See also: Autopilot.

I think the disgust can be justified in some circumstances, when marketing is used to oversell or just outright deceive, in this case and others which involves taking advantage of common ignorance.

Autopilot is a particularly egregious case, though. Naming an experimental, very limited car feature after the device that flys the plane most of the time, and has for many years, really ought to have been illegal. It sets wildly inappropriate expectations.

Most of the other names are just random nice sounding names that they made up.

It is more like if they called DayQuil “Tracheotomax,” because you know, it helps you breathe!

I'm not a Elon fan but the autopilot in a plane does basically the same (if we are saying that planes and cars do the same thing, which is transport people) that Tesla's or many more manufacturers "autopilot" does on highways. Not an aviation expert but I don't think AP is controlling take-offs and landings. It controls cruise speed, altitude and direction. A car AP on a highway does the same (minus altitude).

But there is a very important difference, and that is that airplane autopilots are certified with extremely expensive years long tests to demonstrate failure rates of 10E-9 (once in a billion hours) or even stricter. Whereas a computer vision model is considered “good enough” by the car industry after just a few hundred hours of “self driving” without major accidents, and this is in spite of the fact that the roads are full elements that are definitely a lot more unpredictable (eg. other drivers) than what airplanes usually encounter during landing (that is, a mostly empty runway)

If a plane's autopilot steers the plane into a cliff (and such cases have happened many times, 'controlled flight into terrain' is a thing and in quite a few of those cases the autopilot was involved), we don't consider it a fault of the autopilot, it's working as intended, as it's effective job is to keep the plane straight and level, not to make smart decisions about how to fly - that's up to the pilots.

In a similar manner, if some computer system in a car holds the steering wheel straight and the speed constant, it's working just as well as a plane's autopilot even if it crashes into a parked car at full speed.

Also a plane's autopilot has situations where it will yell at you to take over; and have situations where it's expected that the pilot recognizes problems and overrides the autopilot.

It's a good analogy from a technical standpoint, with the "minor" difference that in most situations pilots have a lot more time to react than the driver of a car. Which makes it very different from a consumer standpoint

and pilots have a lot more training

While that’s true (on a plane, I’ve seen simply keeping the wings level labelled “Autopilot” without it even maintaining altitude), it’s still a travesty.

a) Pilots have certification and training which includes proper use of whatever ‘autopilot’ that plane has.

b) Even so, the name still “over-promises” in an arena where doing so risks lives. So it should never have been called that even on a plane. Let alone on a car sold to consumers with little regulation.

> I'm not a Elon fan but the autopilot in a plane does basically the same (if we are saying that planes and cars do the same thing, which is transport people) that Tesla's or many more manufacturers "autopilot" does on highways.

Even if true, when you talk about consumer marketing, none of that matters.

I don't have name for it, but there's a whole class of bad-faith, deliberately misleading statements that exploit the difference between common and technical understandings (e.g. say something you know most people will inaccurately interpret as X, then fall back to the much narrower Y when challenged).

I call it "lying". It's a special subset of lying, but the intention is to be deceptive, so it's in that category.

I’m pretty sure this would match Harry G. Frankfurt’s definition of “bullshit”.

Yes, like GP said: "marketing"

I think it is pretty well understood, for example if you look at something like the IEEE code of ethics, that technical professionals have an obligation to honesty beyond just not lying; a requirement to communicate in a way that helps the general public clear up likely misunderstandings.

Also not an aviation expert, but it looks like airplane autopilots can do everything except taxiing and taking off (they can do landings now I guess, in fact, just looking on Wikipedia it sounds like they are preferred in low visibility situations for some airports, because they have more sensors and the airports have maps/beacons to help them out).

Apparently it also must be engaged above 28000 ft. Imagine if autonomous vehicles were so good that they were required to be used while going at speed on the highway.

Autopilot was not a consumer feature but a professional one where the understanding of the system comes with multiple certifications.

True, but that's where the difference in intended usage is problematic. In the sky, autopilot can't accidentally hit another plane or barrier because it got confused about the road paint or construction signs. The stakes are a lot higher on the ground, even though it technically controls less of the vehicle than autopilot in a plane does (acceleration, braking, and steering compared to elevator, trim, roll, pitch, throttle, vector) since cars don't have to worry about 3 dimensional movement much while airplanes do.

