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Comment by ulonglongman | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand. I learnt about optimizers, and genetic algorithms in my AI courses. There are lots of different things we call AI, from classical AI (algorithms for discrete and continuous search, planning, sat, Bayesian stuff, decision trees, etc.) to more contemporary deep learning, transformers, genAI etc. AI is a very very broad category of topics.

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Optimization can be a tool used in the creation of AI. I'm taking issue with people who say their optimizer is an AI. We don't need to personify every technology that can be used to automate complex tasks. All that does is further dilute an already overloaded term.

It's not "an AI", it's AI as in artificial intelligence, the study of making machines do things that humans do.

A fairly simple set of if statements is AI (an "expert system" specifically).

AI is _not_ just talking movie robots.

You can remove the word 'an' if you're attributing some weird meaning to it, the point is still valid. Genetic algorithms and optimizers are usually in there to make AI algorithms, they aren't themselves AI algorithms.

And you have to be doing something rather specific with a pile of if statements for it to count as an expert system.

I agree that the article is wrong in using the wording “the AI”. However, firstly the original publication [0] doesn’t mention AI at all, only deep-learning models, and neither do any of the quotes in the article. Secondly, it is customary to categorize the technology resulting from AI research as AI — just not as “an AI”. The former does not imply any personification. You can have algorithms that exhibit intelligence without them constituting any kind of personal identity.

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-54178-1

Who said it was 'an AI'? Do you understand what intelligence means? And what artificial means?

In game dev we've called a bunch of weighted If statements AI since the 80s. Sometimes they're not even weighted.

I think that's a bit different. The term is overloaded. There's "the machine is thinking" AI and then there's "this fairly primitive code controls an agent" AI. The former describes the technique while the latter describes the use case.

Clippy was an AI but he wasn't an AI.

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