4 ms·

AI has been around for as long (or even longer, depending on how you see it) as the internet (counting the start of internet as the beginning of TCP/IP).

xtracto 4y ago
As someone who has done some research on AI in the last 25 years I find this current iteration amazing. 25 years ago when I was just starting my Bachelor's degree, AI was in a sort of "hiatus". The "great" AI procedures were mostly rule based systems. We read about MYCIN and similar expert systems and how they could do amazing stuff. We also read about AI generating new strategies for Backgammon. That was amazing. But during the 90s/2000s, nothing spectacular happened. We had some advances in neural networks, which were just an academic curiosity given their processing requirements. (I remember implementing a NN that could recognize vowels using C in school). We also had Genetic Algorithms, that were basically optimizers. We had some interesting implementations such as the Creatures game series and similar. Then "Machine Learning" started gaining notoriety. Industry started using "Machine Learning" techniques to perform some types of forecasting. This came a bit later after "Data warehousing". I remember all the talk about hypercubes and that crap. And how Walmart would extract "knowledge" and place beer six-packs in the diapers aisle so that "dad" would impulse-buy beer when "mom" makes him go to buy diapers. The ML time was an exciting time, and for some time mainstream thought that ML was AI ... but there were lots of other things cooking. Now suddenly we have enough power to make non-trivial Neural Networks... and suddenly we have Deep Learning and these LLM with HUGE networks. And industry has just started looking at it. These are exciting times. The other side of the coin is that during all these times, "mainstream" goal-post has been pushed and pushed for AI... what was AI in the 60s-70s (rule based systems like MyCIN), is not AI nowadays (they are just pattern matching, if-elses!! they say). What was AI in the 80s-90s (Genetic Algorithms, Multi-Agent systems) is not AI nowadays... and what was AI in the 2000-2010s (Random Forests, SVMs, AdaBoost) is no AI nowadays (just statistics!). But overall, it has been a very interesting subject to study.
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  Well, the 70's AI is out there optimizing the software you write; making sure you can use all the bandwidth on your network links; routing people over the maps they have on their pockets. The 90's AI is out there making trucks and ships cheaper to run; reducing the amount of wood, steel, plastics, etc our industries use; helping design bridges or microprocessors; optimizing your code at runtime inside the CPU. The 10's AIs aren't out there a lot. Maybe it is because of lack of time. But it's just research that moves on, the value stays.
  - bryananderson 4y ago
    Deep learning is out there in real products a lot more than you think. Any system that’s processing images, video, audio, or natural language (better than what existed in 2010, which was almost universally very poor) is almost certainly using DL.
  - mchaver 4y ago
    People might not call them AIs, but the big AIs of the 2010's are definitely recommendation algorithms and they have had a huge influence on society (facebook, youtube, twitter, tiktok, instagram, etc.).
- baq 4y ago
  2023 AI is basically magic. LLMs and diffusors are the first AI technology to keep the AI name. All previously developed AIs lost their AI naming rights - magic powers - soon after production deployment. These two are truly AI - they’re still magic, perhaps even more so than even 3 months ago and given the number of parameters in them, this will likely remain true for a while. Working with ChatGPT and stable diffusion, seeing GPT-4 write games and midjourney generate presidents of US as Warhammer 40k characters really feels surreal. This is the sufficiently advanced technology. Literally indistinguishable from magic.
  - capableweb 4y ago
    > LLMs and diffusors are the first AI technology to keep the AI name "AI" is not a static name that can be given to something and it remains AI. What was AI today will not be AI tomorrow, it'll be too simple by then. Just as the AI written in the 1950s is not even AI by today standards, while it was groundbreaking at the time. This moment will too come to pass, and people will look at 2023 AI as "AI that lost its naming rights".
mellosouls 4y ago
We haven't had AI like this.

xtracto 4y ago

As someone who has done some research on AI in the last 25 years I find this current iteration amazing. 25 years ago when I was just starting my Bachelor's degree, AI was in a sort of "hiatus". The "great" AI procedures were mostly rule based systems. We read about MYCIN and similar expert systems and how they could do amazing stuff. We also read about AI generating new strategies for Backgammon. That was amazing. But during the 90s/2000s, nothing spectacular happened. We had some advances in neural networks, which were just an academic curiosity given their processing requirements. (I remember implementing a NN that could recognize vowels using C in school). We also had Genetic Algorithms, that were basically optimizers. We had some interesting implementations such as the Creatures game series and similar. Then "Machine Learning" started gaining notoriety. Industry started using "Machine Learning" techniques to perform some types of forecasting. This came a bit later after "Data warehousing". I remember all the talk about hypercubes and that crap. And how Walmart would extract "knowledge" and place beer six-packs in the diapers aisle so that "dad" would impulse-buy beer when "mom" makes him go to buy diapers. The ML time was an exciting time, and for some time mainstream thought that ML was AI ... but there were lots of other things cooking. Now suddenly we have enough power to make non-trivial Neural Networks... and suddenly we have Deep Learning and these LLM with HUGE networks. And industry has just started looking at it. These are exciting times. The other side of the coin is that during all these times, "mainstream" goal-post has been pushed and pushed for AI... what was AI in the 60s-70s (rule based systems like MyCIN), is not AI nowadays (they are just pattern matching, if-elses!! they say). What was AI in the 80s-90s (Genetic Algorithms, Multi-Agent systems) is not AI nowadays... and what was AI in the 2000-2010s (Random Forests, SVMs, AdaBoost) is no AI nowadays (just statistics!). But overall, it has been a very interesting subject to study.

marcosdumay 4y ago
Well, the 70's AI is out there optimizing the software you write; making sure you can use all the bandwidth on your network links; routing people over the maps they have on their pockets. The 90's AI is out there making trucks and ships cheaper to run; reducing the amount of wood, steel, plastics, etc our industries use; helping design bridges or microprocessors; optimizing your code at runtime inside the CPU. The 10's AIs aren't out there a lot. Maybe it is because of lack of time. But it's just research that moves on, the value stays.
- bryananderson 4y ago
  Deep learning is out there in real products a lot more than you think. Any system that’s processing images, video, audio, or natural language (better than what existed in 2010, which was almost universally very poor) is almost certainly using DL.
- mchaver 4y ago
  People might not call them AIs, but the big AIs of the 2010's are definitely recommendation algorithms and they have had a huge influence on society (facebook, youtube, twitter, tiktok, instagram, etc.).
baq 4y ago
2023 AI is basically magic. LLMs and diffusors are the first AI technology to keep the AI name. All previously developed AIs lost their AI naming rights - magic powers - soon after production deployment. These two are truly AI - they’re still magic, perhaps even more so than even 3 months ago and given the number of parameters in them, this will likely remain true for a while. Working with ChatGPT and stable diffusion, seeing GPT-4 write games and midjourney generate presidents of US as Warhammer 40k characters really feels surreal. This is the sufficiently advanced technology. Literally indistinguishable from magic.
- capableweb 4y ago
  > LLMs and diffusors are the first AI technology to keep the AI name "AI" is not a static name that can be given to something and it remains AI. What was AI today will not be AI tomorrow, it'll be too simple by then. Just as the AI written in the 1950s is not even AI by today standards, while it was groundbreaking at the time. This moment will too come to pass, and people will look at 2023 AI as "AI that lost its naming rights".

mellosouls 4y ago

We haven't had AI like this.