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Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: July 2nd, 2023
  • eestileib@lemmy.blahaj.zonetoTechnology@beehaw.org•The Dead Economy Theory
    2·
    3 days ago

    I learned about simulated annealing, gradient descent, perceptron feedback methods in the 1990s, when those were still being called AI.

    I was the pm for multiple teams that used ML classifiers at a major Internet company to get serious work done, for a decade. Nobody called it AI.

    From where I’m sitting, the frenzied use of the term AI on a grand scale for fundraising coincided pretty much exactly with general purpose transformers applied to language models (and to a lesser extent diffusion models).

    I feel like calling all machine learning AI is confusing, because it confuses actually well-designed systems that do real stuff with an emperor-has-no-clothes bullshit mania.

    It feels like maybe you’re trying to extend the AI halo to non-llm, non-gpt algorithms because you think it will improve the esteem in which the latter type of system is held.

    I think the AI branding is a stain, I think there is going to be justified and ferocious backlash, and I would want to keep a perceptual moat between “AI” and whatever I’m building, even if at some point I do want to write code for an npu.