See also: “posi-trac” (limited slip differential), “alleve” (2-(6-Methoxynaphthalen-2-yl)propanoic acid), Technicolor (usually to describe a 3-strip prismatic camera+film arrangement).
In general, consumers are marketing care about the benefits, and engineers care about the methods. Hence AI versus machine learning.
It’s nothing to get upset or disgusted about.
We don't know what "intelligence" means, but we know it isn't matrix multiplication, or brute force algorithms, otherwise gears could be called intelligent.
I understand the importance of selling. But selling shouldn't be confused with deceiving consumers. It's hard to accept our work is used to create general panic for the sake of money.
I believe the post you're replying to is just saying that matrix multiplications (as useful as they are), aren't going to become Skynet.
Your post is pointing out that various AI techniques are replacing loads of jobs for folks that still need to make ends meet, but likely don't have the skill sets to magically become a web developer overnight. As a result, AI is pretty dangerous like many disruptions throughout history. Only in the past, there was usually still plenty of need for labor.
The better we get at understanding how various cognitive functions that once seemed mysterious can be accomplished by matrix multiplications, the easier it becomes to eventually create Skynet.
The weird thing, I think, about these matrix multiplications, seems to be that they might be coming for the jobs of people who are generally in the same field that invented them (programmers) and also they might be coming for the jobs of reporters, creatives, and hot-take authors. People with bigger platforms than factory workers.
So with unlimited budget and time, can you write something complex enough to seem intelligent? I think so. Is what you wrote actually intelligent? No idea, and I think that’s more philosophy than I’m interested in.
General purpose solving functions will only get better with time and already solve more than we can write solvers for by hand. I don’t suspect there’s a limit here, assuming we can keep improving in ways to scale its compute and scale the function goals.
We know no such thing. The simplicity of the basic operations do not necessarily constrain the complexity of the whole system composed of those operations. We compose simple operations into complex units all the time.
Through a process called thinking, too.
I didn't, how do you know? And to be honest many LLM seems to show intelligence to some degree, at least when they solve complex and novel problems I ask them in a random language and using N library, that's feel pretty intelligent to me and if it's not than also humans are not.
Neuroscientist here: You're right!
At least in the neuro that we know today, most [0] of the communication between neurons is done in the Fourier domain. In that, it's the frequency of firing events that matters, not that a neuron fired at all.
[0] by no means is it exclusive. The brain is really complicated and there are edge cases all over the place.
Wikipedia is decent-ish on the topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_coding
Wulfram Gerstner's book has a nice discussion of the theory and limitations of different proposed coding schemes, which might interest the technical audience here. In particular, I think the parent poster alluded to the ideas presented in the last section here: https://neuronaldynamics.epfl.ch/online/Ch7.S6.html
Really and truly this "discussion" should have been put to rest a long time ago. Neurons encode information with the temporal precision needed to encode that information. Since most objects are somewhat permanent, the temporal precision can be very low, yielding effectively a rate code. For tasks for which the (relative) timing is critical, e.g. the encoding of auditory sequences, the temporal precision of the neural code is high, yielding effectively a temporal code. Some problems are neither here nor there, in which case the neuron will encode as much information as possible at a low rate / temporal resolution, and then encode diminishing amounts of information at successively higher temporal resolutions (the Fourier code alluded to by the parent poster). Higher temporal precision typically requires more control, larger circuits, and hence more energy expenditure.
Bill Bialek's group had a paper that quantified the amount of information present in a visual neuron of the fly at different temporal resolutions (/frequencies) as early as 2008: https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jo...
I ran into this over ten years ago in an experiment on temporary plasticity of sensory input and I didn't find a quick answer before I had to leave the topic (ok, it left me)
Thanks for sharing that book link, btw.
What makes you believe “intelligence” can’t emerge from lots of matrix multiplications? Unless you believe in some more mystical explanation, human intelligence is just electrochemical processes not that unlike computers.
The same applies to "brute force algorithms" and "otherwise gears could do it".
It's very likely that the current crop of LLMs do the wrong set of matrix multiplications. (If you ask me, it's a certainty.) But that doesn't change the fact that matrix multiplications can do anything.
By this measure "learning" could be inaccurate too. Does a human learn if they just commit something to memory? Programming is chalk full of people who know the code but haven't "learned" to program. Intrinsically we all know there's something deeper to learning than just memorizing or retaining to memory.
I think GP has a point. Marketing terms are to the benefit of the user to be relatable, whether accurate or not. We can and, to my knowledge, historically do retain the stories of what the correlation of a marketing term versus its actual technology is.
Woo boy, someone hasn't taken marketing 101 in uni.
Second, the general consensus of what "intelligence" means in the AI field is approximately the Legg&Hutter "Intelligence measures an agent’s ability to achieve goals in a wide range of environments." from https://arxiv.org/abs/0706.3639 .
