7 ms·

Stop Calling Everything AI, Machine-Learning Pioneer Says

253 points by tmfi 6y ago

joenathanone 6y ago
Marketing team says "no".
SolarNet 6y ago
This so much. To say nothing of the fact there is a risk of another AI winter when NN/ML continues to not produce (the promised) results.
- mattnewton 6y ago
  I think it’s producing plenty, but it will never live up to the hype of singularity-enabling Asimov-style superior super-intelligences that are being promised regularly to be just around the corner.
  - gremlinsinc 6y ago
    I think there's some "missing link" here, I think we'll have human brains merging with computers to create a symbiotic AI relationship that's less artificial but more "enhanced" for already existing "intelligence", this enhancing is probably the equivalent of the singularity, or pre-cursor to it, as we are able to research faster and faster with our computer-aided brains, we might get to AGI easier/quicker. We're at least 30 years away from that though, if not 100. Immortality tech, may be easier to accomplish.
butterknife 6y ago
Yes please! It's disheartening to engage in discussions where Airbus' autopilot is used as an example of advanced AI.
Guest42 6y ago
I appreciate this notion. It seems as though AI has become a fancy marketing term for stats. I also think there are times when knowing which types of models are used would be really helpful. Having built models with neural nets and glms on the same data sets, there are pros and cons to a variety of approaches and oftentimes the simple ones win, even after a 6 month detailed analysis of all the predictors.
codetrotter 6y ago
> “People are getting confused about the meaning of AI in discussions of technology trends—that there is some kind of intelligent thought in computers that is responsible for the progress and which is competing with humans,” he says. “We don’t have that, but people are talking as if we do.” How much more am I as a human really than the machine learning algorithms are?
- stagger87 6y ago
  I guess when we understand how the brain works, we'll be able to answer this.
  - jmfldn 6y ago
    Fundamentally different I would say. I understand enough about the brain to say that talking about any kind of machine intelligence in relation to brains, is comparing apples and oranges. Its not computing things in any way analogous to how a computer works. Why would it be? Of course, computers might be able to imitate some things and far exceed some things that our brains do. That's different though.
    - stagger87 6y ago
      I guess when we understand how the brain works, we can determine if your statements are true.
      - hervature 6y ago
        I get that you comment is tongue in cheek, but your brain doesn’t have a clock signal. Easily verifiable and we could easily detect it if it did. Thus, computers are fundamentally different than brains. Also, computers have nearly perfect recall and perform arithmetic much better than humans. So both statements of GP are true.
- nerdponx 6y ago
  A lot? A machine learning algorithm is a task-specific pattern matching algorithm. Sea cucumbers are probably more "intelligent" than any ML algorithm.
gfaure 6y ago
I admire the reach of "Two Minute Papers", but that guy has got to stop calling everything an AI for the sake of YouTube views.
wunderflix 6y ago
I really liked the definition of AI (back in 2015) by Seth Godin - a marketer! >One common insightful definition of AI: Artificial Intelligence is everything a computer can't do yet. As soon as it can, we call it obvious. If the term is used like that it does make sense to me. https://seths.blog/2015/04/the-noise-in-our-head-and-artificial-intelligence/ https://seths.blog/2015/04/the-noise-in-our-head-and-artific...
- temac 6y ago
  Products are shipped which claim to use "AI". This is self-contradictory with this definition, and no product can ever exist claiming AI with it. I'm fine with that, but then it seems that the term would be completely useless, when "science-fiction" already exist (and, even if it is not always, can be realistic)
  - wunderflix 6y ago
    I understand what you are saying and I tend to agree. But: AI would then be way more specific to computers. Science Fiction is a very broad term also applied to biology, engineering etc.
  - hervature 6y ago
    Well unless you read it as “humans do the hard part” and so a product with AI can make substantial use of computer systems as long as humans are at the helm. The definition is obviously bad because you wouldn’t consider a fire AI because a computer can’t do that. The definition needs an additional stipulation that AI is a computing program.
  - zozbot234 6y ago
    That's not self-contradictory, it's just proof that products which claim to use "AI" can't possibly work. Quite consistent with what's observed in practice.
- baron_harkonnen 6y ago
  > Seth Godin - a marketer! Like most clever things marketers do, that quote is borrowed nearly verbatim from a much older quote without reference. "AI is whatever hasn't been done yet." From Douglas Hofstadter quoting Larry Tesler in 1980 Anyone who has studied AI and its history at all knows that similar quotes to Godin have been going on since the 70s an even that quote from Tesler. There's an entire wikipedia article on the AI effect[0] if you want to dive deeper. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect
arnaudsm 6y ago
When I listen to marketers and journalists I always assume AI means "Algorithm" and Blockchain means "Decentralised"
- s0rce 6y ago
  The worst is when marketers and journalists talk about your own research.
- whatshisface 6y ago
  I would say that blockchain usually means "with hash trees." There are a lot of centralized hash tree products marketed as blockchain technology. Also, "Algorithm" might be a little too narrow, "computer program" fits the colloquial use of AI a little better. :)
- Semiapies 6y ago
  I assume "AI" means there's at least one conditional branch in the code.
lokimedes 6y ago
I tried convincing the business developers and marketing for years that what we did was machine learning, applied statistics or gulp “data-driven” functionality - but no, only thing that worked was “<Company> AI Engine”... hurray for throwing my PhD at the wind...
- whatshisface 6y ago
  What something is has almost no relationship to what sales could be the most successful calling it. That's a consequence of the lamentable but maybe unavoidable fact that so rarely are customers experts in what they buy.
- anonu 6y ago
  Unfortunately marketing is everything. Engineers like to build nice shiny things without much of an eye on how to sell it. If you can slap "AI" on it and make some $, then why not? The end customer may not really care. Its not exactly like calling an apple "organic". Theres no certification process or consensus on what AI actually is or means.
  - gspr 6y ago
    We, the people doing the actual work, have a moral responsibility to resist our work being dishonestly marketed. And certainly a moral responsibility not to engage in it ourselves.
    - colesantiago 6y ago
      usually marketing always wins. I remember when 'GANs' were 'marketed' as 'deepfakes' to the public and watched it enter the english lexicon.
    - ku-man 6y ago
      Well said. If we consider ourselves engineers we should always have the public as our first responsibility.
- reaperducer 6y ago
lightgreen 6y ago
"When reading a text about AI, replace AI with matrix multiplication, it will make much more sense"
- fdsafdsfdsf 6y ago
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ipsum2 6y ago
Reminds me when X-rays first were discovered, everyone claimed their product contained them, including X-ray headache tablets, golf balls, stove polish, razor blades. https://pubs.rsna.org/doi/full/10.1148/rg.242035157 https://pubs.rsna.org/doi/full/10.1148/rg.242035157 for some fun pictures. I won't be surprised when AI toothbrushes come out.
