3 ms·
AI was over-hyped. I remember how "AI" felt like marketing bullshit at the lab when I was there between 2015 and 2020. Generative AI took it at the next level
by jraph 1y ago
AI was over-hyped. I remember how "AI" felt like marketing bullshit at the lab when I was there between 2015 and 2020.
Generative AI took it at the next level though. There is no comparison.
The meaning of AI has brutally changed. It used to refer to ML, deep learning and all these things. Now, it is a synonym of generative AI.
- seanmcdirmid 1y agoThe original paper where they took wikipedia as a corpus and generated a character by character generator (the precursor to the token-based transformer stuff) came out in 2012 (I think?). It isn't unrelated to the AI that was hyped up then, it is and was a direct evolution of the same ML we were talking about today (Hinton was an author on that paper).
- jraph 1y agoYeah yeah, there was also SCIgen in 2005 (when 3 MIT students submitted a fake paper and got it accepted). I believe the difference is scale. It's not just Wikipedia, it's the whole web. Billions and billions are burned (and it seems highly unsustainable, where previously, stuff was made to work in public labs - possibly with things like Grid5000, but that's nothing compared to what's training and running LLMs today). One fifth to one third of HN's front page is AI. The thing is mainstream and omnipresent (before 2022, that stuff was mostly people working in research and tech companies, the informed general public might have heard of ML). Around 2015, we were there: https://xkcd.com/1425/ https://xkcd.com/1425/ (explain xkcd says September 24, 2014)