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Comment by Swizec | Hacker News Reader

> We have been through several "AI Winters" before

Yeah, remember when we spent 15 years (~2000 to ~2015) calling it “machine learning” because AI was a bad word?

We use so much AI in production every day but nobody notices because as soon as a technology becomes useful, we stop calling it AI. Then it’s suddenly “just face recognition” or “just product recommendations” or “just [plane] autopilot” or “just adaptive cruise control” etc

You know a technology isn’t practical yet because it’s still being called AI.

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I don’t think there’s any “AI” in aircraft autopilots.

AI encompasses a wide range of algorithms and techniques; not just LLMs or neural nets. Also, it is worth pointing out that the definition of AI has changed drastically over the last few years and narrowed pretty significantly. If you’re viewing the definition from the 80–90’s, most of what we call "automation" today would have been considered AI.

Autopilots were a thing before computers were a thing, you can implement one using mechanics and control theory. So no, traditional autopilots are not AI under any reasonable definition, otherwise every single machine we build would be considered AI as almost all machines has some form of control systems in them, for example is your microwave clock an AI?

So I'd argue any algorithm that comes from control theory is not AI, those are just basic old dumb machines. You can't make planes without control theory, humans can't keep a plane steady without it, so Wrights Brothers adding this to their plane is why they succeeded making a flying machine.

So if autopilots are AI then the Wrights Brothers developed an AI to control their plane. I don't think anyone sees that as AI, not even at the time they did the first flight.

Uh, the bellman equation was first used for control theory and is the foundation of modern reinforcement learning... so wouldn't that imply LLMs "come from" control theory?

Is the training algorithm the AI or is the model that you get at the end the AI?

Ah yes the mythical strawman definition of AI that you can never seem to pin down, was never rigorous, and never enjoyed wide expert acceptance. It's on par with "well many people used to say, or at least so I've been told, that ...".

That’s the point: AI is a marketing term and always has been. The underlying tech changes with every hype wave.

One of the first humanoid robots was an 18th century clockwork mechanism inside a porcelain doll that autonomously wrote out “Cogito Ergo Sum” in cursive with a pen. It was considered thought provoking at the time because it implied that some day machines could think.

BBC video posted to reddit 10 years ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/history/s/d6xTeqfKCv

It certainly sees use as an ever shifting marketing term. That does not exclude it from being a useful technical term. Indeed if the misuse of a term by marketers was sufficient to rob a word of meaning then I doubt we'd have any means of communication left.

> It was considered thought provoking at the time because it implied that some day machines could think.

What constitutes "thinking"? That's approximately the same question as what qualifies as AGI. LLMs and RL seem to be the first time humanity has achieved anything that begins to resemble that but clearly both of those come up short ... at least so far.

Meanwhile I'm quite certain that a glorified PID loop (ie autopilot) does not qualify as machine learning (AI if you'd prefer). If someone wants to claim that it does then he's going to need to explain how his definition excludes mechanical clockwork.

What do you think an executing LLM is? It’s basically a glorified PID loop. It isn’t learning anything new. It isn’t thinking about your conversation while you go take a poo.

And I think the point is that the definition doesn’t exclude pure mechanical devices since that’s exactly what a computer is.

To claim that an LLM is equivalent to a PID loop is utterly ridiculous. By that logic a 747 is "basically a glorified lawn mower".

> It isn’t thinking about your conversation while you go take a poo.

The commercial offerings for "reasoning" models can easily run for 10 to 15 minutes before spitting out an answer. As to whether or not what it's doing counts as "thinking" ...

> the definition doesn’t exclude pure mechanical devices since that’s exactly what a computer is.

By the same logic a songbird or even a human is also a mechanical device. What's your point?

I never said anything about excluding mechanical devices. I referred to "mechanical clockwork" meaning a mechanical pocket watch or similar. If the claim is that autopilot qualifies as AI then I want to know how that gets squared with a literal pocket watch not being AI.

> The commercial offerings for "reasoning" models can easily run for 10 to 15 minutes before spitting out an answer. As to whether or not what it's doing counts as "thinking" ...

Tell me you don’t know how AI works without telling me you don’t know how AI works. After it sends you an output, the AI stops doing anything. Your conversation sits resident in ram for a bit, but there is no more processing happening.

It is waiting until you give it feedback... some might say it is a loop... a feedback loop ... that continues until the output has reached the desired state ... kinda sounds familiar ... like a PID loop where the human is the controller...

>To claim that an LLM is equivalent to a PID loop is utterly ridiculous.

Is it? It looks like one to me.

> By that logic a 747 is "basically a glorified lawn mower".

I don’t think a 747 can mow lawns, but I assume it has the horsepower to do it with some modifications.

AI is multiple things.

AI is a marketing term for various kinds of machine learning applications.

AI is an academic field within computer science.

AI is the computer-controlled enemies you face in (especially, but not solely, offline) games.

This has been the case for decades now—especially the latter two.

Trying to claim that AI either "has always been" one particular thing, or "has now become" one particular thing, is always going to run into trouble because of this multiplicity. The one thing that AI "has always been" is multiple things.

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