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Comment by binarymax | Hacker News Reader

I remember the good old days when we used to use terms like statistics, heuristics, data science, and machine learning. Now everything is just "AI".

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{In Thick Yorkshire Accent} - 'Luxury! In my day, we used to call it "maths"! Two-hundred and fifty of us huddled together in a bomb shelter in Bracknell[1] poring over oceanographic maps by gaslight and trying not to sneeze into the sergeant's tea.'

  [1]:https://rafmetman.wordpress.com/meteorology/ww2-meteorology/

Ohhhh 'maths' - we used to DREAM of huddlin' in a shelter doing 'maths'! We barely had a distinction between 'one', 'two' and 'lots'.

etc etc

You were lucky to have ones and twos! The best we could manage was to rifle through tea leaves at the bottom of a cracked cup to divine the forecast for the next six hours in Thebes. And when we would read the leaves wrong, our dad would thrash us in two with bronze bread knife and dance about our graves singing Ode to Dionysus.

It's all just marketing. The companies running these advanced chatbots want to tap into tech mystique to give the impression that LLMs are on the cusp of being the intelligent agents we see in movies and books, because just admitting they're just implementing statistical patterns isn't sexy. They need investors, and investors are throwing money at anything called AI

Eh, "AI" has always (at least a decade+) been thrown around as a catch all term for things that should have been called ML or DS or statistics (though I find that term a bit reductive, it's like saying it's all just math).

At least these days the LLMs have gotten us a little closer to the original promise of AI.

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