Comment by _heimdall | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _heimdall | Hacker News Reader

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I can't speak to 70 years ago, but in my 30ish years I don't think I have raised the bar of what I'd consider AI. I never thought of text prediction or auto complete as AI for example, though out of context I could see many 70 years ago considering it AI.

I've always considered AI as a much more complex concept than simply appearing to be human in speech or text. Extremely complex prediction algorithms that appear on the surface to be creative wouldn't have met my bar either.

An LLM can predict how a human may write a white paper, for example. It will sound impressive, but the model and related algorithms seem to have absolutely no way of logically working through a problem or modelling the world to know if the ideas proposed in the paper might work. Its a really impressive sounding impersonator, but it is nothing like intelligence.

Have you been balking at video game AI this whole time? At chess engines when they were pure search? Or at chess engines now?

It's actually long been noted that the bar keeps rising, that when we figure something out it stops being called AI by a lot of people. I don't think that's individuals raising their bar necessarily though, but stuff becomes more mainstream or younger people being introduced to it.

The bar keeps raising because the term used for it promises human-level intelligence from a machine.

The same thing could be said about Virtual Reality where the bar raises each time the tech gets closer to making VR indistinguishable from reality.

I've never considered chess engines or video games to have AI, I guess in that sense you could say I balked at it.

> It's actually long been noted that the bar keeps rising, that when we figure something out it stops being called AI by a lot of people.

That's interesting, I've seen it the other way around. In the 90s I don't remember anything related to AI depicting something as simple as fancy text prediction or human-like speech. Going back further and Hal from Space Odyssey didn't seem like an AI that was just predictive text.

Its always possible my expectations were born from science fiction and not academic research, but that's a pretty big gap if academics considered AI to only require natural language processing and text prediction.

I also never considered chess engines or video games to have AI.

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