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Comment by driggs | Hacker News Reader

Quoth the article:

  The USGS predictive model provides the first estimate of total lithium present in Smackover Formation brines in southern Arkansas, using machine learning, which is a type of artificial intelligence.

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I was disappointed in that line. They could’ve mentioned it used a random forest, which is much more informative. “ML is a type of AI” isn’t even a cocktail party understanding of the topic.

For a layperson, this is an accessible and directionally correct definition.

For the HN audience, of course this is 'technically incorrect'.

The article was written for the (larger) general public.

I am also glad they didn't squeeze in a word salad of LLMs and quantum technology and instead stuck to 'it's just standard ML'.

The only informational dividable from the statement is "we used a computer to analyze data".

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