Built on unearned hype.
Like blockchain there is some niche usefulness to the technology, but also like blockchain it’s being applied to a myriad of things it is not useful for.
Drugs(silk road), scams&malware(pay 5 Bitcoin to unlock PC), money laundering&pump dump (unregulated market), and Nvidia hype (should have bought amd at 5$)
“we ran out of useful things to do with computing at the consumer level and now we are inventing problems” - “just bill’em” gates, 1984.
Also it’s not fucking ai is it. I actually find the blatant misuse of this term incredibly annoying to be honest.
It is, machine learning, neural networks and all the other parts in LLMs and generative algorithms like midjourney etc are all fields of artificial intelligence. The AI Effect just means the goalposts for what people think of as “proper” AI are constantly moving.
This might be the case ‘in the industry’, but I would argue quite strongly that it represents a gross misuse of the word ‘intelligence’. Like a fun new definition of the word, that doesn’t mean anything close to what it usually means.
The term AI was coined in 1956 at a computer science conference and was used to refer to a broad range of topics that certainly would include machine learning and neural networks as used in large language models.
I don’t get the “it’s not really AI” point that keeps being brought up in discussions like this. Are you thinking of AGI, perhaps? That’s the sci-fi “artificial person” variety, which LLMs aren’t able to manage. But that’s just a subset of AI.
‘Intelligence’ requires understanding. The machine has no understanding, because it is not conscious. You can fiddle around with the definitions of these words until you’re blue in the face but this will be true in rain, sun, hail, puffed wheat, etc.
Arguably you are the one misusing the term. Even painfully mundane tasks like the A* pathfinding algorithm fall under the umbrella of artificial intelligence. It’s a big, big (like, stupidly big) field.
You are right that it’s not AGI, but very few people (outside of marketing) claim that it is.
I’m going to argue quite strongly that my general, all purpose understanding of the words ‘artificial’ and ‘intelligence’ constitute the ‘correct’ definition for the term, and I don’t really care how ‘ai’ is defined ‘in industry’. It’s not intelligent, therefore it’s not artificial intelligence. You can redefine ‘intelligent’ in this context to mean whatever you like, but unless the general definition of the word changes then it doesn’t mean jack about shit.
