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Have been having a lot of laughs about all the things we call AI nowadays. Now it’s becoming less funny. To me it’s just generative AI, LLMs, media generation.

Have been having a lot of laughs about all the things we call AI nowadays. Now it’s becoming less funny. To me it’s just generative AI, LLMs, media generation. But I see the CNN folks suddenly getting “AI” attention. Anything deep learning really. It’s pretty weird. Even our old batch processing, SLURM based clusters with GPU nodes are now “AI Factories”.

sethd 2y ago
Even the A* search algorithm is technically AI.
- ykonstant 2y ago
  Oh man, I really want to watch CNN folks try to pronounce Dijkstra!
  - jcgrillo 2y ago
    We could have it both ways with a Convolutional News Network
  - catoc 2y ago
    Let alone Edsger
    - ykonstant 2y ago
      That reminded me of this classic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icoe0kK8btc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icoe0kK8btc
  - zelphirkalt 2y ago
    die-jick-stra!
- eru 2y ago
  Well, it used to be. But whenever we understand something, we move the goal posts of what AI is. At least that's what we used to do.
  - aithrowawaycomm 2y ago
    It's not "moving the goalposts." It's realizing that the principles behind perceptrons / Lisp expert systems / AlphaGo / LLMs / etc might be very useful and interesting from a software perspective, but they have nothing to do with "intelligence," and they aren't a viable path for making machines which can actually think in the same way a chimpanzee can think. At best they do a shallow imitation of certain types of formal human thinking. So the search continues.
    - eru 2y ago
      No, it's still moving the goalposts. It just that we move the goalposts for pretty good reasons. (I agree!) Btw, you bring up the perspective of realising that our tools weren't adequate. But it's broader: completely ignoring the tools, we also realise that eg being able to play eg chess really, really well didn't actually capture what we wanted to mean by 'intelligence'. Similar for other outcomes.
      - bmicraft 2y ago
        Moving the goal posts and noticing that that you mistook the street lights for goal posts is not really the same.
xdennis 2y ago
> To me it’s just generative AI, LLMs, media generation. That's not what AI is. Artificial Intelligence has decades of use in academia. Even a script which plays Tic Tac Toe is AI. LLMs have advanced the field profoundly and gained widespread use. But that doesn't mean that a Tic Tac Toe bot is no longer AI. When a term passes to the mainstream people manufacture their own idea of what it means. This has happened to the term "hacker". But that doesn't mean decades of AI papers are wrong because the public uses a different definition. It's similar to the professional vs the public understanding of the term "prop" in movie making. People were criticizing Alec Baldwin for using a real gun on the set of Rust instead of a "prop" gun. But as movie professionals explained, a real gun is a prop gun. Prop in theater/movies just means property. It's anything that's used in the production. Prop guns can be plastic replicas, real guns which have been disabled, or actually firing guns. Just because the public thinks "prop" means "fake", doesn't mean movie makers have to change their terms.

sethd 2y ago

Even the A* search algorithm is technically AI.

ykonstant 2y ago
Oh man, I really want to watch CNN folks try to pronounce Dijkstra!
- jcgrillo 2y ago
  We could have it both ways with a Convolutional News Network
- catoc 2y ago
  Let alone Edsger
  - ykonstant 2y ago
    That reminded me of this classic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icoe0kK8btc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icoe0kK8btc
- zelphirkalt 2y ago
  die-jick-stra!
eru 2y ago
Well, it used to be. But whenever we understand something, we move the goal posts of what AI is. At least that's what we used to do.
- aithrowawaycomm 2y ago
  It's not "moving the goalposts." It's realizing that the principles behind perceptrons / Lisp expert systems / AlphaGo / LLMs / etc might be very useful and interesting from a software perspective, but they have nothing to do with "intelligence," and they aren't a viable path for making machines which can actually think in the same way a chimpanzee can think. At best they do a shallow imitation of certain types of formal human thinking. So the search continues.
  - eru 2y ago
    No, it's still moving the goalposts. It just that we move the goalposts for pretty good reasons. (I agree!) Btw, you bring up the perspective of realising that our tools weren't adequate. But it's broader: completely ignoring the tools, we also realise that eg being able to play eg chess really, really well didn't actually capture what we wanted to mean by 'intelligence'. Similar for other outcomes.
    - bmicraft 2y ago
      Moving the goal posts and noticing that that you mistook the street lights for goal posts is not really the same.

xdennis 2y ago

> To me it’s just generative AI, LLMs, media generation. That's not what AI is. Artificial Intelligence has decades of use in academia. Even a script which plays Tic Tac Toe is AI. LLMs have advanced the field profoundly and gained widespread use. But that doesn't mean that a Tic Tac Toe bot is no longer AI. When a term passes to the mainstream people manufacture their own idea of what it means. This has happened to the term "hacker". But that doesn't mean decades of AI papers are wrong because the public uses a different definition. It's similar to the professional vs the public understanding of the term "prop" in movie making. People were criticizing Alec Baldwin for using a real gun on the set of Rust instead of a "prop" gun. But as movie professionals explained, a real gun is a prop gun. Prop in theater/movies just means property. It's anything that's used in the production. Prop guns can be plastic replicas, real guns which have been disabled, or actually firing guns. Just because the public thinks "prop" means "fake", doesn't mean movie makers have to change their terms.