[HN Gopher] 'AI-powered' is tech's meaningless equivalent of 'al...
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'AI-powered' is tech's meaningless equivalent of 'all natural'
(2017)
Author : nvr219
Score : 19 points
Date : 2023-03-21 19:05 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (techcrunch.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (techcrunch.com)
| joseph8th wrote:
| It's a marketing term rendered meaningless by the marketers. Even
| those who know better keep calling LLMs "AI"
| ralusek wrote:
| We run all of our bits through "Hot Dog/Not Hot Dog" AI. It
| turned out to be an identity function, because it thinks the 1s
| are hot dogs and the 0s aren't. All of our integration tests are
| still passing...things are just a lot slower around here, and
| multiple people swear that the servers now smell like a baseball
| game.
| dexwiz wrote:
| This article makes sense in 2017, which most AI was just a
| statistical model. But 6 years later we are living in a much
| different world.
| pornel wrote:
| We may seamlessly transition from "this isn't a real A.I, only
| a bit of simple fuzzy logic" to "this is needlessly using a
| billion-weights model to simulate a bit of simple fuzzy logic".
| nvr219 wrote:
| It's still that just with faster computers.
| version_five wrote:
| It's been funny watching the "it's just a statistical model"
| crowd who were always quick to chime in (when that's not what
| 2016 deep learning was) now doing a 180 degree turn to "how do
| we know the brain isn't just a llm" or whatever silly confused
| by a mirror opinion they have now, when despite obvious
| advances in scale, theres no fundamental difference in the
| models. The only takeaway for me is that people love to
| passionately misunderstand anything that gets called AI.
| cmarschner wrote:
| For my part (phd in computational linguistics, first
| classical ,,AI", then machine learning, then deep learning
| since 2014, not working on NLP for the past 5 years) - I
| _thought_ I would know a thing or two about what's possible,
| and I am still in absolute awe what these models spit out.
|
| People might not be aware that just a few years ago
| formulating a grammatically correct sentence was a hard
| problem, let alone all the other things that once had names
| (anaphora resolution, semantics, pragmatics etc. etc.) and
| conference tracks and workshops dedicated to them. All that
| swept away by data and scalable transformer models. It is
| such a f*cking miracle.
|
| I would be curious what the state of understanding these
| models is. Haven't done any literature review on this but
| just reverse engineering whatever structure the model has
| come about could be enlightning (perhaps).
| nwah1 wrote:
| Not that much different. 9/10 uses of the term are still
| complete bullshit. The other 1/10 are still mostly bullshit as
| well.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| If you don't understand the potential of a technology it's
| certainly easier to dismiss it as bullshit than to learn.
|
| Crypto/"Web3" was stupid because of the oracle problem: Your
| magical NFT can't actually enforce its license without
| leveraging the slightly centralized concept of the federal
| court system.
|
| AI as in LLMs and Latent Diffusion do not have that kind of
| obvious limitation to generating any actual value. There will
| clearly be _specific_ limitations, but even within the
| confines of what has been _built_ so far there is an insane
| amount of value and potential.
|
| Crypto detractors who are lumping AI into the "bullshit"
| bucket really come across as a broken clock that was right
| once, and I say that as someone who has been a crypto
| detractor for a long time.
| nwah1 wrote:
| I didn't say machine learning is useless.
|
| I said most products claiming to have AI secret sauce have
| no secret sauce.
|
| Big difference.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Eh, I think a lot of the reasons to be skeptical of crypto
| still apply to "AI".
|
| AI may have actual real world uses (unlike crypto), but
| it's also the subject of a huge hype campaign (like crypto)
| largely consisting of the same people hyping crypto, with
| similar strategies of emphasizing FOMO (like crypto) and
| making wild and fantastical claims about unheard of growth
| and about the end of the existing world order through
| technology in a way that borders on eachatology (like
| crypto).
| 360macky wrote:
| Interesting. I see it. This will be the counterpart of "Human-
| designed" or "Made by humans".
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