- djoldman 6y ago
  :( https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2019/10/25/20932250/oral-b-genius-x-connected-toothbrush-ai-artificial-intelligence https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2019/10/25/20932250/...
  - choxi 6y ago
    if brush_time < 2.minutes return "Brush longer" else if brush_time > 5.minutes return "Brush less" end
    - sidpatil 6y ago
      I.e. using bleeding-edge decision-tree models to disrupt the oral hygiene space.
      - dwighttk 6y ago
        Lotta bleeding edges in the oral hygiene space
    - dublin 6y ago
      In the real world, most AI is just a bunch of IF statements, anyway, just abstracted away enough that it's no longer obvious.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- banana_giraffe 6y ago
  That's happened: https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2019/10/25/20932250/oral-b-genius-x-connected-toothbrush-ai-artificial-intelligence https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2019/10/25/20932250/...
jmfldn 6y ago
"Computers have not become intelligent per se, but they have provided capabilities that augment human intelligence, he writes. Moreover, they have excelled at low-level pattern-recognition capabilities that could be performed in principle by humans but at great cost. " It's odd how under-appreciated this is. There is no "intelligence" here as we know it, not even a hint. There are algorithms operating on data for very prescribed use cases. When you break it down its pretty primitive stuff really. Clever sure, but don't think we're building a mind here, that language just confuses things. So much of the public conversation around this stuff is polluted with this sort of sci fi nonsense claiming all sorts of properties for AI and implying some sort of singularity is around the corner. Pure fantasy.
- Sebb767 6y ago
  > There is no "intelligence" here as we know it, not even a hint. There are algorithms operating on data for very prescribed use cases. I agree with your general point, but if you break it down, our brains a nothing "intelligent" either. It's just a network of neurons searching for patterns in the sensor input. Sure, it can reconfigure itself, but from a really abstract perspective it's nothing more than a ultra-scaled neural network as we currently use them. So this really boils down to the definition of intelligence, which is by no means easy.
  - omnicognate 6y ago
    > it's nothing more than a ultra-scaled neural network as we currently use them You state this as if it is an undisputed/obvious fact, but it isn't.
    - Sebb767 6y ago
      It does not matter for my point. Even if our NNs miss some part of neuron function, it would look comparable to a simple if/a multiplication on the smallest level. My point is that the complexity/intelligence comes from size; just because our algorithms adapt minimally or accept pre-defined scenarios, does not mean that they are fundamentally unintelligent because we're able to fully understand them.
clircle 6y ago
I prefer to call AI “random number generators”
xwdv 6y ago
Maybe we should also stop calling everything “tech”. Seems like every company that uses computers is a tech company.
- rvz 6y ago
  Can't wait for anyone who has a cryptocurrency wallet to call themselves a 'blockchain' company.
kimi 6y ago
You mean we have to go back to "Blockchain"?
colesantiago 6y ago
What would be a better way to call 'AI' then for the general public? pattern recognition? matrix multiplication? fancy statistics? or maybe enhanced statistics? gah, might as well just say 'algorithm' and just be done with it.
- Aeronwen 6y ago
  'Algorithm' is too long and hard to pronounce to gain popularity. Better shorten it to 'Al'.
  - colesantiago 6y ago
    welp, back to square one then.
mark_l_watson 6y ago
While I mostly agree with Michael Jordan, I think that he overstates his argument a small bit. I feel comfortable applying the "AI" label to projects if they: 1) achieve human level of performance or better. 2) They use any or all of standard techniques like deep learning, NLP, knowledge representation, reinforcement learning, etc. I am just about to hit my 40 year anniversary for getting paid to be doing "AI" related work, with a lenient definition of AI. On the other hand, Artificial General Intelligence is a much stronger term, and is something that I don't expect to see in my lifetime.
- bobthechef 6y ago
  > 2) They use any or all of standard techniques like deep learning, NLP, knowledge representation, reinforcement learning, etc. But why that? There isn't a principled reason for singling those out. It's just a matter of convention that we call those AI. Pretend you never heard of AI before and you came across these algorithms. No amount of analysis or poking around would lead you to think "oh, man, this is artificial intelligence!". No, you'd see a bunch of statistical techniques that do X, Y, and Z, none of which would jump out at you as "wow, this is AI". All that computers give us is the ability to run tedious computations over larger data sets that would be impractical for human beings to perform. "AI" is what we read into these things. There really is no such thing as such.
  - 256lie 6y ago
    What would a principled reason for association look like beyond mere convention? Language is used by different groups to mean different things. Machine learning, logic, control, robotics, linguistics, and cognitive science were publishing in artificial intelligence venues decades ago. Now AI seems to just mean DL/RL.
- hervature 6y ago
  Serious question, are calculators AI because they perform arithmetic much better than humans and use standard techniques like Taylor series expansion and numerical methods? I feel like you want to add that the technique has to use data as a core part of its algorithm that represents “learning”. But then we’re just back to machine learning that beats humans at a specific task. Is there a need for this term? We already have “superhuman algorithm”. AI has more syllables and we could also use SA which could double as State of the Art.
dominotw 6y ago
Off topic: This website needs me to 'accept & close' cookies before i read the article. I had people respond to me in a gdpr thread saying that they never accept cookies example : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26360345 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26360345 What do such ppl do here? just not read the article?
- Sebb767 6y ago
  Depends. If the pop up is something along the lines of "we only have functional cookies", that's okay anyway. If they try to force advertising cookies I'll look for an alternative site (i.e. for coding help) or skip the article. Same if the popup is designed in way that skipping is more work than the content is worth. Of course, sometimes you direly need some info and can't skip it, but these situations are extremely rare.
  - dominotw 6y ago
    Curious. Did you skip this article ? from their privacy policy https://www.ieee.org/security-privacy.html https://www.ieee.org/security-privacy.html > What information do we collect? IEEE collects the following personal data in line with the use purposes explained in a subsequent section: - Your name and contact details - Date of birth - Online profile data/usage - Emergency contact information - Social media profile information - Copies of identification documents - Education and professional information - Communication information including IEEE Online Support and Contact Center communications - Purchasing and payment information - Registration and participation in IEEE events and activities - Subscription preferences - Information about the device(s) you use - Information about service usage - Cookies - Authentication data - Location information - Author and peer review information - Other information you upload or provide to us How do we use your information? To engage with third parties. IEEE may share your personal data with third parties in connection with services that these individuals or entities perform for or with IEEE.
