Conversation

Notices

1. Embed this notice
   Cube Drone (cube_drone@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 16:25:56 JST Cube Drone

   • Simon Willison

   @simon

   I also get very angry when people call burgers "food" when they're very clearly burgers. It's me, the strawman who doesn't understand when one category is very clearly a subset of another category.

   • GreenSkyOverMe (Monika) repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Cube Drone (cube_drone@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 16:25:55 JST Cube Drone

     in reply to

     • Simon Willison

     @simon
     
     I think the people who object to calling LLMs AI think that what people mean when they say "AI" is "AGI", THE MACHINE IS HUMAN INTELLIGENT, but actually AI has served as a kind of CS topic salad since the 60s.

     Using A* search to play chess? AI. Using Prolog to do logic programming? AI. Using constraint satisfaction algorithms to do logistics? AI. Using bayesian filtering to detect spam? AI. Using LLMs to predict text? That's right, it's AI.

     GreenSkyOverMe (Monika) repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Irenes (many) (irenes@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 16:32:18 JST Irenes (many)

     in reply to

     • Simon Willison

     @cube_drone @simon it's just, "AI" has been a marketing term, not a technical one, throughout that history. it has always led people to incorrect conclusions. more than once in the last 50 years, all funding for "AI" has dried up for a decade or so as a direct consequence of unrealistic expectations which were deliberately seeded, in part through the use of that term.

     GreenSkyOverMe (Monika) repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Irenes (many) (irenes@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 16:32:33 JST Irenes (many)

     in reply to

     • Simon Willison

     @cube_drone @simon even the proponents of these technologies should be wanting to call them by names which help people arrive at accurate mental models of what they do.

   • Embed this notice
     Cube Drone (cube_drone@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 16:33:28 JST Cube Drone

     in reply to

     • Simon Willison
     • Irenes (many)

     @irenes @simon

     the only thing the topics really have in common is that they're all lumped together in the same popular AI textbook that I know a few universities use.

     I suppose I wouldn't object if they were to add the subscript "A Variety of CS Topics That People Have Pretended Was AI Over The Years"

     GreenSkyOverMe (Monika) repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Irenes (many) (irenes@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 16:33:29 JST Irenes (many)

     in reply to

     • Simon Willison

     @cube_drone @simon on reflection, we don't really think these belong in the same course. like... some of them are statistics techniques and belong in a stats course. others are exotic programming languages.

   • Embed this notice
     Irenes (many) (irenes@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 16:33:29 JST Irenes (many)

     in reply to

     • Simon Willison

     @cube_drone @simon we do recognize room for debate on that point

     GreenSkyOverMe (Monika) repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Irenes (many) (irenes@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 16:33:30 JST Irenes (many)

     in reply to

     • Simon Willison

     @cube_drone @simon we cautiously support use of the term for that specific use-case.

   • Embed this notice
     Cube Drone (cube_drone@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 16:33:31 JST Cube Drone

     in reply to

     • Simon Willison
     • Irenes (many)

     @irenes @simon

     Yeah, but "CS 220: Graph search, constraint satisfaction problems, logic trees, bayesian filters, and neural nets" is just such a danged mouthful

   • Embed this notice
     Irenes (many) (irenes@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 07-Jan-2024 16:37:52 JST Irenes (many)

     in reply to

     • Simon Willison

     @cube_drone @simon it's a good book, we do like it, we learned a lot from it back in the day. that subscript sounds like a good idea :D