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LoganDarktoday at 2:15 AM4 repliesview on HN

I never heard people calling machine learning "AI" until large language models made it trivial to market it as such. Like, I remember back when Netflix, for instance, was going around advertising how machine learning (not AI) powers their recommendations.


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inopinatustoday at 3:20 AM

> I never heard…

You should listen better. The University of Edinburgh had an entire Department of Artificial Intelligence when I was an undergrad there in the 1990s, and one of the things it researched was machine learning.

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fn-motetoday at 2:20 AM

Ed: I disagree. My recollection is that machine learning was routinely sold as “AI” even when it obviously wasn’t. (IBM’s Watson was good at Jeopardy but not real medical applications.)

This isn’t exactly the same, but nothing in the book Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence would be considered AI today.

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bananaflagtoday at 6:39 AM

In 2011, I took an AI course at my university and it was all perceptrons and neural networks.

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woodsontoday at 4:33 AM

For a long time, AI was a bad word that stood for unfulfilled promise. See AI Winter. Hence, researchers strictly avoided the term while still working on learning algorithms, the same that power LLM training.