    - Sebb767 6y ago
      > Curious. Did you skip this article ? In this case no, as I did not need to click "accept" in order to read articles. With an intrusive pop up, I most likely would have. Overall, though, I'd probably need to make an exception for IEEE anyway as it hosts a lot of papers for my field of study. To be fair, though, I'm not a hardcore data protection activists. It might be possible to start a complaint or check whether the website does tracking without clicking "I accept" (and I'm pretty sure most do), but unfortunately my life is only so long and the effect is probably rather small. I highly dislike that this tactic works for them, but I'm only willing to sacrifice so much. Also, I still run no script and ad blockers, so the effective tracking is hopefully limited anyway.
bobthechef 6y ago
AI isn't really a thing per se and it adds a kind of patina of false mystique to computation that is essentially no different than any other computation (which itself is also not really "a thing" out there in the world as a phenomenon). The only way AI really means anything is because the person in question has decided to frame something as AI. He is choosing to append to something meaning that it itself does not possess. Take a the linear regression type stuff lots of AI today uses. You put that in another context and it ceases to be AI. Why? Because it's not AI per se! If it were a real thing or real phenomenon, it would be mind-independent and the mental context wouldn't determine its identity. Basically, it seems that whenever someone mechanizes something that previous only a thinking person could do, then its viewed as AI.
SavantIdiot 6y ago
Whew boy, this guy reminds me of Frank Grimes: mad that he can't control the world. I don't really think it matters, "computers" originally meant the women computed ballistics tables for the military in the early 40's... language changes, one person can't change that.
slibhb 6y ago
The rebuttal to this view is "provide a principled definition of intelligence". Doesn't seem like the article does this. A hint appears partway through: "computers will not be able to match humans in their ability to reason abstractly about real-world situations". Does human intelligence distinguish itself by its "abstractness" and by its application to "the real world"? There's also "the systems do not form the kinds of semantic representations and inferences that humans are capable of". Seems like a promising direction for some definition of intelligence. For my money, we will never consider any machine intelligent as long as we mass produce it. The only way we'll accept machines as intelligent is if, as the singularity theorists say, the machines build themselves. Then we aren't really mass producing them, we're just kicking off a process that we don't totally understand, a bit like gestation.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > For my money, we will never consider any machine intelligent as long as we mass produce it. We won't consider machines intelligent until they have and demonstrate the capacity to consider us not-intelligent. It's an open question of how long we will consider anything after that point.
  - tachyonbeam 6y ago
    > We won't consider machines intelligent until they have and demonstrate the capacity to consider us not-intelligent. I don't think it needs to go that far. Birds that can solve simple puzzles are obviously intelligent, so are cats who can open doors, etc. I think the human perception if intelligence is hugely based on the notion of, "is this thing self-aware?" or "is there someone in there?", "does it have a mind of its own?" I would say we'll consider machines intelligent when they're able to have some amount of independence. Right now, they can't solve problems they're not specifically designed/engineered to solve. We don't have any kind of general-purpose artificial intelligence. You might try to argue that reinforcement learning is that, but no, RL doesn't really work outside of a sandbox with an artificial reward function, and it's very sensitive to hyper-parameters. If you could have a chat bot that can pass the Turing Test with a high degree of success, I think most people would consider that intelligent. Same thing for a robot that can do your laundry, wash your dishes and make some mac and cheese without days of training and without fucking up more than a typical human child would.
cyberlab 6y ago
AI these days can be seen as nothing more than a bunch of code used to offload human manual labor to machines, and nothing more. Strong AI[0] is the real sought after gem we all want, but also the one that could cause problems (since it could 'run away' from the inventors and end up controlling humanity in some form). I imagine if we really wanted to build our final invention[1] then we would have to be under some existential pressure to do so. In other words: we would build a 'run away' AI if it could potentially save humanity. Also worth reading this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics_of_artificial_intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics_of_artificial_intellige... [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_AI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_AI [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Final_Invention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Final_Invention
northisup 6y ago
how many dimensions does my linear equation need before it is AI?
DebtDeflation 6y ago
"Ok, we'll call it Quantum instead." /s
- colesantiago 6y ago
  "No wait... I got it, 'Quantum Leap', this is huge, I'm sure our R&D team won't mind this." /s
- 8note 6y ago
  Most things are quantized anyways, so at least it's accurate
hnlmorg 6y ago
Having grown up with 8 and 16 bit games systems and the term AI being used to describe the computer opponents (eg in beat em ups) I’ve long since learned not to take the term AI literally. The problem is the term never had a technical definition. It was always just a hand waving marketing phrase for “clever algorithms”.
arduinomancer 6y ago
It annoyed me at first but I don't think it matters. The technical people involved have since moved on to using AGI as the term for "actual AI" for years now.
- 256lie 6y ago
  That presumes technical people believe in AGI. I would think more ML researchers don't so just avoid the term "AI".
Lammy 6y ago
“AI” always feels like a slur to me honestly. Who am I to call other intelligence artificial?
veltas 6y ago
>Stop Calling Everything AI, AI Pioneer Says
rvz 6y ago
But I heard the florist across the street telling me they are just now getting into the 'deep learning AI' (what they said) just to pick the right flowers for my mother for mothers day several weeks ago. Since they are 'going to use' deep learning soon, they must be turning into an AI company. /s Every time I see a new company preaching endlessly about 'AI' to address a non issue at this point is straight-up begging to VCs to fund their $0 revenue so-called 'tech startup'.
- astrange 6y ago
  That sounds kind of real. Image recognition is one of the most useful ML areas and it's good at identifying plants. Doesn't have to be deep learning though: https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-pastry-ai-that-learned-to-fight-cancer https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-past...
dang 6y ago
