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Comment by tsimionescu | Hacker News Reader

One of the earliest things that defined what AI meant were algorithms like A*, and then rules engines like CLIPS. I would say LLMs are much closer to anything that we'd actually call intelligence, despite their limitations, than some of the things that defined* the term for decades.

* fixed a typo, used to be "defend"

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>than some of the things that defend the term for decades

There have been many attempts to pervert the term AI, which is a disservice to the technologies and the term itself.

Its the simple fact that the business people are relying on what AI invokes in the public mindshare to boost their status and visibility. Thats what bothers me about its misuse so much

Again, if you look at the early papers on AI, you'll see things that are even farther from human intelligence than the LLMs of today. There is no "perversion" of the term, it has always been a vague hypey concept. And it was introduced in this way by academia, not business.

While it could possibly be to point out so abruptly, you seem to be the walking talking definition of the AI Effect.

>The "AI effect" refers to the phenomenon where achievements in AI, once considered significant, are re-evaluated or redefined as commonplace once they become integrated into everyday technology, no longer seen as "true AI".

One of the earliest examples of "Artificial Intelligence" was a program that played tic-tac-toe. Much of the early research into AI was just playing more and more complex strategy games until they solved chess and then go.

So LLMs clearly fit inside the computer science definition of "Artificial Intelligence".

It's just that the general public have a significantly different definition "AI" that's strongly influenced by science fiction. And it's really problematic to call LLMs AI under that definition.

We had Markov Chains already. Fancy Markov Chains don't seem like a trillion dollar business or actual intelligence.

Completely agree. But if Markov chains are AI (and they always were categorized as such), then fancy Markov chains are still AI.

The results make the method interesting, not the other way around.

An LLM is no more a fancy Markov Chain than you are. The math is well documented, go have a read.

About everything can be modelled with large enough Markov Chain, but I'd say stateless autoregressive models like LLMs are a lot easier analyzed as Markov Chains than recurrent systems with very complex internal states like humans.

Markov chains in meatspace running on 20W of power do quite a good job of actual intelligence

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