if we are what marketers say we are, we're doomed.

I myself do not think they are the arbiters of reality, but I won't stop you if you do. It is certain that people constantly market 'smart' featured things as AI, when not even LLM features actual intelligence.

I have to say instead that I don't really GAF what they make of things, though, or what gullible people decide they must mean.

I think one can be two different things at the same time -- entirely skeptical of the current crop of businesses and products that are hyping the 'intelligence' of what they are offering for sale, and simultaneously cognizant that a true autonomic general intelligence will be a very different beast altogether.

is it?

The author's point about perception is wonderfully post-modern and worthy of consideration about LLMs but I'm not sure it is applicable to the scale of AGI. It's also kind of hard to understand the scope of what they're saying AI is and isn't, underneath all the terms-based uncertainty.

Part of that is no doubt down to the idiosyncrasies of their prose construction -- i am loath to mock someone for writing unclearly in a non-native language but as someone who has both written and edited in English for a living I struggled a bit to elucidate what they were getting at.

True AI will only be so easily confused as being human to the degree that it intends to be deceptive but at the risk of dramaticising -- the difference between LLM and AI will be unmistakable.

For over half a century, "AI" has been a marketing term for parlor tricks to bamboozle folks without the technical expertise needed to know better into thinking the computer is doing something vastly more impressive than what it's actually doing.

That is THE meaning of "AI".

It's really hard to make an experience feel special and unique when you leave too much of it to the computer. Not impossible, but part of the joy is the choices the developers made about the world.

Now for translation and speech to text? That's where this tech really shines and does things that impress me.

Although you don't need the chatbot LLMs for that. It's nice to be able to read papers that aren't in English and still have all of the formatting the same.

it's not even a thing. absolutely nothing new happened to make it anything it's being sold as. more computer per computer does not make whatever the hell "AI" is supposed to be. it's just fucking computers.

the larger point i have in mind is that we aren't done with the AI phase, just one of its preliminaries.

This whole thing has been a shit show.

We could have had some wonderful things (and still can), but greedy white folks got their hands on it first.

They tried to pretend like this all came from a non-profit, remember?

"the tech industry has gotten tired of waiting for big breakthroughs and decided to just pretend they're happening instead of working towards them anymore"

It's so exhausting. I sometimes worry that we won't get to see any more cool breakthroughs since this "just fake it" ethos makes real tech progress very difficult.

I believe the tech industry is getting the brunt of it because that's where most of the capital is right now.

the last big breakthrough I can think of in anything related to video games was the idea of making the camera able to move in a VR game

everything else is just slow tiny incremental progress, which is super important but apparently not exciting enough for tech CEOs