Related: Artificial Intelligence – The Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25530178 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25530178 - Dec 2020 (120 comments) The AI Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16873778 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16873778 - April 2018 (161 comments) Others?
- psing 6y ago
  The hero HN doesn't deserve.
benja123 6y ago
When machine learning was a buzz word then companies started using it to describe almost everything they do. Recently I have also noticed that more companies (and PMs) are using AI in its place, at least in their marketing speak. Often the AI or machine learning that is being sold to their customers (or if it’s a startup, to their investors) is in fact a team or a group of teams creating static rules. If it is image recognition the they will often have a large team of manual reviewers. Yes there maybe some AI or machine learning models that are assisting in the decision making, but they are usually much less effective than people realize. Today whenever I hear AI or machine learning, my default is to assume it is marketing speak. I don’t doubt there are models, I just doubt their effectiveness. But saying “we use AI to do X”, sounds much better than saying, “we have a team of experts who help us do X really well” With that said I have worked and continue to work with some amazing data scientist who really are pushing the limits of what can be done with machine learning.
- redisman 6y ago
  I interviewed with one of these startup with these .ai domains. I was super impressed that somehow they could decode human speech over a phone into orders. Until I asked them about that and they had a call center farm that does all that. And a "prototype" of an AI that doesn't work at all lol
  - ArnoVW 6y ago
    Sounds like they're building an annotated dataset, whilst at the same time claiming the space and testing market fit / appetance. Sure, the risk is that they can't make it work in the medium term. But without knowing much about the complexity of the orders / domain, that doesn't sound like a huge risk, given the current SoTA
an-allen 6y ago
I think IEEE has had it right for several decades now - Computational Intelligence. I’ll never forget when my undergrad research adviser in Artificial Neural Networks and Self Organising Maps (circa 2003) corrected me - “we call it computational intelligence as artificial intelligence is science fiction”.
flowerlad 6y ago
What is considered "AI" changes over time. At any point in history, if a machine appears to do a task that only a human brain used to be able to do, then that's considered "AI". So in the mid 1900s a calculator that is able to do arithmetic was considered "AI", and in the late 1900s chess playing machines were considered "AI". Today those things are not considered "AI". What is considered "AI" today will not be considered "AI" a decade or two from now. More: https://ai100.stanford.edu/2016-report/section-i-what-artificial-intelligence/defining-ai https://ai100.stanford.edu/2016-report/section-i-what-artifi...
- ahepp 6y ago
  >So in the mid 1900s a calculator that is able to do arithmetic was considered "AI" Is this true? The citation you link doesn't seem to clearly state that. I see the linked page says: >A simple electronic calculator performs calculations much faster than the human brain, and almost never makes a mistake.[4] Is a calculator intelligent? But I don't see where it says anyone in the mid 1900s thought a calculator was AI. I am no historian, but I can think of numerous examples of AI in science fiction throughout the 1900s and perhaps earlier. Metropolis, Rossum's Universal Robots, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Heck, one could probably even draw the line all the way back to Frankenstein. Maybe the lower bound for what gets called AI to sell stuff has changed over time, but it seems like there's been a pretty clear and consistent (if poorly defined) goal of human-like intelligence.
  - flowerlad 6y ago
    > there's been a pretty clear and consistent (if poorly defined) goal of human-like intelligence. You don't think performing arithmetic and playing chess could ever have been thought of as requiring human-like intelligence? See https://www.leanix.net/en/blog/what-is-the-difference-between-artificial-intelligence-and-machine-learning https://www.leanix.net/en/blog/what-is-the-difference-betwee... Excerpts: Artificial intelligence has been around for ages, with it even being used in the Greek mythology to express human like machines which copied man’s behaviour. At the beginning, even early computers were considered logical machines as they were able to reproduce “intelligent” capabilities such a arithmetics and memory… Engineers of that era saw it as an attempt to create mechanical brains. Nowadays, something as “trivial” as a calculator function, does not go hand in hand with our current concept of Artificial Intelligence.
Corence 6y ago
If a rule-based system can get as good of results as a deep neural net, why is the deep neural net "AI" but the rule-based system is "dumb and hard-coded"? AI is not a precise term. If you can make a product that feels intelligent to the user, why does the implementation matter?
fdsafdsfdsf 6y ago
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SinasinaX 6y ago
I agree with the article. I think calling machine learning as it is today AI is just plain wrong, it started as pure marketing about 5 years ago & now it's almost like people are believing it, even in the industry.
kerblang 6y ago
Hey, would somebody mind breaking down the different not-necessarily-AI things? Like is machine learning the same as neural nets or a subset? This would be tremendously useful! I would assume "expert systems" falls somewhere at the bottom of the list, right above "good old vanilla programming". Dunno how linear regression fits in.
- austinjp 6y ago
  Some of the boundaries here are blurry and subjective, making it nontrivial to produce neat categories. Personally, I go to the Wikipedia page for any particular term and follow the crowd wisdom, plus a grain of salt. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Actually, you raise a genuine issue. Terminology isn't clear, and that makes discussion difficult. I believe that the notion of AI was predictive, and emergent, and retro-fitted. It emerged around the 1950s (arguably), gained some degree of formalisation, meanwhile the goalposts shifted and the field diversified, and now the term is applied haphazardly. I think it's now the responsibility of the user of the phrase to define their terms... which probably indicates that it's no longer fit for purpose.
csimon80 6y ago
A little late for that now...
SergeAx 6y ago
There's a rule of thumb literally for years. If it's Python - we are seeng a ML. If it's PowerPoint - ladies and gentlemen, let me present to you an AI.
akamia 6y ago
The last time I was at a start up (~2 years ago), it was a running joke that the easiest way to raise money was to say your product had something to do with AI. We saw so many companies that were branding everything as AI simply to raise a round. One of the funniest cases was a start up that claimed to be using AI to process their customers' requests but was actually just farming out the work to contractors who were doing everything by hand.
amoorthy 6y ago
Sadly our marketing tests show that when we say our product uses ML we get far less engagement than when we say AI. I don't know that net-conversion is better with AI but ML sure doesn't capture people's imagination. Sigh. Btw, reminds me of the old joke that goes something like this: AI for marketing, ML for recruiting, Regression for design, multiplication for implementation.
simpleguitar 6y ago
When I read the title, I thought of Mike J Jordan immediately. And then I clicked on the article. HAHAHA. I learned Bayesian inference models from him.

