zlacker

It certainly sees use as an ever shifting marketing term. That does not exclude it from being a useful technical term. Indeed if the misuse of a term by marketers was sufficient to rob a word of meaning then I doubt we'd have any means of communication left.

> It was considered thought provoking at the time because it implied that some day machines could think.

What constitutes "thinking"? That's approximately the same question as what qualifies as AGI. LLMs and RL seem to be the first time humanity has achieved anything that begins to resemble that but clearly both of those come up short ... at least so far.

Meanwhile I'm quite certain that a glorified PID loop (ie autopilot) does not qualify as machine learning (AI if you'd prefer). If someone wants to claim that it does then he's going to need to explain how his definition excludes mechanical clockwork.

>>fc417f+(OP)
What do you think an executing LLM is? It’s basically a glorified PID loop. It isn’t learning anything new. It isn’t thinking about your conversation while you go take a poo.

And I think the point is that the definition doesn’t exclude pure mechanical devices since that’s exactly what a computer is.

>>within+8j
To claim that an LLM is equivalent to a PID loop is utterly ridiculous. By that logic a 747 is "basically a glorified lawn mower".

> It isn’t thinking about your conversation while you go take a poo.

The commercial offerings for "reasoning" models can easily run for 10 to 15 minutes before spitting out an answer. As to whether or not what it's doing counts as "thinking" ...

> the definition doesn’t exclude pure mechanical devices since that’s exactly what a computer is.

By the same logic a songbird or even a human is also a mechanical device. What's your point?

I never said anything about excluding mechanical devices. I referred to "mechanical clockwork" meaning a mechanical pocket watch or similar. If the claim is that autopilot qualifies as AI then I want to know how that gets squared with a literal pocket watch not being AI.

>>fc417f+9N2
> The commercial offerings for "reasoning" models can easily run for 10 to 15 minutes before spitting out an answer. As to whether or not what it's doing counts as "thinking" ...

Tell me you don’t know how AI works without telling me you don’t know how AI works. After it sends you an output, the AI stops doing anything. Your conversation sits resident in ram for a bit, but there is no more processing happening.

It is waiting until you give it feedback... some might say it is a loop... a feedback loop ... that continues until the output has reached the desired state ... kinda sounds familiar ... like a PID loop where the human is the controller...

>To claim that an LLM is equivalent to a PID loop is utterly ridiculous.

Is it? It looks like one to me.

> By that logic a 747 is "basically a glorified lawn mower".

I don’t think a 747 can mow lawns, but I assume it has the horsepower to do it with some modifications.