Re:Amazon tells employees it isn’t falling behind on AI
by bob1029 on Saturday April 08, 2023 @04:14PM
(#35497151)
> I guess there is Alexa
There is "AI" and then there is the AI we have today.
Alexa is in the same class as Watson when it comes to intelligence. You can reproduce most of its effects using old techniques on cheap hardware. NLP and statistical classification is incredibly powerful if you throw enough resources at it. These approaches are also mostly deterministic and easy to incrementally improve (to a limit - i.e. they can't generate arbitrary output).
LLMs are like enriching uranium by comparison. Unless someone at the top thought 'damn we need one of those things soon' a few years ago, there would not likely be much progress to talk about today.
There is "AI" and then there is the AI we have today.
Alexa is in the same class as Watson when it comes to intelligence. You can reproduce most of its effects using old techniques on cheap hardware. NLP and statistical classification is incredibly powerful if you throw enough resources at it. These approaches are also mostly deterministic and easy to incrementally improve (to a limit - i.e. they can't generate arbitrary output).
LLMs are like enriching uranium by comparison. Unless someone at the top thought 'damn we need one of those things soon' a few years ago, there would not likely be much progress to talk about today.