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Comment by mathgenius | Hacker News Reader

> Deterministic if/then statements

This was the pinnacle of AI in the 80's. They called them "expert systems".

Principle problem being that expert systems required meticulous inputs from domain experts, codified by skilled engineers. People don't have time or startup capital for actual expertise...

And AI requires the same thing, we just call them data scientists and ML engineers. Using linear-ish algebra instead of decision trees doesn't change the the fact that you need time and capital to hire experts.

The big difference is that data scientists only work on the model architecture and data sources, whereas expert systems need people who have expertise in the subject matter itself. One of the biggest changes from 'old AI' to modern ML is that we no longer try to use human domain knowledge as much, instead getting the model itself to see the same pattern from data.

Isn't labeling still an important part of modern AI?

Yes, but there is a whole field of artificial intelligence called unsupervised learning that tries to identify labels without pre-defined labels. At the extreme end there are no externally imposed / defined labels and artificial labels are determined by empirical clusters or some orthogonal data pattern or algorithm. Unsupervised learning is much less effective and not as mature as supervised learning. In the case of LLMs the label is "next words" and it's inferred from a corpus of text.

I'd say labels (for supervised ML) are fundamentally different from rules (for expert systems), because

  - labels are easy to decide in many cases
  - rules require humans to analyze patterns in the problem space
  - labels only concern each data point individually
  - rules generalize over a class of data points

Which is very much unlike today’s training set inputs meticulously labeled by domain experts and curated by engineers?

Large language models are the thing the average joe in 2023 would call AI the most, and at the end of the day, if you go deep enough down the 500 billion parameters rabbit hole, it's just a "veryyyyyyy loooooong chain of if-then-else's" obtained after 10s of thousands of hours of computing time over basically all of the text generated by humans over 30 years of internet existence. I know it's not EXACTLY that, but it could be pretty much "recreated" using this metaphorical long chain.

This is kind of like saying every video could be recreated manually with painters.

That is, this is a ridiculous statement.

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