It's worth noting that solely focuses on the capabilities of the system and intentionally completely disregards how it's built. Gears cannot be called intelligent iff it is impossible to build an system that acts intelligently solely from gears, and if it turns out that it is possible to build a gear arrangement that soundly demonstrates intelligent behavior, then those gears definitely could be called intelligent.
And it's also a clearly nonbinary definition - i.e., it's not whether something is or isn't intelligent, but a scale to measure how intelligent it is; and a observation that a particular system (or human!) demonstrates poor intelligence doesn't prevent us from discussing that it's more intelligent than something or someone who is even worse.
I think the disgust can be justified in some circumstances, when marketing is used to oversell or just outright deceive, in this case and others which involves taking advantage of common ignorance.
Most of the other names are just random nice sounding names that they made up.
It is more like if they called DayQuil “Tracheotomax,” because you know, it helps you breathe!
It's a good analogy from a technical standpoint, with the "minor" difference that in most situations pilots have a lot more time to react than the driver of a car. Which makes it very different from a consumer standpoint
Even if true, when you talk about consumer marketing, none of that matters.
I don't have name for it, but there's a whole class of bad-faith, deliberately misleading statements that exploit the difference between common and technical understandings (e.g. say something you know most people will inaccurately interpret as X, then fall back to the much narrower Y when challenged).
Apparently it also must be engaged above 28000 ft. Imagine if autonomous vehicles were so good that they were required to be used while going at speed on the highway.
a) Pilots have certification and training which includes proper use of whatever ‘autopilot’ that plane has.
b) Even so, the name still “over-promises” in an arena where doing so risks lives. So it should never have been called that even on a plane. Let alone on a car sold to consumers with little regulation.
In a similar manner, if some computer system in a car holds the steering wheel straight and the speed constant, it's working just as well as a plane's autopilot even if it crashes into a parked car at full speed.
"Introducing new Rectopurge, for all your constipation needs!"
It serves to make the middle class folk think they're making any sort of climate change oriented decision, when in fact they aren't.
It also superficially makes the company doing Greenwashing look more respectable.
I lament that people fall for buzzwords, hollow words that all mean the same thing to a fool - "Oh it's got <BUZZWORD>, that means GOOD! Just take my money!".
But I don't lament for long, and when I'm done lamenting, that's when I start selling.
“The characteristic feature of the loser is to bemoan, in general terms, mankind’s flaws, biases, contradictions, and irrationality—without exploiting them for fun and profit.”
- Nassim Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes
But none of those examples are misleading. "AI" is (or at least very often is).
The reality is that no matter what structure the software takes, or what outputs it achieves, it can't falsify a fundamentally unfalsifiable belief that machines cannot be like people in ways that could imply any sort of social recognition of that status.
Are we really going to pretend that marketing departments / companies aren't fully aware of and taking advantage of this misunderstanding? This just seems like common sense to me.
I (for intelligence) is the problem.
Intelligence covers everything from the behaviors of a single celled organism, to the meta organism of human society. There is no misunderstanding by marketing. Intelligence covers everything they are doing.
What we need is new words for behaviors that are much more focused to what the capabilities we want to achieve are.
> I’ve been told that a product was “driven by AI” only to find out it was driven by “if-then” statements.
At best, a system like that is an "expert system." It's not artificially-intelligent in any way.
This, BTW, is why many developed countries have strict labelling laws for food and trademarks. Otherwise, people will call something whatever they can get away with in order to sell it, even if it's not what they claim they're selling.
“Expert system” was adopted for that particular form of AI (which it was also considered when it was developed) because “expertise” is a combination of both intelligence and knowledge.
So, if “AI” is misleading for it, “expert system” is more misleading.
Chemical names aren't the best examples to use, as even within the scientific community, it's extremely rare to use full IUPAC systematic names for well-known organic molecules. The fancy name for caffeine would be 1,3,7-trimethylxanthine, not 1,3,7-trimethyl-3,7-Dihydro-1H-purine-2,6-dione.
Ever since I started running my own business, I found it funny that I needed to rephrase my services in order to attract the right client.
Marketing is the direct opposite of engineering, imo.
Sorry, which is the methods and which is the benefits? In your mind is "AI" a benefit?
I think you're demonstrating the issue by focusing on the name again: "AI" and "Machine Learning" are the same thing. Engineers care about the method, so ML is more appropriate; it describes what they are doing. Consumers care about outcomes, so "AI" is used because it's familiar.
So how is "AI" an outcome benefitting me as customer?
Q: "So, why did you get into Artificial Intelligence?"
A: "It made sense: I didn't have any real intelligence."
Consumer don’t know that and hence don’t care.
And that’s fine.
If you take away buzzwords and apply good product design, when ML-based stuff works it's invisible powering features like "autocomplete" or "voice control" or "internet search".