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Comment by inigyou | Hacker News Reader

Decision trees are one of the oldest forms of AI! There are even algorithms to automatically form decision trees, though you don't need ML to have AI.

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Indeed; As I recall, I mentioned GOFAI in the interview and got amused agreement.

Those algorithms were only called machine learning and it's the opposite. Before the marketers got ahold of it we reserved AI for the actually intelligent, sentient, full strength vision of intelligent systems. We now talk about general AIs and A[Super]Is.

That's not true. AI was widely used to refer to the decision systems and state machines that produced NPC behaviour in video games, and I'm sure many other things than just science fiction

Parsing used to be "AI". If you look at proceedings of old AI conferences you get this impression that anything interesting you might program a computer to do has passed through the field at some point.

Weren't they trying to parse human languages? I think that's still AI. And they didn't manage to, but what they tried ended up falling down to a more basic level of computer science.

That's true. The gaming community used the acronym that way. Good exception to the rule.

As your respondents point out there's also been the pattern of clever algorithms being classified as "AI" until they were understood. That differentiated those selling snake oil from the serious.

The term AGI was coined almost 30 years ago; is that when the marketers got ahold of it?

I would say IBM poisoned the well with the term AI. Watson was probably the biggest inflection point, but there was stuff earlier too.

I'm old enough to remember Deep Blue.

Obviously not but the community has shifted its language away from AI.

I did not claim we coined AGI in response to marketers.

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