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It's Time to Investigate the AI Labs

629 points · 277 comments · ibobev

  1. jimmyjazz14 · · focus · HN ↗
    > We must move past vague discussions of “AI” and instead isolate the specific types of systems that are creating problems.

    This is absolutely correct and its surprising how rarely you see commenters in the media push to go into the specifics on this. AI is just matrix math and its what you connect that math to that matters, we should talk a little more about what we are willing to connect AI to and little less about how scary or capable the models appear.

    1. yodsanklai · · focus · HN ↗
      A point that Yann LeCun has been making for a while is that it's meaningless to regulate AI, but we want to regulate applications. For instance, you don't want autonomous vehicles to hit people, whether they use AI or not. In practice, most applications of AI are already regulated.
      1. thaumasiotes · · focus · HN ↗
        > For instance, you don't want autonomous vehicles to hit people, whether they use AI or not.

        What would it mean for a vehicle to be "autonomous", but to "not use AI"?

        1. ehe78qhe · · focus · HN ↗
          Trains are often highly automated without AI, for example. Aircraft are often automated for most of their flight without AI.
          1. throwawayffffas · · focus · HN ↗
            Autopilots perceive the environment, reason, plan and execute actions. Autopilots are AI.
            1. gizajob · · focus · HN ↗
              You can’t say to an autopilot “create an excel spreadsheet of the current vectors and conditions and upload it to google docs”.
              1. throwawayffffas · · focus · HN ↗
                You can't say that to an mri machine that detects and highlights tumors. You can't say it to jev either, nor googles spam filters. But all these are built in the same way as any LLM. The term AI is not restricted to chat based LLMs.
                1. gizajob · · focus · HN ↗
                  None of that applies to autopilots though and it’s disingenuous for anyone to say that an autopilot is an AI rather than an automated system designed for a very specific task.

                  An autopilot is cybernetic without being intelligent.

                  1. throwawayffffas · · focus · HN ↗
                    Read wongsarus comment above.
              2. Sharlin · · focus · HN ↗
                That is neither a sufficient nor necessary condition for something to be AI.
                1. gizajob · · focus · HN ↗
                  I was giving a framing around its complete lack of generality or intelligence. Rather than contemporary definitions of AI shifting, what is being shown is that previous definitions of AI were misapplied in the hope that the field might bootstrap itself into existence, which it’s done.

                  As I’ve said elsewhere - an autopilot is cybernetic, it responds to inputs and stimulus in data but it doesn’t possess anything we’d now regard as falling under intelligence because it’s a strictly coded deterministic system and designed for it’s specific environment. I couldn’t take the autopilot from a Boeing and put it into an Airbus and hope for any kind of useful result. I could take a human pilot trained on a Boeing and put them in an Airbus or a Cessna, and if push came to shove in an emergency, they could probably do a decent job of getting the thing pointed in the right direction and landed on the ground.

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