253 points by tmfi 6y ago

Marketing team says "no".

This so much. To say nothing of the fact there is a risk of another AI winter when NN/ML continues to not produce (the promised) results.

mattnewton 6y ago
I think it’s producing plenty, but it will never live up to the hype of singularity-enabling Asimov-style superior super-intelligences that are being promised regularly to be just around the corner.
- gremlinsinc 6y ago
  I think there's some "missing link" here, I think we'll have human brains merging with computers to create a symbiotic AI relationship that's less artificial but more "enhanced" for already existing "intelligence", this enhancing is probably the equivalent of the singularity, or pre-cursor to it, as we are able to research faster and faster with our computer-aided brains, we might get to AGI easier/quicker. We're at least 30 years away from that though, if not 100. Immortality tech, may be easier to accomplish.

butterknife 6y ago

Yes please! It's disheartening to engage in discussions where Airbus' autopilot is used as an example of advanced AI.

Guest42 6y ago

I appreciate this notion. It seems as though AI has become a fancy marketing term for stats. I also think there are times when knowing which types of models are used would be really helpful. Having built models with neural nets and glms on the same data sets, there are pros and cons to a variety of approaches and oftentimes the simple ones win, even after a 6 month detailed analysis of all the predictors.

codetrotter 6y ago

> “People are getting confused about the meaning of AI in discussions of technology trends—that there is some kind of intelligent thought in computers that is responsible for the progress and which is competing with humans,” he says. “We don’t have that, but people are talking as if we do.” How much more am I as a human really than the machine learning algorithms are?

stagger87 6y ago
I guess when we understand how the brain works, we'll be able to answer this.
- jmfldn 6y ago
  Fundamentally different I would say. I understand enough about the brain to say that talking about any kind of machine intelligence in relation to brains, is comparing apples and oranges. Its not computing things in any way analogous to how a computer works. Why would it be? Of course, computers might be able to imitate some things and far exceed some things that our brains do. That's different though.
  - stagger87 6y ago
    I guess when we understand how the brain works, we can determine if your statements are true.
    - hervature 6y ago
      I get that you comment is tongue in cheek, but your brain doesn’t have a clock signal. Easily verifiable and we could easily detect it if it did. Thus, computers are fundamentally different than brains. Also, computers have nearly perfect recall and perform arithmetic much better than humans. So both statements of GP are true.
nerdponx 6y ago
A lot? A machine learning algorithm is a task-specific pattern matching algorithm. Sea cucumbers are probably more "intelligent" than any ML algorithm.

gfaure 6y ago

I admire the reach of "Two Minute Papers", but that guy has got to stop calling everything an AI for the sake of YouTube views.

wunderflix 6y ago

I really liked the definition of AI (back in 2015) by Seth Godin - a marketer! >One common insightful definition of AI: Artificial Intelligence is everything a computer can't do yet. As soon as it can, we call it obvious. If the term is used like that it does make sense to me. https://seths.blog/2015/04/the-noise-in-our-head-and-artificial-intelligence/ https://seths.blog/2015/04/the-noise-in-our-head-and-artific...

temac 6y ago
Products are shipped which claim to use "AI". This is self-contradictory with this definition, and no product can ever exist claiming AI with it. I'm fine with that, but then it seems that the term would be completely useless, when "science-fiction" already exist (and, even if it is not always, can be realistic)
- wunderflix 6y ago
  I understand what you are saying and I tend to agree. But: AI would then be way more specific to computers. Science Fiction is a very broad term also applied to biology, engineering etc.
- hervature 6y ago
  Well unless you read it as “humans do the hard part” and so a product with AI can make substantial use of computer systems as long as humans are at the helm. The definition is obviously bad because you wouldn’t consider a fire AI because a computer can’t do that. The definition needs an additional stipulation that AI is a computing program.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  That's not self-contradictory, it's just proof that products which claim to use "AI" can't possibly work. Quite consistent with what's observed in practice.
baron_harkonnen 6y ago
> Seth Godin - a marketer! Like most clever things marketers do, that quote is borrowed nearly verbatim from a much older quote without reference. "AI is whatever hasn't been done yet." From Douglas Hofstadter quoting Larry Tesler in 1980 Anyone who has studied AI and its history at all knows that similar quotes to Godin have been going on since the 70s an even that quote from Tesler. There's an entire wikipedia article on the AI effect[0] if you want to dive deeper. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect

arnaudsm 6y ago

When I listen to marketers and journalists I always assume AI means "Algorithm" and Blockchain means "Decentralised"

s0rce 6y ago
The worst is when marketers and journalists talk about your own research.
whatshisface 6y ago
I would say that blockchain usually means "with hash trees." There are a lot of centralized hash tree products marketed as blockchain technology. Also, "Algorithm" might be a little too narrow, "computer program" fits the colloquial use of AI a little better. :)
Semiapies 6y ago
I assume "AI" means there's at least one conditional branch in the code.

lokimedes 6y ago

I tried convincing the business developers and marketing for years that what we did was machine learning, applied statistics or gulp “data-driven” functionality - but no, only thing that worked was “<Company> AI Engine”... hurray for throwing my PhD at the wind...

whatshisface 6y ago
What something is has almost no relationship to what sales could be the most successful calling it. That's a consequence of the lamentable but maybe unavoidable fact that so rarely are customers experts in what they buy.
anonu 6y ago
Unfortunately marketing is everything. Engineers like to build nice shiny things without much of an eye on how to sell it. If you can slap "AI" on it and make some $, then why not? The end customer may not really care. Its not exactly like calling an apple "organic". Theres no certification process or consensus on what AI actually is or means.
- gspr 6y ago
  We, the people doing the actual work, have a moral responsibility to resist our work being dishonestly marketed. And certainly a moral responsibility not to engage in it ourselves.
  - colesantiago 6y ago
    usually marketing always wins. I remember when 'GANs' were 'marketed' as 'deepfakes' to the public and watched it enter the english lexicon.
  - ku-man 6y ago
    Well said. If we consider ourselves engineers we should always have the public as our first responsibility.
reaperducer 6y ago

lightgreen 6y ago

"When reading a text about AI, replace AI with matrix multiplication, it will make much more sense"

