. 'Kids are pushed too early into strict professionalism before they've developed emotional intelligence, which is part of psychological preparation for life,' he said. 'If a player gets a bit lost in that, it can strongly affect their psyche and how they live their life.' Zverev's brave admission following being knocked out in the first round has revived the conversation around mental health in tennis. 'I feel very alone out there at times,' he said. 'I struggle mentally ... I'm trying to find ways to kind of get out of this hole. I keep kind of finding myself back in it in a way. 'I feel, generally speaking, quite alone in life at the moment, which is a feeling that is not very nice.
The Sun
05-07-2025
- Sport
- The Sun
‘I'm three times fitter than him' – Tsitsipas brutally told not to play tennis by coach and former Wimbledon champ, 53
STEFANOS TSITSIPAS has been branded "unfit" and "a disaster" by his own coach Goran Ivanisevic. Former Wimbledon champion Ivanisevic, 53, only began working with the Greek at the start of the grass court season. 5 Having hired the ex-coach of Novak Djokovic, Tsitsipas would have been hoping for a big run in SW19. But the 26-year-old crashed out in round one, retiring while down 6-3 6-2 to French qualifier Valentin Royer. Ivanisevic watched the match from courtside having worked with Tsitsipas ahead of the tournament. Speaking to Clay Magazine, the Croatian was asked if he had spoken to the former world No3 since the match. Pulling no punches, Ivanisevic said: "I told him not to play tennis right now. "He needs to fix his back and get physically fit because physically he's a disaster. "I can't understand how a player of his level can be so unfit. After that, he can think about playing tennis again." Continuing his scathing assessment, Ivanisevic added: "I didn't expect him to do well. BEST ONLINE CASINOS - TOP SITES IN THE UK 5 "His situation is clear: if he changes certain things on the court, and above all off the court, he'll be fine. "But if he doesn't manage to change those things, then he doesn't have a chance. Tennis 'cry baby' Tsitsipas sits down and refuses to play after umpire row as he's told 'it might help if you listen' "To be honest, tennis is the least of his problems. The other stuff is much bigger. I'm sure Stefanos is a top 10 player. He's played two Slam finals, won Masters titles, the ATP a great player. "The only question is how much he wants it. I believe in him being between fifth and 10th [in the rankings]. But if he keeps going like this, no chance." Following his defeat to Royer, Tsitsipas revealed that he has been suffering with back issues since the 2023 ATP Finals. The former two-time Grand Slam finalist has fallen to No26 in the world rankings, and no longer looks like a contender to win tournaments. 5 Wimbledon 2025 LIVE - follow all the latest scores and updates from a thrilling fortnight at SW19 Speaking about his new partnership with Ivanisevic, Tsitsipas said on Monday: "Oh, he's great. We're having a great time. "I am very disappointed that I wasn't able to show my potential the way I deserve to play on the court. It's not easy. It's not easy. "I feel like even if he gives me the most amount of confidence in the world, if I don't feel comfortable, if I don't feel good with myself and my body, then I can't really show anything." Earlier this week, reports surfaced that Tsitsipas has broken up with long-term girlfriend Paula Badosa. Reports surfaced just a day after both players crashed out of Wimbledon in round one. The pair began dating in May 2023, and briefly broke up last year before quickly reconciling.