Isn't the bigger problem the one they called "full self driving"?

>It is more like if they called DayQuil “Tracheotomax,” because you know, it helps you breathe!

"Introducing new Rectopurge, for all your constipation needs!"

I was pretty disgusted when Dyson called their hairdryers “zero carbon emission” because they used brushless DC motors

Yep, that's called "Greenwashing".

It serves to make the middle class folk think they're making any sort of climate change oriented decision, when in fact they aren't.

It also superficially makes the company doing Greenwashing look more respectable.

It is no worse than "Pro Pilot". For some reason, that one never seems to bother anyone.

> In general, consumers are marketing care about the benefits, and engineers care about the methods. Hence AI versus machine learning.

Sorry, which is the methods and which is the benefits? In your mind is "AI" a benefit?

>Sorry, which is the methods and which is the benefits? In your mind is "AI" a benefit?

I think you're demonstrating the issue by focusing on the name again: "AI" and "Machine Learning" are the same thing. Engineers care about the method, so ML is more appropriate; it describes what they are doing. Consumers care about outcomes, so "AI" is used because it's familiar.

> I think you're demonstrating the issue by focusing on the name again: "AI" and "Machine Learning" are the same thing. Engineers care about the method, so ML is more appropriate; it describes what they are doing. Consumers care about outcomes, so "AI" is used because it's familiar.

So how is "AI" an outcome benefitting me as customer?

From an old fortune message:

    Q: "So, why did you get into Artificial Intelligence?"
    A: "It made sense: I didn't have any real intelligence."

Sums up the benefit nicely.

They are not the same thing.

Consumer don’t know that and hence don’t care.

And that’s fine.

That's my point. They are the same thing. But the person I'm responding to implies that one is a benefit and the other one is a method. I was just asking which is which, seeing as I don't see the difference. They're both different names for the same set of tools, in my opinion.

Not the parent, but yes, with my consumer hat on, ML is the method - how it learns is an implementation detail I shouldn't care about - while AI is the benefit - it applies something resembling intelligence to help address my needs.

The word "AI" sells consumers an abstract image of themselves as having something "intelligent" and "smart" at their service + edgy feeling of having almost person at your complete command but without(?) the moral issues of slavery.

If you take away buzzwords and apply good product design, when ML-based stuff works it's invisible powering features like "autocomplete" or "voice control" or "internet search".

But "autocomplete", "voice control" and "internet search" as we know them are terms that appeared relatively recently for capabilities that people even 30 years ago would have said are in the realm of sci-fi. It sounds to me like just moving-the-goalposts such that when something is proven to work well enough to have a name, it becomes "plain old tech" rather than AI. Is there any computer capability that when widely released you'd be ok with calling AI?

Yep. A lot of engineers don't like the idea that most people aren't engineers, don't think like them, and don't appreciate things the way they do. You can't sell "machine learning solutions" unless your target audience is developers building ML systems.

I have to disagree. "Machine learning" could just as easily be a marketing buzzword. Artificial Intelligence is just sexier because it's misleading (while being broad enough to be acceptable).

Again, that's just the inner developer not liking the term. There's a reason why AI sticks with people and ML doesn't.

If machine learning were the broadly accepted term to refer to these techniques in society, the people who currently complain that "AI is misleading because they're not intelligent" would instead be complaining that "ML is misleading because they're not learning". I know this because I have already seen people complaining that ML is misleading because "they're not learning".

The reality is that no matter what structure the software takes, or what outputs it achieves, it can't falsify a fundamentally unfalsifiable belief that machines cannot be like people in ways that could imply any sort of social recognition of that status.

Ai is misleading because it's too broad and consumers confuse it as AGI which is far more powerful (and not yet possible). From a marketing perspective this is a feature, not a bug since it gives off the appearance of being a much bigger deal than it is.

Are we really going to pretend that marketing departments / companies aren't fully aware of and taking advantage of this misunderstanding? This just seems like common sense to me.

AI is not the problem.

I (for intelligence) is the problem.

Intelligence covers everything from the behaviors of a single celled organism, to the meta organism of human society. There is no misunderstanding by marketing. Intelligence covers everything they are doing.

What we need is new words for behaviors that are much more focused to what the capabilities we want to achieve are.

It used to be called pattern recognition. Is your machine really learning?

