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> LLMs are not "AI" in the old sense of being conscious and aware. That's not the old sense of AI. The old sense of AI is like a tree search that plays chess o

by ftxbro 3y ago

> LLMs are not "AI" in the old sense of being conscious and aware. That's not the old sense of AI. The old sense of AI is like a tree search that plays chess or a rules engine that controls a factory.

foobazgt 3y ago
Historically "AI" meant what "AGI" now means today. That's what they're referring to.
- ftxbro 3y ago
  Fair enough if you're talking about Steven Spielberg films, but not if you mean anything in academia or industry.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  No, it didn't. AI historically has been the entire field of making machines think, or behave as if they think, more like biological models (not even exclusively humans.) The far-off-end-goal wasn’t even usually what we now call AGI, but “strong AI” (mirroring the human brain on a process level) or “human-level intelligence” (mirroring it on a capability/external behavior level), while the current distant horizons are “AGI” (which is basically human-scope but neutral on level) and “superintelligence” (AGI and beyond human level).
- gwd 3y ago
  I took a university-level AI course in 1997, and I can tell you that GP is 100% correct. The course itself was mostly about how to teach humans to define what they wanted precisely enough to actually ask a computer to do it (utility functions, logic, Baysean mathematics, etc). Neural networks were touched on, of course; but the state of the art at the time was search. Compiler optimization? AI. Map routing? AI. SQL query optimizer? AI. I can't find it right now, but there used to be somewhere on the sqlite.org website that describes its query optimizer as an AI. Classically speaking, that's 100% correct. Obviously there was always in people's minds the idea of AI being AGI; the course also covered Searle's Chinese Room argument and so on, "strong AI" vs "weak AI" and so on. But the nuts and bolts of artificial intelligence research was nowhere near anything like an AGI.

by ftxbro 3y ago

foobazgt 3y ago

Historically "AI" meant what "AGI" now means today. That's what they're referring to.

ftxbro 3y ago
Fair enough if you're talking about Steven Spielberg films, but not if you mean anything in academia or industry.
dragonwriter 3y ago
No, it didn't. AI historically has been the entire field of making machines think, or behave as if they think, more like biological models (not even exclusively humans.) The far-off-end-goal wasn’t even usually what we now call AGI, but “strong AI” (mirroring the human brain on a process level) or “human-level intelligence” (mirroring it on a capability/external behavior level), while the current distant horizons are “AGI” (which is basically human-scope but neutral on level) and “superintelligence” (AGI and beyond human level).
gwd 3y ago
I took a university-level AI course in 1997, and I can tell you that GP is 100% correct. The course itself was mostly about how to teach humans to define what they wanted precisely enough to actually ask a computer to do it (utility functions, logic, Baysean mathematics, etc). Neural networks were touched on, of course; but the state of the art at the time was search. Compiler optimization? AI. Map routing? AI. SQL query optimizer? AI. I can't find it right now, but there used to be somewhere on the sqlite.org website that describes its query optimizer as an AI. Classically speaking, that's 100% correct. Obviously there was always in people's minds the idea of AI being AGI; the course also covered Searle's Chinese Room argument and so on, "strong AI" vs "weak AI" and so on. But the nuts and bolts of artificial intelligence research was nowhere near anything like an AGI.