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ipsum2 6y ago

Reminds me when X-rays first were discovered, everyone claimed their product contained them, including X-ray headache tablets, golf balls, stove polish, razor blades. https://pubs.rsna.org/doi/full/10.1148/rg.242035157 https://pubs.rsna.org/doi/full/10.1148/rg.242035157 for some fun pictures. I won't be surprised when AI toothbrushes come out.

djoldman 6y ago
:( https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2019/10/25/20932250/oral-b-genius-x-connected-toothbrush-ai-artificial-intelligence https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2019/10/25/20932250/...
- choxi 6y ago
  if brush_time < 2.minutes return "Brush longer" else if brush_time > 5.minutes return "Brush less" end
  - sidpatil 6y ago
    I.e. using bleeding-edge decision-tree models to disrupt the oral hygiene space.
    - dwighttk 6y ago
      Lotta bleeding edges in the oral hygiene space
  - dublin 6y ago
    In the real world, most AI is just a bunch of IF statements, anyway, just abstracted away enough that it's no longer obvious.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
banana_giraffe 6y ago
That's happened: https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2019/10/25/20932250/oral-b-genius-x-connected-toothbrush-ai-artificial-intelligence https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2019/10/25/20932250/...

jmfldn 6y ago

"Computers have not become intelligent per se, but they have provided capabilities that augment human intelligence, he writes. Moreover, they have excelled at low-level pattern-recognition capabilities that could be performed in principle by humans but at great cost. " It's odd how under-appreciated this is. There is no "intelligence" here as we know it, not even a hint. There are algorithms operating on data for very prescribed use cases. When you break it down its pretty primitive stuff really. Clever sure, but don't think we're building a mind here, that language just confuses things. So much of the public conversation around this stuff is polluted with this sort of sci fi nonsense claiming all sorts of properties for AI and implying some sort of singularity is around the corner. Pure fantasy.

Sebb767 6y ago
> There is no "intelligence" here as we know it, not even a hint. There are algorithms operating on data for very prescribed use cases. I agree with your general point, but if you break it down, our brains a nothing "intelligent" either. It's just a network of neurons searching for patterns in the sensor input. Sure, it can reconfigure itself, but from a really abstract perspective it's nothing more than a ultra-scaled neural network as we currently use them. So this really boils down to the definition of intelligence, which is by no means easy.
- omnicognate 6y ago
  > it's nothing more than a ultra-scaled neural network as we currently use them You state this as if it is an undisputed/obvious fact, but it isn't.
  - Sebb767 6y ago
    It does not matter for my point. Even if our NNs miss some part of neuron function, it would look comparable to a simple if/a multiplication on the smallest level. My point is that the complexity/intelligence comes from size; just because our algorithms adapt minimally or accept pre-defined scenarios, does not mean that they are fundamentally unintelligent because we're able to fully understand them.

clircle 6y ago

I prefer to call AI “random number generators”

xwdv 6y ago

Maybe we should also stop calling everything “tech”. Seems like every company that uses computers is a tech company.

rvz 6y ago
Can't wait for anyone who has a cryptocurrency wallet to call themselves a 'blockchain' company.

kimi 6y ago

You mean we have to go back to "Blockchain"?

colesantiago 6y ago

What would be a better way to call 'AI' then for the general public? pattern recognition? matrix multiplication? fancy statistics? or maybe enhanced statistics? gah, might as well just say 'algorithm' and just be done with it.

Aeronwen 6y ago
'Algorithm' is too long and hard to pronounce to gain popularity. Better shorten it to 'Al'.
- colesantiago 6y ago
  welp, back to square one then.

mark_l_watson 6y ago

While I mostly agree with Michael Jordan, I think that he overstates his argument a small bit. I feel comfortable applying the "AI" label to projects if they: 1) achieve human level of performance or better. 2) They use any or all of standard techniques like deep learning, NLP, knowledge representation, reinforcement learning, etc. I am just about to hit my 40 year anniversary for getting paid to be doing "AI" related work, with a lenient definition of AI. On the other hand, Artificial General Intelligence is a much stronger term, and is something that I don't expect to see in my lifetime.

bobthechef 6y ago
> 2) They use any or all of standard techniques like deep learning, NLP, knowledge representation, reinforcement learning, etc. But why that? There isn't a principled reason for singling those out. It's just a matter of convention that we call those AI. Pretend you never heard of AI before and you came across these algorithms. No amount of analysis or poking around would lead you to think "oh, man, this is artificial intelligence!". No, you'd see a bunch of statistical techniques that do X, Y, and Z, none of which would jump out at you as "wow, this is AI". All that computers give us is the ability to run tedious computations over larger data sets that would be impractical for human beings to perform. "AI" is what we read into these things. There really is no such thing as such.
- 256lie 6y ago
  What would a principled reason for association look like beyond mere convention? Language is used by different groups to mean different things. Machine learning, logic, control, robotics, linguistics, and cognitive science were publishing in artificial intelligence venues decades ago. Now AI seems to just mean DL/RL.
hervature 6y ago
Serious question, are calculators AI because they perform arithmetic much better than humans and use standard techniques like Taylor series expansion and numerical methods? I feel like you want to add that the technique has to use data as a core part of its algorithm that represents “learning”. But then we’re just back to machine learning that beats humans at a specific task. Is there a need for this term? We already have “superhuman algorithm”. AI has more syllables and we could also use SA which could double as State of the Art.

dominotw 6y ago

Off topic: This website needs me to 'accept & close' cookies before i read the article. I had people respond to me in a gdpr thread saying that they never accept cookies example : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26360345 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26360345 What do such ppl do here? just not read the article?

