GeePawHill

It's too bad that LLM grifters sought to shine their reputation by calling it "AI".

It didn't shine their reputation.

It ruined the world's opinion of the fascinating & legitimate science -- and remarkably creative uses -- of actual artificial intelligence.

May 19 at 6:22pmWeb
Show threadacbMay 20
@GeePawHill @cstross the term “AI” has been marketing hot-air since the days of John McCarthy. Anything emerging from it that matured enough to obviously not yield the godlike machines of loving grace the term promised ended up being renamed to something more mundane so that the term could be reused for the next thing.
Show threadCharlie StrossMay 20
@acb @GeePawHill It used to be a running joke that "AI" means "anything we don't understand how to do with computers (yet)". Play chess? Machine vision? High level programming languages like COBOL or LISP (that didn't require intimate understanding of the underlying machine)? Simple chatbots like ELIZA? All heralded as AI before they were invented … then no longer AI.
Show threadPhosphenesMay 20

@cstross @acb @GeePawHill

It's like we could rewrite Frankenstein except the monster is under the custody of an Amway salesman.

Show threadAnthkMay 21

@cstross @acb @GeePawHill

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/ai-repository/ai/0.html

Topic: (/)

Show threadSpeakerToManagersMay 23
@cstross @acb @GeePawHill
It is true that the goalposts have been moved every few years, but to be fair they started out maybe a couple of meters apart.
Show threadWellsiteGeoMay 20

@acb @GeePawHill @cstross John McCarthy, the journalist kidnapped in the Levant War from about 1985 to 1990?

I didn't know he was into AI.

The interesting uses of the tech have long pivoted to calling it "machine learning", to get away from the slop.

Show threadacbMay 20
@WellsiteGeo @GeePawHill @cstross no, the one who invented Lisp in the late 1950s
Show threadPhilippa CowderoyMay 20
@acb @GeePawHill @cstross It is also, however, the term of art for an aspect of the art of video games, in which software often plays one or more roles that are more akin to characters than a best-it-can-play turn-based game player.
Show threadJonMay 20

@acb @GeePawHill @cstross I still say peak was "Rog-o-matic: a belligerent expert system".

https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~appel/papers/rogomatic.pdf

Show threadSigmaMay 20
@GeePawHill Hmm… I’m not sure that’s true. I mean, probably depends on what you define as "actual artificial intelligence" but traditionally natural language processing is part of the field of artificial intelligence. And LLMs essentially solved natural language processing. So they are arguably a huge leap in AI research. And related fields like image recognition, speech recognition, … also much big steps forward because of LLMs - or more specifically the transformer architecture.

And I personally also think that agentic AI using LLMs is super fascinating from a research perspective. But is that enough to cancel out all the bad LLMs are causing? Probably not.
Show threadElse, Someone2d ago

@sigmasternchen @GeePawHill

> And LLMs essentially solved natural language processing.
> So they are arguably a huge leap in AI research.
> ...big steps forward because of LLMs - ...transformer...

Naaaah call me a hater, but IMO all 3 statements are somewhat false.

Judging by the public picture, it feels like there has hardly been any progress in language modeling in the past 5-6 years (research halted by chatgpt), and only modest progress in the past two decades (incl. transformers).

Show threadElse, Someone2d ago
@sigmasternchen @GeePawHill unless openai/anthropic do something wildly different internally, modern LLMs still remain NeRFs of language modeling
Show threadElse, Someone2d ago
@sigmasternchen @GeePawHill for the impact of transformers specifically... I'd need to collect my receipts but I very much suspect it must be the same story as Alyosha Efros' "Victory of Data", i.e. that we're still in the mode of "running ANN over increasingly large datasets"
Show threadAnthkMay 21
@GeePawHill Prolog and Common Lisp programmers do
actual AI research since forever.