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Comment by quantadev | Hacker News Reader

My favorite AI term to ridicule is the recent "Test Time Compute" nonsense, which has nothing whatsoever to do with testing. It literally just means "inference time".

And if I hear someone say "banger", "cooking", "insane", or "crazy", one more time I'm going to sledge hammer my computer. Can't someone, under 40 please pick up a book and read. Yesterday Sam Altman tried to coin "Skillsmaxxing" in a tweet. I threw my coffee cup at my laptop.

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Speaking of old-timers and "inference time" - there was a time when "inference" meant inferring parameters from data (i.e. training). And now it means "test-time". (or maybe the difference is if it's statistics community vs ML community).

e.g. Bishop's textbook says:

5.2.4 Inference and decision

We have broken the classification problem down into two separate stages, the inference stage in which we use training data to learn a model for p(Ck|x) and the subsequent decision stage in which we use these posterior probabilities to make op- timal class assignments.

I almost mentioned "inference" too, as an unfortunate word that stuck in a bad way, but it's tolerable since we can now just [falsely] claim that the AI is "inferring" what a prompt "means" in order to answer it.

And speaking of word definitions: "Old Timer" is anyone with a decade more experience than you.

It makes quite a lot of sense juxtaposed with "train time compute". The point being made is that a set budget can be split between paying for more training or more inference _at test time_ or rather _at the time of testing_ the model. The word "time" in "inference time" plays a slightly different role grammatically (noun, not part of an adverbial phrase), but comes out to mean the same thing.

Exactly right. The term "Test Time" had relevance in a certain context, and in a certain paper, but once people read the paper and saw the term they latched onto it, not realizing how totally non-descriptive and nonsensical it was when used outside that specific narrow context of genuinely "testing".

Get off my lawn is alive and well it seems

Speaking of worn out tropes, you just used the most common one of all. I'm sure it was a tough call for you to decide between that and a "boomer" quip.

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