Sebb767 6y ago
Depends. If the pop up is something along the lines of "we only have functional cookies", that's okay anyway. If they try to force advertising cookies I'll look for an alternative site (i.e. for coding help) or skip the article. Same if the popup is designed in way that skipping is more work than the content is worth. Of course, sometimes you direly need some info and can't skip it, but these situations are extremely rare.
- dominotw 6y ago
  Curious. Did you skip this article ? from their privacy policy https://www.ieee.org/security-privacy.html https://www.ieee.org/security-privacy.html > What information do we collect? IEEE collects the following personal data in line with the use purposes explained in a subsequent section: - Your name and contact details - Date of birth - Online profile data/usage - Emergency contact information - Social media profile information - Copies of identification documents - Education and professional information - Communication information including IEEE Online Support and Contact Center communications - Purchasing and payment information - Registration and participation in IEEE events and activities - Subscription preferences - Information about the device(s) you use - Information about service usage - Cookies - Authentication data - Location information - Author and peer review information - Other information you upload or provide to us How do we use your information? To engage with third parties. IEEE may share your personal data with third parties in connection with services that these individuals or entities perform for or with IEEE.
  - Sebb767 6y ago
    > Curious. Did you skip this article ? In this case no, as I did not need to click "accept" in order to read articles. With an intrusive pop up, I most likely would have. Overall, though, I'd probably need to make an exception for IEEE anyway as it hosts a lot of papers for my field of study. To be fair, though, I'm not a hardcore data protection activists. It might be possible to start a complaint or check whether the website does tracking without clicking "I accept" (and I'm pretty sure most do), but unfortunately my life is only so long and the effect is probably rather small. I highly dislike that this tactic works for them, but I'm only willing to sacrifice so much. Also, I still run no script and ad blockers, so the effective tracking is hopefully limited anyway.

bobthechef 6y ago

AI isn't really a thing per se and it adds a kind of patina of false mystique to computation that is essentially no different than any other computation (which itself is also not really "a thing" out there in the world as a phenomenon). The only way AI really means anything is because the person in question has decided to frame something as AI. He is choosing to append to something meaning that it itself does not possess. Take a the linear regression type stuff lots of AI today uses. You put that in another context and it ceases to be AI. Why? Because it's not AI per se! If it were a real thing or real phenomenon, it would be mind-independent and the mental context wouldn't determine its identity. Basically, it seems that whenever someone mechanizes something that previous only a thinking person could do, then its viewed as AI.

SavantIdiot 6y ago

Whew boy, this guy reminds me of Frank Grimes: mad that he can't control the world. I don't really think it matters, "computers" originally meant the women computed ballistics tables for the military in the early 40's... language changes, one person can't change that.

slibhb 6y ago

The rebuttal to this view is "provide a principled definition of intelligence". Doesn't seem like the article does this. A hint appears partway through: "computers will not be able to match humans in their ability to reason abstractly about real-world situations". Does human intelligence distinguish itself by its "abstractness" and by its application to "the real world"? There's also "the systems do not form the kinds of semantic representations and inferences that humans are capable of". Seems like a promising direction for some definition of intelligence. For my money, we will never consider any machine intelligent as long as we mass produce it. The only way we'll accept machines as intelligent is if, as the singularity theorists say, the machines build themselves. Then we aren't really mass producing them, we're just kicking off a process that we don't totally understand, a bit like gestation.

dragonwriter 6y ago
> For my money, we will never consider any machine intelligent as long as we mass produce it. We won't consider machines intelligent until they have and demonstrate the capacity to consider us not-intelligent. It's an open question of how long we will consider anything after that point.
- tachyonbeam 6y ago
  > We won't consider machines intelligent until they have and demonstrate the capacity to consider us not-intelligent. I don't think it needs to go that far. Birds that can solve simple puzzles are obviously intelligent, so are cats who can open doors, etc. I think the human perception if intelligence is hugely based on the notion of, "is this thing self-aware?" or "is there someone in there?", "does it have a mind of its own?" I would say we'll consider machines intelligent when they're able to have some amount of independence. Right now, they can't solve problems they're not specifically designed/engineered to solve. We don't have any kind of general-purpose artificial intelligence. You might try to argue that reinforcement learning is that, but no, RL doesn't really work outside of a sandbox with an artificial reward function, and it's very sensitive to hyper-parameters. If you could have a chat bot that can pass the Turing Test with a high degree of success, I think most people would consider that intelligent. Same thing for a robot that can do your laundry, wash your dishes and make some mac and cheese without days of training and without fucking up more than a typical human child would.

cyberlab 6y ago

AI these days can be seen as nothing more than a bunch of code used to offload human manual labor to machines, and nothing more. Strong AI[0] is the real sought after gem we all want, but also the one that could cause problems (since it could 'run away' from the inventors and end up controlling humanity in some form). I imagine if we really wanted to build our final invention[1] then we would have to be under some existential pressure to do so. In other words: we would build a 'run away' AI if it could potentially save humanity. Also worth reading this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics_of_artificial_intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics_of_artificial_intellige... [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_AI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_AI [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Final_Invention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Final_Invention

northisup 6y ago

how many dimensions does my linear equation need before it is AI?

DebtDeflation 6y ago

"Ok, we'll call it Quantum instead." /s

colesantiago 6y ago
"No wait... I got it, 'Quantum Leap', this is huge, I'm sure our R&D team won't mind this." /s
8note 6y ago
Most things are quantized anyways, so at least it's accurate

hnlmorg 6y ago

Having grown up with 8 and 16 bit games systems and the term AI being used to describe the computer opponents (eg in beat em ups) I’ve long since learned not to take the term AI literally. The problem is the term never had a technical definition. It was always just a hand waving marketing phrase for “clever algorithms”.

arduinomancer 6y ago

It annoyed me at first but I don't think it matters. The technical people involved have since moved on to using AGI as the term for "actual AI" for years now.

256lie 6y ago
That presumes technical people believe in AGI. I would think more ML researchers don't so just avoid the term "AI".

