AI is like a hammer

ironhydroxide@sh.itjust.works to Showerthoughts@lemmy.world – 122 points –

Any tool can be a hammer if you use it wrong enough.

A good hammer is designed to be a hammer and only used like a hammer.

If you have a fancy new hammer, everything looks like a nail.

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calling (mm)LLMs AI is just corpo bullshit. But hey, it's fancy, right?

I don't see the "is not actual AI" argument.

Since the 80 AI has just been algorithms and proposals for neural networks.

It never has need to have a "soul" or "be sentient" to be Artificial Intelligence.

Even a simple Tic Tac Toc opponent algorithm has been called AI without much complaining about it.

Also AI didn't got called AI by corporations. That naming for the technology dates from where it was being proposed as concepts in universities.

you not liking it doesn't make it any less ai. I don't remember that many people complaining when we called the code controlling video game characters ai.

Or called our mobile phones "cell phones", despite not being organic. Tsk.

Except cell phones or cellular phones refer to the structure a mobile network is built on: a mesh of cell towers.

pretty sure that they were and still are called Bots though, atleast in the context of first person shooter.

Software developer, here.

It's not actually AI. A large language model is essentially autocomplete on steroids. Very useful in some contexts, but it doesn't "learn" the way a neural network can. When you're feeding corrections into, say, ChatGPT, you're making small, temporary, cached adjustments to its data model, but you're not actually teaching it anything, because by its nature, it can't learn.

I'm not trying to diss LLMs, by the way. Like I said, they can be very useful in some contexts. I use Copilot to assist with coding, for example. Don't want to write a bunch of boilerplate code? Copilot is excellent for speeding that process up.

LLMs are part of AI, which is a fairly large research domain of math/info, including machine learning among other. God, even linear regression can be classified as AI : that term is reeeally large

I mean, I guess the way people use the term "AI" these days, sure, but we're really beating all specificity out of the term.

This is a domain research domain that contain statistic methods and knowledge modeling among other. That's not new, but the fact that this is marketed like that everywhere is new

AI is really not a specific term. You may refer as global AI, and I suspect that's what you refer to when you say AI?

it's always been this broad, and that's a good thing. if you want to talk about AGI then say AGI.

I know that they're "autocorrect on steroids" and what that means, I don't see how that makes it any less ai. I'm not saying that LLMs have that magic sauce that is needed to be considered truly "intelligent", I'm saying that ai doesn't need any magic sauce to be ai. the code controlling bats in Minecraft is called ai, and no one complained about that.

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They are neural networks which are some of the oldest AI tech we have.

You can hate them, but they are by definition AI.

uhm no, AI is relaying on neural networks (which are just weighted gates) but Neural Networks are not by definition AI.

Complaining that it's called AI is like complaining that smartphones are called smart. There's no stopping it, you just end up sounding like an old man yelling at the cloud. (Which isn't really a cloud, but we still call it that)

Nah, smartphones being actually "smarter" than feature phones as in you can do way more than just basic stuff like calling, messaging people, run a simple calculation, having a calendar etc.

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