alt Hacker NewsAs soon as we started unironically calling LLMs "AI" we went down the hype path. That has plenty of downsides, like stressing out the entire world and attracting cryptocurrency bros, but also the major upside massive of funding/acceleration.
So far, all we have is more software running on computers. It's powerful, and it's amazing, but it's not magic.
Calling it "AI" was possibly a net-negative but we don't know yet.
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I think calling it AI has been very negative.
One of the lesser, but still underdiscussed ramifications is that I think it has limited the public's ability to comprehend the Yann LeCunn argument, that genuine AI is likely possible but that LLMs and transformers are a dead end and we need to explore different modalities
> Calling it "AI" was possibly a net-negative but we don't know yet.
I’m not sure it’s net negative or not. I’ve found that it’s reductive though. We have this really broad field of artificial intelligence reduced down to at worst a “slop machine” and at best a single tool.
Imagine being a CS professor that studied AI in the 90s and how you have to over explain you don’t mean LLM chatbots to a layman.
"It's powerful, and it's amazing, but it's not magic"
But since its creators and as of my knowledge everyone else totally did not see it coming, that you can now give a vague prompt full of spelling errors - and get returned a working program - I would say it is pretty close to magic (as in we don't really understand why it works so good).
I also don't see how you cannot call it AI. Especially since simple chess engines and alike were called AI long ago. So it is not general strong AI and has no consciousness and no mind and is pretty dumb too often - but the general concept - getting from a some vague text to a working program has some connection to intelligence to me.