Some researchers proposed using, instead of the term "AI", the much more fitting "self-parametrising probabilistic model" or just advanced auto-complete - that would certainly take the hype-inducing marketing PR away.
It’s the result that consumers are interested in, not the mechanics of how it’s achieved. Software engineers are often extraordinarily bad at seeing the difference because they’re so interested in the implementation details.
A machine that magically replaces several hours of her manual work? As far as she’s concerned, it’s a specialized maid that doesn’t eat at her table and never gets sick.
I used to play with a Maytag machine machine motor. It had a single cylinder, ran on gasoline, and had a kick-start. It was from, IIRC, 1926.
The exhaust would have been plumbed to the outdoors, but other than that the expectation was that there would be a gas-fired engine running in the house while the washing was done.
https://www.nfpa.org/education-and-research/research/nfpa-re...
In the table from the Pdf link failure to clean was the only category that resulted in deaths.
In both cases, automation of what was previously human labor is very early and they’ve seen almost nothing yet.
I agree that in the year 2225 people are not going to consider basic LLMs artificial intelligences, just like we don’t consider a washing machine a maid replacement anymore.
They were not called maids nor personified.
I could even see the humour in "washer-bot" and "dryer-bot" if they did anything notably more complex. But we don't need/want appliances to become more complex than is necessary. We usually just call such things programmable.
I can accept calling our new, over-hyped, hallucinating overlords chatbots. But to be fair to the technology, it is we chatty humans doing all the hyping and hallucinating.
The market capitalisation for this sector is sickly feverish — all we have done is to have built a significantly better ELIZA [1]. Not a HIGGINS and certainly not AGI. If this results in the construction of new nuclear power facilities, maybe we can do the latter with significant improvement too. (I hope.)
My toaster and oven will never be bots to me. Although my current vehicle is better than earlier generations, it contains plenty of bad code and it spews telemetry. It should not be trusted with any important task.
Aside from the obviously humorous content the rest is useless allegory (I want a recipe not a story and need some code, not personal affection for software engineering) and no true scotsman (no true adherent of my native language would call it a robotic maid!)
As social creatures humans are pretty repetitive.
Washing is a useful word to describe what that machine does. Our current setup is like if washing machines were called "badness removers," and there was a widespread belief that we were only a few years out from a new model of washing machine being able to cure diseases.
Given that, I consider it quite possible that we'll reach a point where even more people will consider LLMs having reached or surpassed AGI, while others still only consider it "sufficiently advanced autocomplete".
I buy that there's disagreement on what intelligence means in the enthusiast space, but "thinks like people" is pretty clearly the general understanding of the word, and the one that tech companies are hoping to leverage.
Doubly so if the AGI writes software for itself to accomplish a task it decided to do.
Once someone has software like that, not a dog that is sicced on a task, but a bloodhound that seeks out novelty and accomplishment for its own personal curiosity or to test its capabilities, then you have a good chance of convincing me that AGI has been achieved.
Until then, we have fancy autocomplete.
I don't understand this mindset that because someone stuck the label "AI" on it, consumers are suddenly unable to think for themselves. AI as a marketing label has been used for dozens of years, yet only now is it taking off like crazy. The word hasn't change - what it's actually capable of doing has.
Yikes. I’m guessing you’ve never lost anyone to “alternative” medical treatments.
LLMS can appear intelligent until they, often, say things no intelligent being would. Then they appear profoundly stupid.
Washing machines wash reliably. LLMs do not.
A machine will be intelligent when instead of producing false output it responds with “I don’t know” and can be trusted.
AI (supervised).