this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2024
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"The term "AI" has been in use since 1956 for a wide range of computer science techniques. LLMs most certainly qualify as AI. You may be thinking of the science-fiction kind of "artificial people" AI, which is a subset of AI called Artificial General Intelligence when researchers want to be specific about that kind.
I'm thinking of something that actually processes some form of "thought", in the abstract sense. Even video game AI does that to an extend (granted, there's various techniques depending on the game type), so the term here is actually somewhat appropriate. LLMs don't do that at all though, they're just word guessing based on the texts they were trained upon (while we stick with text gen here at least) and that just so happens to sound like somewhat coherent sentences that can fool someone into thinking that their computer actually talked to them. There never was any sort of thought behind that though. It functions closer to how your mobile keyboard predicts the next word you want to use in its suggestions at the top. It just tries to complete the text it was already presented with. A lot of the illusion here comes actually from the tools used to display this information in a chat like manner, but that's just frontend foolery for the user.
I think it's more that you're overestimating video game AI, here. If your definition of "abstract thought" doesn't include what LLMs do then it definitely shouldn't include video game AI. It's even more illusory.
Yeah but you think a lot of weird things, so that does not surprise me in the slightest.
I would agree with the other guy. A video game AI can be as simple as some if-then decision logic, and i would count that as "AI". An LLM also makes "decisions" on what to do/say, just via a different mechanism (predictive modeling) . I would still bucket that as AI. It you count one you should count the other. Neither are truly "thinking" in the sense of an AGI.
I wasn't talking about something like an AI in Pong. But if your definition of "AI" is conditionals such as if statements, then absolutely everything is an AI, which honestly just further muddles the meaning of that term.