Lammy 6y ago

“AI” always feels like a slur to me honestly. Who am I to call other intelligence artificial?

veltas 6y ago

>Stop Calling Everything AI, AI Pioneer Says

rvz 6y ago

But I heard the florist across the street telling me they are just now getting into the 'deep learning AI' (what they said) just to pick the right flowers for my mother for mothers day several weeks ago. Since they are 'going to use' deep learning soon, they must be turning into an AI company. /s Every time I see a new company preaching endlessly about 'AI' to address a non issue at this point is straight-up begging to VCs to fund their $0 revenue so-called 'tech startup'.

astrange 6y ago
That sounds kind of real. Image recognition is one of the most useful ML areas and it's good at identifying plants. Doesn't have to be deep learning though: https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-pastry-ai-that-learned-to-fight-cancer https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-past...

dang 6y ago

Related: Artificial Intelligence – The Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25530178 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25530178 - Dec 2020 (120 comments) The AI Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16873778 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16873778 - April 2018 (161 comments) Others?

psing 6y ago
The hero HN doesn't deserve.

benja123 6y ago

When machine learning was a buzz word then companies started using it to describe almost everything they do. Recently I have also noticed that more companies (and PMs) are using AI in its place, at least in their marketing speak. Often the AI or machine learning that is being sold to their customers (or if it’s a startup, to their investors) is in fact a team or a group of teams creating static rules. If it is image recognition the they will often have a large team of manual reviewers. Yes there maybe some AI or machine learning models that are assisting in the decision making, but they are usually much less effective than people realize. Today whenever I hear AI or machine learning, my default is to assume it is marketing speak. I don’t doubt there are models, I just doubt their effectiveness. But saying “we use AI to do X”, sounds much better than saying, “we have a team of experts who help us do X really well” With that said I have worked and continue to work with some amazing data scientist who really are pushing the limits of what can be done with machine learning.

redisman 6y ago
I interviewed with one of these startup with these .ai domains. I was super impressed that somehow they could decode human speech over a phone into orders. Until I asked them about that and they had a call center farm that does all that. And a "prototype" of an AI that doesn't work at all lol
- ArnoVW 6y ago
  Sounds like they're building an annotated dataset, whilst at the same time claiming the space and testing market fit / appetance. Sure, the risk is that they can't make it work in the medium term. But without knowing much about the complexity of the orders / domain, that doesn't sound like a huge risk, given the current SoTA

an-allen 6y ago

I think IEEE has had it right for several decades now - Computational Intelligence. I’ll never forget when my undergrad research adviser in Artificial Neural Networks and Self Organising Maps (circa 2003) corrected me - “we call it computational intelligence as artificial intelligence is science fiction”.

flowerlad 6y ago

What is considered "AI" changes over time. At any point in history, if a machine appears to do a task that only a human brain used to be able to do, then that's considered "AI". So in the mid 1900s a calculator that is able to do arithmetic was considered "AI", and in the late 1900s chess playing machines were considered "AI". Today those things are not considered "AI". What is considered "AI" today will not be considered "AI" a decade or two from now. More: https://ai100.stanford.edu/2016-report/section-i-what-artificial-intelligence/defining-ai https://ai100.stanford.edu/2016-report/section-i-what-artifi...

ahepp 6y ago
>So in the mid 1900s a calculator that is able to do arithmetic was considered "AI" Is this true? The citation you link doesn't seem to clearly state that. I see the linked page says: >A simple electronic calculator performs calculations much faster than the human brain, and almost never makes a mistake.[4] Is a calculator intelligent? But I don't see where it says anyone in the mid 1900s thought a calculator was AI. I am no historian, but I can think of numerous examples of AI in science fiction throughout the 1900s and perhaps earlier. Metropolis, Rossum's Universal Robots, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Heck, one could probably even draw the line all the way back to Frankenstein. Maybe the lower bound for what gets called AI to sell stuff has changed over time, but it seems like there's been a pretty clear and consistent (if poorly defined) goal of human-like intelligence.
- flowerlad 6y ago
  > there's been a pretty clear and consistent (if poorly defined) goal of human-like intelligence. You don't think performing arithmetic and playing chess could ever have been thought of as requiring human-like intelligence? See https://www.leanix.net/en/blog/what-is-the-difference-between-artificial-intelligence-and-machine-learning https://www.leanix.net/en/blog/what-is-the-difference-betwee... Excerpts: Artificial intelligence has been around for ages, with it even being used in the Greek mythology to express human like machines which copied man’s behaviour. At the beginning, even early computers were considered logical machines as they were able to reproduce “intelligent” capabilities such a arithmetics and memory… Engineers of that era saw it as an attempt to create mechanical brains. Nowadays, something as “trivial” as a calculator function, does not go hand in hand with our current concept of Artificial Intelligence.

Corence 6y ago

If a rule-based system can get as good of results as a deep neural net, why is the deep neural net "AI" but the rule-based system is "dumb and hard-coded"? AI is not a precise term. If you can make a product that feels intelligent to the user, why does the implementation matter?

fdsafdsfdsf 6y ago

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fsaddds 6y ago

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SinasinaX 6y ago

I agree with the article. I think calling machine learning as it is today AI is just plain wrong, it started as pure marketing about 5 years ago & now it's almost like people are believing it, even in the industry.

kerblang 6y ago

Hey, would somebody mind breaking down the different not-necessarily-AI things? Like is machine learning the same as neural nets or a subset? This would be tremendously useful! I would assume "expert systems" falls somewhere at the bottom of the list, right above "good old vanilla programming". Dunno how linear regression fits in.

austinjp 6y ago
Some of the boundaries here are blurry and subjective, making it nontrivial to produce neat categories. Personally, I go to the Wikipedia page for any particular term and follow the crowd wisdom, plus a grain of salt. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Actually, you raise a genuine issue. Terminology isn't clear, and that makes discussion difficult. I believe that the notion of AI was predictive, and emergent, and retro-fitted. It emerged around the 1950s (arguably), gained some degree of formalisation, meanwhile the goalposts shifted and the field diversified, and now the term is applied haphazardly. I think it's now the responsibility of the user of the phrase to define their terms... which probably indicates that it's no longer fit for purpose.

csimon80 6y ago

A little late for that now...

SergeAx 6y ago

There's a rule of thumb literally for years. If it's Python - we are seeng a ML. If it's PowerPoint - ladies and gentlemen, let me present to you an AI.

akamia 6y ago

The last time I was at a start up (~2 years ago), it was a running joke that the easiest way to raise money was to say your product had something to do with AI. We saw so many companies that were branding everything as AI simply to raise a round. One of the funniest cases was a start up that claimed to be using AI to process their customers' requests but was actually just farming out the work to contractors who were doing everything by hand.

amoorthy 6y ago

Sadly our marketing tests show that when we say our product uses ML we get far less engagement than when we say AI. I don't know that net-conversion is better with AI but ML sure doesn't capture people's imagination. Sigh. Btw, reminds me of the old joke that goes something like this: AI for marketing, ML for recruiting, Regression for design, multiplication for implementation.

simpleguitar 6y ago

When I read the title, I thought of Mike J Jordan immediately. And then I clicked on the article. HAHAHA. I learned Bayesian inference models from him.