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Comment by bee_rider | Hacker News Reader

How can one article be expected to fix the problem of people sloppily using “AI” when they mean LLM or something like that?

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I use "ML" when talking about more traditional/domain specific approaches, since for whatever reason LLMs haven't hijacked that term in the same way. Seems to work well enough to avoid ambiguity.

But I'm not paid by the click, so different incentives.

Generative AI vs artificial neural network is my go-to (though ML is definitely shorter than ANN, lol).

Huge amounts of ml have nothing to do with ANNs and transformers are ANNs.

I stand corrected! What are your go-tos?

Not the person you're replying to, but there are tons of models that aren't neural networks. Triplebyte used to use random forests [1] to make a decision to pass or fail a candidate given a set of interview scores. There are a bunch of others, though, like naive Bayes [2] or k-nearest-neighbors [3]. These approaches tend to need a lot less of a training set and a lot less compute than neural networks, at the cost of being substantially less complex in their reasoning (but you don't always need complexity).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_forest

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naive_Bayes_classifier#Trainin...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-nearest_neighbors_algorithm

I like that.

AI for attempts at general intelligence. (Not just LLMs, which already have a name … “LLM”.)

ML for any iterative inductive design of heuristical or approximate relationships, from data.

AI would fall under ML, as the most ambitious/general problems. And likely best be treated as time (year) relative, i.e. a moving target, as the quality of general models to continue improve in breadth and depth.

Just do not use AI for anything except LLMs anymore. Same way that crypto scam has taken the word crypto.

crypto must now be named cryptography and AI must now be named ML to avoid giving the scammers and hypers good press.

Yep. I dislike it just as much as ceding crypto, but at the end of the day language changes, and clarity matters.

I think image and video generation that aren't based on LLMs can also use the term AI without causing confusion.

> AI must now be named ML

You just made a lot of 20th century AI researchers cry.

Ocaml users too. And Haskell.

Just don't use the term AI. It has no well defined meaning and is mostly intended as a marketing term

So, "don't do marketing" is your advice?

Correct, "an editorially independent online publication launched by the Simons Foundation in 2012 to enhance public understanding of science" shouldn't be doing marketing and contributing to the problem.

By doing its part and using the term correctly.

The real problem is not people using the term incorrectly, it's papers and marketing material using the term incorrectly.

Lets be real here, the people with the money bags don't care either.

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