There’s an extraordinary amount of hype around “AI” right now, perhaps even greater than in past cycles, where we’ve seen an AI bubble about once per decade. This time, the focus is on generative systems, particularly LLMs and other tools designed to generate plausible outputs that either make people feel like the response is correct, or where the response is sufficient to fill in for domains where correctness doesn’t matter.
But we can tell the traditional tech industry (the handful of giant tech companies, along with startups backed by the handful of most powerful venture capital firms) is in the midst of building another “Web3”-style froth bubble because they’ve again abandoned one of the core values of actual technology-based advancement: reason.
It depresses me that we have to find new silly acronyms to mean something we already had acronyms for in the first place, just because we are simply too stupid to use our vocabulary appropriately.
AI is what “AGI” means. Just fucking AI. It has been for more than half a century, it is sensical, and it is logical.
However, in spite of its name, the current technology is not really capable of generating information, so it isn’t capable of actual “intelligence”. It is pseudo-generation, which it achieves by sequencing and combining input (AKA training) data. So it does not generate new information, but rather new variations of existing information. Due to this fact, I would prefer the name of “Artificial Adaptability” (or “AA”, or " A2") to be used in lieu of “AI”, or “Artificial Intelligence” (on the grounds that it means something else entirely).
Edit: to the people it may concern: stop answering this about “Artifishual GeNeRaL intelligence”. I know what AGI means. It takes all of 3 seconds to do an internet search, and it isn’t even necessary: everyone has known for months. I did not bother to explicit it, because I did not imagine that anyone would be simple enough to take literally the first word starting with “g” from my comment and roll with that in a self-important diatribe on what they imagined I was wrong about. So if you feel the need to project what you imagine I meant, and then correct that, please don’t. I’m sad enough already that humanity is failing, I do not need more evidence.
Edit 2: “your opinion only matters if you have published papers”. No. Also it is a really stupid argument from authority. Besides, anyone with enough time on their hands can get papers published. It is not a guarantee of quality, but merely a proof that you LARPed in academy. The hard part isn’t writing, it is thinking. And as I wrote before, I already know this, I need no more proof, thank you.
The fact that you think “AGI” is a new term, or the fact that you think the “G” stands for “Generative” shows how much you know about the field, so maybe you should go read up on literally any of it before you come at me with this attitude and your “due to this fact” pseudo-intellectual bullshit.
The “G” stands for “General”, friend. It delineates between an Artificial Intelligence that is narrow in the scope of its knowledge, from intelligences like us that can adapt to new tasks and improve themselves. We do not have Artificial General Intelligence yet, but the ones we have getting there and faster than you could possibly imagine.
Tell me, oh Doctor Of Neuropsychology and Computer Science: how do people learn? How do people generate new information?
Actually no fuck that, I have a better question: define “intelligence”. Let’s hear it, I’ve wanted to act the Picard in a Data trial since I was a kid. Since around the time that the term Artificial General Intelligence was coined in fact: nineteen ninety fucking seven.
You’ve shown your IQ right there. No time to waste with you. Goodbye.
If you haven’t published a few papers then your preference in acronyms is irrelevant.
AI comprises everything from pattern recognition like OCR and speech recognition to the complex transformers we know now. All of these are specialized in that they can only accomplish a single task. Such as recognizing graffiti or generating graffiti. AGI, artificial general intelligence, would be flexible enough to do all the things and is currently considered the holy grail of ai.