Comment by gum_wobble
2 hours ago
> PR executives say UK companies are forcing them to present ordinary automation as artificial intelligence
What a time to be alive
2 hours ago
> PR executives say UK companies are forcing them to present ordinary automation as artificial intelligence
What a time to be alive
To be fair, that’s not exactly a new thing, it’s just sensitive to the exact phase of the Great AI Freeze/Thaw Cycle. A lot of now-ordinary automation used to be "AI" until it become commonplace and no longer buzzword-worthy and thus no longer regarded as "AI", and/or an AI winter hit.
Last time that AI was big before DL it was the "big data" fad and everything had to be big data. Marketing has never not been about how to disguise "what we already do" as the newest buzzword that customers (or investors) want to hear.
The same goes, of course, for all the non-AI fads like "the cloud" or "NoSQL".
I understand why companies try to brand themselves as the latest and greatest tech innovation. What I don't understand is why it works or who falls for it. It's quite trivial to determine whether or not this is e.g. transformer-based AI.
I remember in the years before the pandemic that I would joke that all you had to do was "sprinkle in some blockchain" to your VC pitch and your valuation would automatically go up by tens of millions. It seemed dumb to me then and it seems dumb to me now.
Fun times. Although I find it hard to blame them tbh.
They’re incentived to do so because apparently investors don’t understand the difference.
Remember when crypto was hot and everything had crypto.
Remember the Internet was first hot and everything was iThis or Active That. iPhone still has i.
Remember… well not, me, I wasn’t alive… when radiation was cool and Radioactive was in.
Everyone always wants to be cool.
Before the iPhone was the iPod, and before the iPod I had an iRiver mp3 player. There was certainly a trend and only Apple's product survived that one.
Because the trend started with the iMac.
BPM is now agentic, don’t you know.
Yup. Also ML is called AI now too at least as far as hiring managers are concerned. Adjust your resume accordingly.
AI used to be called ML
which used to be called Statistics
which used to be called “math” or maybe “applied science.”
Obviously the underlying tech and research changed along the way… but not as much as it would seem. We’re still doing matrix operations and gradient descent and softmax, all of which has been around for a while.
ML is, obviously, AI. But not all AI is ML.
The reason the term "machine learning" was even invented was because it was one of the AI winters and an euphemism was needed because "AI" was more of a swearword than a buzzword.
"now"? The appliance industry pretty much hit the "label everything AI" button...again...within months of ChatGPT taking off.
Last time around was when "fuzzy logic" came out, I think?
I guess the appliance industry has dibs on the name AI anyway.
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