I think this one annoys people because when engineers hear AI they think of a bunch of techniques that mostly didn't work and caused an AI winter. When they hear ML they think of the latest and greatest techniques that have moved the needle on some of the hardest problems in the space.

What you say is true, however in this case, there's no communication of benefits. AI is not a benefit, it's an attention-grabbing buzzword.

I lament that people fall for buzzwords, hollow words that all mean the same thing to a fool - "Oh it's got <BUZZWORD>, that means GOOD! Just take my money!".

But I don't lament for long, and when I'm done lamenting, that's when I start selling.

“The characteristic feature of the loser is to bemoan, in general terms, mankind’s flaws, biases, contradictions, and irrationality—without exploiting them for fun and profit.”

- Nassim Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes

I'd also add that, as much as many engineers hate the fact, marketing is very necessary to sell things to the general market. It's also a real skill set to figure out how to market things well. Even more so when trying to sell technical capabilities.

I doubt it's "we need marketing to sell stuff" that engineers hate, but rather the seemingly inevitable "marketing lies about what our product does".

I certainly don't hate that fact at all. What I hate is that marketers very often lie and misrepresent.

The problem is the "intelligence" word causes more harm than value. It makes the whole world afraid of what is in fact just matrix multiplications.

We don't know what "intelligence" means, but we know it isn't matrix multiplication, or brute force algorithms, otherwise gears could be called intelligent.

I understand the importance of selling. But selling shouldn't be confused with deceiving consumers. It's hard to accept our work is used to create general panic for the sake of money.

>We don't know what "intelligence" means, but we know it isn't matrix multiplication, or brute force algorithms, otherwise gears could be called intelligent.

We know no such thing. The simplicity of the basic operations do not necessarily constrain the complexity of the whole system composed of those operations. We compose simple operations into complex units all the time.

> We compose simple operations into complex units all the time.

Through a process called thinking, too.

Which itself is a complex process composed from simple operations.

Twas the joke

If you built a complex series of gears that took input, revolved through different sets of millions of gears, and produced meaningful output, I would consider that a form of intelligence.

Agreed. My understanding of NN is that more than matrix multiplication, it’s that it’s a general purpose solver. You could write the same thing yourself, it would just take you ages.

So with unlimited budget and time, can you write something complex enough to seem intelligent? I think so. Is what you wrote actually intelligent? No idea, and I think that’s more philosophy than I’m interested in.

General purpose solving functions will only get better with time and already solve more than we can write solvers for by hand. I don’t suspect there’s a limit here, assuming we can keep improving in ways to scale its compute and scale the function goals.

You are basically describing an automaton, some of them were very elaborate and able to write with a pen on paper. People probably misinterpreted it for intelligence, basically thing have improved, but not changed.

Whether you build it with gears, transistors on silicon wafer, or biological neurons, it doesn't matter. If complex enough arrangement of enough neurons can give rise to intelligence, then so can enough transistors or enough gears.

"It makes the whole world afraid of what is in fact just matrix multiplications" is such a reductionist view that doesn't really capture the reality of AI taking people's jobs and reshaping the economy. That's like saying electricity is just "electrons moving through a wire"

You and the comment you're referring to are both making good comments, but may not be talking apples to apples.

I believe the post you're replying to is just saying that matrix multiplications (as useful as they are), aren't going to become Skynet.

Your post is pointing out that various AI techniques are replacing loads of jobs for folks that still need to make ends meet, but likely don't have the skill sets to magically become a web developer overnight. As a result, AI is pretty dangerous like many disruptions throughout history. Only in the past, there was usually still plenty of need for labor.

That's a deep thought, it puts the discussion in a great perspective for further thinking. Thanks!

These matrix multiplications won't become Skynet, but that has nothing to do with the fact that they are matrix multiplications.

The better we get at understanding how various cognitive functions that once seemed mysterious can be accomplished by matrix multiplications, the easier it becomes to eventually create Skynet.

Also consuming enormous amounts of power and water

Look bombs are just an accelerated oxidization. Like rusting but fast. What's the big deal. Rusting is natural.

For the most part electrons don't move through the wire, that would be very inefficient.

“Just a bunch of matrix multiplications” is also a bit odd because lots of jobs have been automated out of existence by tools way less complicated than matrix multiplications.

