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Comment on Bernie Sanders spoke to AI agent Claude

Also, LLMs are not AI (in the sense that most people would deem meaningful): there’s no reasoning involved, just a convincing illusion of it, served by extensive knowledge compaction and next token prediction. That is not to say that LLMs are useless, or that the sort of all-powerful AI people fantasize about cannot exist (I really don’t know, no people do). That is to say that it’s not for now, and that before it happens, we will see another long AI winter before the emergence of something fundamentally more convincing than LLMs.

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luciferofastora@feddit.org ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
LLMs are highly impressive text generators, amazing facsimiles of human writing and wholly unsuited to anything involving semantic understanding and critical thought. You cannot generate facts, and it doesn’t understand how the patterns it analyses and reproduces relate to actual concepts or things, but they’re extremely “knowledgeable” about those patterns.

They’re a technological marvel, relentlessly abused by grifters posing as prophets to scam the gullible.

Unfortunately, the gullible are executives and representatives.

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TheBlackLounge@lemmy.zip ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Would you expect anything more than astroturf when I say artificial grass? It’s really not controversial to call it that. ikea.com/…/runnen-floor-decking-outdoor-artificia…

Same goes for anything else artificial. Why expect more than a plastic stand-in useful for some purposes when talking about artificial intelligence?

The word really isn’t the problem. Yeah maybe one day we’ll be able to make artificial grass that you can feed a goat and it’ll grow back, but IKEA really isn’t interested in that.

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- u_tamtam@programming.dev ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  I mean, have fun re-defining artificial intelligence to suit your narrative. Here’s what the scientific consensus stands at: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence
  
  It’s also no secret that the companies involved in the LLM craze (OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, …) diligently muddy the waters as a marketing trick to sell their product for more than what it is, that’s precisely what I’m calling out here: we can collectively do better/know better than that.
  
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  - TheBlackLounge@lemmy.zip ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    
    Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence,
    
    Yeah so like how astroturf is a bit of plastic with some properties usually associated with grass. I don’t see a problem with the term.
    
    It’s gonna be much easier to reemphasize the A in AI than coming up with a new term that sticks and doesn’t have other problems.
    
    This works and has happened multiple times before (eg chess computers). I mean, “machine learning” was a marketing term invented exactly to avoid the A in AI.
    
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    u_tamtam@programming.dev ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    Was there even a point you wanted to make? I’m not sure exactly where you are heading with all this.
    
    I mean, “machine learning” was a marketing term invented exactly to avoid the A in AI.
    
    No, it’s not. ML is a sub-category within the collection of AI techniques that describes those algorithms whose behaviour is the result of fitting a training data-set to a pre-defined model by minimising an agreed-upon error function. For the longest of times, we were just calling that “statistics”, and many ML techniques and algorithms predate computers by centuries. Your mean-squares curve fitting? …qualifies as ML. That is to say, ML is all AI, but not all AI is ML.
    
    LLMs are no different than function fitting with mean-squares. They are not magical, they are not black-boxes: they are fully described and completely predictable.
    
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