Comment on Bernie Sanders spoke to AI agent Claude
u_tamtam@programming.dev 3 days agoWas 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.
TheBlackLounge@lemmy.zip 3 days ago
Yes, the point is LLMs are AI.
ML is AI too. But sales didn’t call it that because AI had the reputation of “just brute force with some heuristics”.
Now we forget about that so it’s hype to call things AI again. Once LLMs lose their magic the next big AI thing will again not be sold as AI.
u_tamtam@programming.dev 2 days ago
So, we’ve gone full circle. LLMs is a sub-category within the collection of ML techniques within the collection of AI techniques. Point is, AI is just a term here. A label, that indicates nothing about the abilities of LLMs to exert any form of intelligence or reasoning. In other words, the whole field of AI could (should?) have been named “computational statistics” or “mathematics applied to numerical datasets” (or whatever else you want, really…), and LLMs would absolutely belong to “CoStats”/“MAND” fields, for the same reason we say they relate to “AI” today, it’s just that nobody would be silly enough to call them “artificially intelligent”.
What sales are you even thinking about? What do even presume the market for ML algorithms to be? Nobody was shopping for support vector machines as a service, or spending tokens on linear regression, or using convolutional neural networks via API before the current LLM craze. What the field is experiencing right now is unheard of. Never before did the private sector jump gun on a niche technique and spent trillions to package, anthropomorphise and market it as if “AI has finally been figured out, and we happen not only to own it, but also to sell it to you”. This deceptive rhetoric would be a much tougher sell if some early computer scientists hadn’t happened to name their field “AI”.
TheBlackLounge@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
Ok. You said LLMs are not AI, I didn’t agree with the nuance. You’re making a big thing out of this.
ML was huge in B2B and still going steady. Not “SVMs as a service”, but you bet sales teams was letting everybody know that their solutions learn. You can find loads of conference material about “why ML is better than AI” from a decade ago. They pivoted to calling it AI again of course, even if the product didn’t change.