The weird thing, I think, about these matrix multiplications, seems to be that they might be coming for the jobs of people who are generally in the same field that invented them (programmers) and also they might be coming for the jobs of reporters, creatives, and hot-take authors. People with bigger platforms than factory workers.

>We don't know what "intelligence" means, but we know it isn't matrix multiplication

I didn't, how do you know? And to be honest many LLM seems to show intelligence to some degree, at least when they solve complex and novel problems I ask them in a random language and using N library, that's feel pretty intelligent to me and if it's not than also humans are not.

I do see where you are coming from, but perhaps it is good that people think of it as proper AI (with all the inherent concerns) so that we enact rules and regulations before there is a runaway ML arms race that actually does give us AGI. Will we be ready then otherwise?

Great response. I will take some time to think about it, thanks!

> but we know it isn't matrix multiplication

Neuroscientist here: You're right!

At least in the neuro that we know today, most [0] of the communication between neurons is done in the Fourier domain. In that, it's the frequency of firing events that matters, not that a neuron fired at all.

[0] by no means is it exclusive. The brain is really complicated and there are edge cases all over the place.

The fourier domain is just a linear transform of the time domain, i.e. just a matrix multiply away!

Could you expand please? I'm connecting the two via convolution but can't intuitively grasp the link yet.

See “Laplace transform”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laplace_transform

The fourier transform converts between time domain and frequency domain. The fourier transform is linear, which means it can be implemented as multiplying your time domain signal by a matrix of complex fourier coefficients. Usually we dont do it this way because the fft is faster than matrix multplication, but the result is the same.

Wow, could you point me to other resources to read about this?

There has been a long discussion in the neuroscience community how neuronal firing encodes information. The two extremes of the proposed solutions are temporal coding and rate coding, but there are intermediate positions such as held by the parent poster (and myself, and nowadays most other people that care about this niche).

Wikipedia is decent-ish on the topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_coding

Wulfram Gerstner's book has a nice discussion of the theory and limitations of different proposed coding schemes, which might interest the technical audience here. In particular, I think the parent poster alluded to the ideas presented in the last section here: https://neuronaldynamics.epfl.ch/online/Ch7.S6.html

Really and truly this "discussion" should have been put to rest a long time ago. Neurons encode information with the temporal precision needed to encode that information. Since most objects are somewhat permanent, the temporal precision can be very low, yielding effectively a rate code. For tasks for which the (relative) timing is critical, e.g. the encoding of auditory sequences, the temporal precision of the neural code is high, yielding effectively a temporal code. Some problems are neither here nor there, in which case the neuron will encode as much information as possible at a low rate / temporal resolution, and then encode diminishing amounts of information at successively higher temporal resolutions (the Fourier code alluded to by the parent poster). Higher temporal precision typically requires more control, larger circuits, and hence more energy expenditure.

Bill Bialek's group had a paper that quantified the amount of information present in a visual neuron of the fly at different temporal resolutions (/frequencies) as early as 2008: https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jo...

Is there a certain way to encode typical "continuos" information like a certain tilt of a line in an image?

I ran into this over ten years ago in an experiment on temporary plasticity of sensory input and I didn't find a quick answer before I had to leave the topic (ok, it left me)

Thanks for sharing that book link, btw.

> We don't know what "intelligence" means, but we know it isn't matrix multiplication

What makes you believe “intelligence” can’t emerge from lots of matrix multiplications? Unless you believe in some more mystical explanation, human intelligence is just electrochemical processes not that unlike computers.

That "it isn't matrix multiplication" argument is completely equivalent to "no computer can do it", and to "nobody can ever understand it". And is practically equivalent to "you need a soul to have intelligence".

The same applies to "brute force algorithms" and "otherwise gears could do it".

It's very likely that the current crop of LLMs do the wrong set of matrix multiplications. (If you ask me, it's a certainty.) But that doesn't change the fact that matrix multiplications can do anything.

> The problem is the "intelligence" word causes more harm than value.

By this measure "learning" could be inaccurate too. Does a human learn if they just commit something to memory? Programming is chalk full of people who know the code but haven't "learned" to program. Intrinsically we all know there's something deeper to learning than just memorizing or retaining to memory.

I think GP has a point. Marketing terms are to the benefit of the user to be relatable, whether accurate or not. We can, and to my knowledge, historically do retain the stories of what the correlation of a marketing term versus its actual technology is.

