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Large Language Models Are Drunk at the Wheel (matt.si)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (7 children)

As an Artificial Intelligence proponent, I want to see the field succeed and go on to do great things. That is precisely why the current exaggerated publicity and investment around "AI" concerns me. I use quotation marks there because what is often referred to as AI today is not whatsoever what the term once described. The recent surge of interest in AI owing to Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT has put this vaguely defined term at the forefront of dialogue on technology. But LLMs are not meaningfully intelligent (we will get into that), yet it has become common parlance to refer to these chatbots as AI1 2.

Pretty sure that this has been happening for as long as AI and similar things like machine learning have been a thing. Overstated promises, people consistently presenting research or products or investments using the sexiest terms they can manage. New term comes out (e.g. "Artificial General Intelligence") to differentiate more-sophisticated AI, and they get latched onto and dragged down into the muck too.

I think that the fix is to come up with terms attached to concrete technical capabilities, where there's no fuzziness to exploit by people trying to promote their not-as-sophisticated-as-they'd-like-them-to-appear things.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 8 months ago (3 children)

AGI is not a new term. It's been in use since the 90s and the concept has been around for much longer.

I agree that we should use more specific terms whenever possible. I call LLMs "LLMs" or "language models". Not that it's inaccurate to call them AI, but it's not useful either. AI is an extraordinarily broad term. Pac-Man had AI. And there's a large portion of the population who thinks it means something much, much more lofty and specific than it ever really has. At this point, the term should probably be abandoned. Any attempt to reclaim it is bound to fail.

I see this as yet another example of a technical term being bastardized by mainstream press who do not understand the field. It happens all the time with tech. I remember when "virus" actually meant something; the industry eventually abandoned the term because it was bastardized to the point of uselessness; now we just say "malware" and if we need to refer to viruses specifically...well we just don't for the most part.

This is a linguistic problem more than a technical problem.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago (1 children)

AGI is not a new term. It’s been in use since the 90s and the concept has been around for much longer.

It's not new today, but it post-dates "AI" and hit the same problem then.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

And before AI we had "Thinking Machines".

Perhaps we should go back to that. OpenAI et al can brand themselves "Think-Tech"

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