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There is a long history of bad naming conventions in the field of AI, including “artificial intelligence” itself imo. (What is “intelligence” here? It’s more li

There is a long history of bad naming conventions in the field of AI, including “artificial intelligence” itself imo. (What is “intelligence” here? It’s more like “automation” or “automated problem solving”.) What really happens is that we figure out something that works, sometimes inspired by some biological thing or neuroscience thing. Examples: neural network, attention, reasoning, hallucination, agents, experts in “mixture of experts”. And then we go to name it, and rather than reaching for some three letter acronym we sometimes borrow a more catchy term. I almost never means the original research was confused about what is going on. And in some cases we eventually strip away things from the original, like in neural nets which used to have a more biologically inspired activation function but we found out that ReLU works just as well because the important thing was the non linearity not the sigmoid.

esperent 2mo ago
Automated problem solving... of specifically the kind of problems we'd normally need human intelligence to solve (coding, translation, etc.). So "automated intelligence" would make sense to me.
- mdp2021 2mo ago
  > automated Automata in context are artificial. Humans are automata, human intelligence can be said an automation. The point making a difference is that that in context is artificial.
- janalsncm 2mo ago
  The issue is that “intelligence” is doing a lot of work, and people do not agree on how to define it. You can take a look at the definitions section here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence
  - svachalek 2mo ago
    That's an argument for not using the word for anything, not specific to this case.
pixl97 2mo ago
There are two things occurring here. One is the AI effect, once something mysterious becomes creatable it is not intelligent at all. The other isn't a problem of the field of AI, but the total fields of intelligence together. There is no formal agreed upon definition of what intelligence actually is across disciplines. It would be slightly hypocritical to point out the field of AI on this, when biology and psychology are just as guilty. The more we look, the more lumpy intelligence seems to get. We find some species have min/maxxed portions of intelligence that we have to question what general intelligence actually is. It also should give us pause that some less generally intelligent agent can cause massive problems by maxing out the right stats.
- janalsncm 2mo ago
  I’d go a step further and say your first point is a consequence of the second. Because “intelligence” is poorly defined, anyone can slap “AI” on their product, so it becomes a nebulous moving target.
  - pixl97 2mo ago
    Correct, we need new definitions and grading system to define what capabilities and algorithms has, while at the same time being on the lookout for new capabilities that fall outside of that system. That way we can judge systems that are just a repeat of previous systems with dubious claims attached to their capabilities. It can be somewhat difficult to do this properly and generally enough to ensure the tests aren't benchmaxxed.
parineum 2mo ago
> There is a long history of bad naming conventions in the field of AI, including “artificial intelligence” itself imo. It's all marketing. AI companies repurpose the terms of AI researchers to exaggerate their products. The public has an idea of what AI means and the companies exploit it. AI, in public perception, is what the Terminator movies are about. It's exactly like all the "hover boards" you can buy.
- janalsncm 2mo ago
  The specific terms I gave as examples weren’t created by marketers. They were created by researchers. It’s just that “attention” is a lot easier to say than “similarity-weighted representation mixing”.
  - parineum 2mo ago
    Created my researchers, co-opted by marketers. That's my point. The marketing is responsible for all of this confusion because they want to associate their product with something that it isn't.
storus 2mo ago
AI = cognitive automation?

esperent 2mo ago

Automated problem solving... of specifically the kind of problems we'd normally need human intelligence to solve (coding, translation, etc.). So "automated intelligence" would make sense to me.

mdp2021 2mo ago
> automated Automata in context are artificial. Humans are automata, human intelligence can be said an automation. The point making a difference is that that in context is artificial.
janalsncm 2mo ago
The issue is that “intelligence” is doing a lot of work, and people do not agree on how to define it. You can take a look at the definitions section here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence
- svachalek 2mo ago
  That's an argument for not using the word for anything, not specific to this case.

pixl97 2mo ago

There are two things occurring here. One is the AI effect, once something mysterious becomes creatable it is not intelligent at all. The other isn't a problem of the field of AI, but the total fields of intelligence together. There is no formal agreed upon definition of what intelligence actually is across disciplines. It would be slightly hypocritical to point out the field of AI on this, when biology and psychology are just as guilty. The more we look, the more lumpy intelligence seems to get. We find some species have min/maxxed portions of intelligence that we have to question what general intelligence actually is. It also should give us pause that some less generally intelligent agent can cause massive problems by maxing out the right stats.

janalsncm 2mo ago
I’d go a step further and say your first point is a consequence of the second. Because “intelligence” is poorly defined, anyone can slap “AI” on their product, so it becomes a nebulous moving target.
- pixl97 2mo ago
  Correct, we need new definitions and grading system to define what capabilities and algorithms has, while at the same time being on the lookout for new capabilities that fall outside of that system. That way we can judge systems that are just a repeat of previous systems with dubious claims attached to their capabilities. It can be somewhat difficult to do this properly and generally enough to ensure the tests aren't benchmaxxed.

parineum 2mo ago

> There is a long history of bad naming conventions in the field of AI, including “artificial intelligence” itself imo. It's all marketing. AI companies repurpose the terms of AI researchers to exaggerate their products. The public has an idea of what AI means and the companies exploit it. AI, in public perception, is what the Terminator movies are about. It's exactly like all the "hover boards" you can buy.

janalsncm 2mo ago
The specific terms I gave as examples weren’t created by marketers. They were created by researchers. It’s just that “attention” is a lot easier to say than “similarity-weighted representation mixing”.
- parineum 2mo ago
  Created my researchers, co-opted by marketers. That's my point. The marketing is responsible for all of this confusion because they want to associate their product with something that it isn't.

storus 2mo ago

AI = cognitive automation?