I think they can be right but also missing the point. Inaccurate but relatable statements can miscommunicate risk. If a marketer calls something “self driving intelligence” when an engineer prefers the more precise term “driver assistance software” it can lead to bad consequences when the consumer doesn’t understand the nuance.

sadly to most of the world, if you can do matrix math, you're intelligent.

> I understand the importance of selling. But selling shouldn't be confused with deceiving consumers

Woo boy, someone hasn't taken marketing 101 in uni.

First, "artificial intelligence" is the name of the field of study that tries to build systems that act intelligently, not a term for referring to the produced systems. Even if some outcome isn't (or wasn't) yet particularly intelligent, the name of the field is entirely appropriate since that's the goal which it is striving to approach.

Second, the general consensus of what "intelligence" means in the AI field is approximately the Legg&Hutter "Intelligence measures an agent’s ability to achieve goals in a wide range of environments." from https://arxiv.org/abs/0706.3639 .

It's worth noting that solely focuses on the capabilities of the system and intentionally completely disregards how it's built. Gears cannot be called intelligent iff it is impossible to build an system that acts intelligently solely from gears, and if it turns out that it is possible to build a gear arrangement that soundly demonstrates intelligent behavior, then those gears definitely could be called intelligent.

And it's also a clearly nonbinary definition - i.e., it's not whether something is or isn't intelligent, but a scale to measure how intelligent it is; and a observation that a particular system (or human!) demonstrates poor intelligence doesn't prevent us from discussing that it's more intelligent than something or someone who is even worse.

“puffery” and forward looking statements do not constitute claims of material fact. I.e., they don’t meet the legal definition of fraud.

Nothing discussed in this article is related to the concerns people have with the forefront of AI research. No one is afraid that the first computer that can convince >50% of the world that its sentient will be a SaaS app, or at least I hope not!

No, it's truth in labeling.

> I’ve been told that a product was “driven by AI” only to find out it was driven by “if-then” statements.

At best, a system like that is an "expert system." It's not artificially-intelligent in any way.

This, BTW, is why many developed countries have strict labelling laws for food and trademarks. Otherwise, people will call something whatever they can get away with in order to sell it, even if it's not what they claim they're selling.

> At best, a system like that is an “expert system.” It’s not artificially-intelligent in any way.

“Expert system” was adopted for that particular form of AI (which it was also considered when it was developed) because “expertise” is a combination of both intelligence and knowledge.

So, if “AI” is misleading for it, “expert system” is more misleading.

half the ordinary people I talk to are spooked by "AI" combine with general deterioration of services by big tech, invasive agreements and slow, growing awareness of what surveillance might look like

Half of the engineers I talk to feel the same way.

> See also: “posi-trac” (limited slip differential), “alleve” (2-(6-Methoxynaphthalen-2-yl)propanoic acid), Technicolor (usually to describe a 3-strip prismatic camera+film arrangement).

But none of those examples are misleading. "AI" is (or at least very often is).

> “alleve” (2-(6-Methoxynaphthalen-2-yl)propanoic acid)

Chemical names aren't the best examples to use, as even within the scientific community, it's extremely rare to use full IUPAC systematic names for well-known organic molecules. The fancy name for caffeine would be 1,3,7-trimethylxanthine, not 1,3,7-trimethyl-3,7-Dihydro-1H-purine-2,6-dione.

Machine learning itself used to be called "data mining" which is perhaps a more honest description of what it's all about. It amounts to a non-rigorous application of methods derived from statistics, e.g. 'deep' neural networks can be understood as a hierarchical (hence 'deep') version of regression models.

On the contrary, the casual lies inherent to marketing - to capitalism - are absolutely something which should disgust you. That casual dishonesty is endemic, or that it elides complexity which may escape the average intelligence - these are not reasons to accept it. Marketing is disgusting.

I love the implicit admission here that marketing is BS. Either that or you didn't read the blog post - I don't think his point is that we're calling it the wrong thing, but rather that it opens the door for a lot of people to sell something they aren't actually doing.

“Wahhh why did my startup fail?”

hahahaah literally this.

Ever since I started running my own business, I found it funny that I needed to rephrase my services in order to attract the right client.

Marketing is the direct opposite of engineering, imo.