this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2024
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Showerthoughts

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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.

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Any tool can be a hammer if you use it wrong enough.

A good hammer is designed to be a hammer and only used like a hammer.

If you have a fancy new hammer, everything looks like a nail.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (4 children)

calling (mm)LLMs AI is just corpo bullshit. But hey, it's fancy, right?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

I don't see the "is not actual AI" argument.

Since the 80 AI has just been algorithms and proposals for neural networks.

It never has need to have a "soul" or "be sentient" to be Artificial Intelligence.

Even a simple Tic Tac Toc opponent algorithm has been called AI without much complaining about it.

Also AI didn't got called AI by corporations. That naming for the technology dates from where it was being proposed as concepts in universities.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 months ago (4 children)

you not liking it doesn't make it any less ai. I don't remember that many people complaining when we called the code controlling video game characters ai.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Or called our mobile phones "cell phones", despite not being organic. Tsk.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Except cell phones or cellular phones refer to the structure a mobile network is built on: a mesh of cell towers.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

pretty sure that they were and still are called Bots though, atleast in the context of first person shooter.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

look at the NBT tags for bats for example. it means artificial intelligence.

https://www.digminecraft.com/data_tags/bat.php

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

next thing you gonna say that boids are AI too...

just because Mojang decided to name that flag noAI doesn't mean it uses AI to govern its behavior.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Descriptivism advocates when AI smhingmyheads

[–] [email protected] -2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (3 children)

Software developer, here.

It's not actually AI. A large language model is essentially autocomplete on steroids. Very useful in some contexts, but it doesn't "learn" the way a neural network can. When you're feeding corrections into, say, ChatGPT, you're making small, temporary, cached adjustments to its data model, but you're not actually teaching it anything, because by its nature, it can't learn.

I'm not trying to diss LLMs, by the way. Like I said, they can be very useful in some contexts. I use Copilot to assist with coding, for example. Don't want to write a bunch of boilerplate code? Copilot is excellent for speeding that process up.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago (1 children)

LLMs are part of AI, which is a fairly large research domain of math/info, including machine learning among other. God, even linear regression can be classified as AI : that term is reeeally large

[–] [email protected] -1 points 3 months ago (2 children)

I mean, I guess the way people use the term "AI" these days, sure, but we're really beating all specificity out of the term.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

This is a domain research domain that contain statistic methods and knowledge modeling among other. That's not new, but the fact that this is marketed like that everywhere is new

AI is really not a specific term. You may refer as global AI, and I suspect that's what you refer to when you say AI?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

it's always been this broad, and that's a good thing. if you want to talk about AGI then say AGI.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

I know that they're "autocorrect on steroids" and what that means, I don't see how that makes it any less ai. I'm not saying that LLMs have that magic sauce that is needed to be considered truly "intelligent", I'm saying that ai doesn't need any magic sauce to be ai. the code controlling bats in Minecraft is called ai, and no one complained about that.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago

Very useful in some contexts, but it doesn’t “learn” the way a neural network can. When you’re feeding corrections into, say, ChatGPT, you’re making small, temporary, cached adjustments to its data model, but you’re not actually teaching it anything, because by its nature, it can’t learn.

But that's true of all (most ?) neural networks ? Are you saying Neural Networks are not AI and that they can't learn ?

NNs don't retrain while they are being used, they are trained once then they cannot learn new behaviour or correct existing behaviour. If you want to make them better you need to run them a bunch of times, collect and annotate good/bad runs, then re-train them from scratch (or fine-tune them) with this new data. Just like LLMs because LLMs are neural networks.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

They are neural networks which are some of the oldest AI tech we have.

You can hate them, but they are by definition AI.

[–] [email protected] -4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

uhm no, AI is relaying on neural networks (which are just weighted gates) but Neural Networks are not by definition AI.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I'm sorry but they absolutely are.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 3 months ago

sorry, but I disagree.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Complaining that it's called AI is like complaining that smartphones are called smart. There's no stopping it, you just end up sounding like an old man yelling at the cloud. (Which isn't really a cloud, but we still call it that)

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago

Nah, smartphones being actually "smarter" than feature phones as in you can do way more than just basic stuff like calling, messaging people, run a simple calculation, having a calendar etc.