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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

You're technically right that AI is a superset. But, at least in a computational context, "AI" is hardly ever being used to refer to cognitive science and other AI subsets that are not directly related to ML. So ML is usually the more precise terminology. But I've pretty much given up on that one.

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Large language models are definitely AI.

> large language models are definitely AI

The term “AI” is becoming over inclusive to the point of meaninglessness. Cupertino is smart enough to pick up on that. “Statistical linguistics” is the best general term for LLMs I’ve come across.

LLMs are the apex of NLP research to date, and NLP is obviously a branch of AI. You may have some sophisticated notion of AI, AGI, human-level or human-like AI or whatever, but NLP has been considered AI for generations now.

> NLP has been considered AI for generations now

I'm arguing the term AI has become "inclusive to the point of meaninglessness." That doesn't mean it was always meaningless.

IDK, I feel like people are making it so narrow that it basically cannot exist.

The best example I've seen to contest that LLM's are "AI" is to make it print the total number of line's it's response will be, essentially add

"First answer with the total number of lines your total message will be, including the line with this number"

For example, GPT4 said "12" for this prompt: "First answer with the total number of lines your total message will be, including the line with this number

Make a program in Cpp that sums all prime numbers from 1 to 100"

LLM's cannot "think", they can only make sequential predictions based on their previous answers - so they cannot formulate a response and then modify that response on-the-fly

That’s more like an inherent limitation of autoregressive prediction than that of LLM. Maybe LLMs can be trained or finetuned in other ways that allows it to think before answering.

Thinking before answer would just be like writing its text output into a hidden buffer that only it is including in the context of the conversation. So its like its always also having a private conversation with its self. I can't prove this isn't more or less what I am.

GPT very much can, in a limited way. It responds to feedback.

It's not exactly a huge leap of imagination to suggest that it won't be long before it can create an internal feedback loop by comparing its own abstractions with its memories and live experiences of external feedback.

Try asking an engineer how long a task will take

Expert systems used to be considered "AI". Certainly some optimization algorithms like genetic algorithms were "AI". Pretty much any system that makes a decision was considered "AI" at some point.

The problem is the general use of the term changes in a way to often make the meaning unclear to the point of being near useless. Outside of marketing, of course.

AI is a pretty well defined field I feel like. It combines symbolists, connectionists, evolutionaries, bayesians, and analogizers. Just because those not in the field misuse the term does not make it less useful.

It is useful when you use it like those knowledgeable of the field. Marketing departments are not using it that way.

I still consider expert systems to be AI. Is there some reason why I should stop?

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