Hacker News Reader

Comment by pvdebbe | Hacker News Reader

Is "ML" some UK-ism? I sort of see the connection between machine learning and LLMs but it doesn't seem too obvious to me. And certainly it's not the common nomenclature.

View on HN

Way to get hung up on a tangent. Yes LLMs are ML models, they are trained with an unsupervised learning objective, then fine tuned with supervised learning and then reinforcement learning, which are all the three main branches of machine learning. It is trained on a training set, with optimizing a training loss, with a learning algorithm. It's as ML as it gets. Do you only want to call cat vs dog image classifiers ML? Or only SVMs?

AI is a superset of ML, though today most successful AI approaches are based on ML so the line has blurred in casual speech.

> I sort of see the connection between machine learning and LLMs but it doesn't seem too obvious to me.

Why isn't it obvious? Transformers are deep learning models, and deep learning is a subset of ML.

ML (machine learning) became a less fashionable term, so AI took over again (having previously fallen out of favour). The terms are essentially used interchangeably, with the idea of real AI now being referred to as AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) (not GAI or GenAI, as those now stand for Generative AI, which includes LLMs, diffusion models, etc.)

Machine Learning has always been in the vernacular.

I think Apple used to use this a lot in their presentations until 1-2 years ago to mean "AI".

All ml is AI, based on the use of the term AI for many decades. For many problems I think it’s more descriptive (learning the rules from data rather than being shown them) and not all classical AI is ML (path finding for example). LLMs are absolutely ML and AI as far as tradition goes and personally I think are one of the very few things that are AI as regular people might have thought it meant back when it was much more obscure (I was into it before it was cool dontchaknow, an AI hipster).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com