I worked for a startup for a while that, late in its life, decided it needed to use AI in their product. Then that turned into needing ML in the product. Then it turned out it was just the owners trying to market the product as AI and ML powered when half of the product was the frontend used to configure the decision engine. The manually-configured decision engine was being sold as AI and ML, with the terms used interchangeably. I was actually a little surprised when it didn't work out, but not that surprised.
I have a technical question here: Can this be called a true AI? Because as far as I'm concerned, most companies just use AI and ML interchangeably. I guess these are only applied AI tailored to do a plethora of tasks, but at the end of the day, they're not conscious and aware of their existence.
I know of at least one startup that claimed to use AI (including having AI in the company name), but in actuality humans did nearly all of the work. Hoped that once they got enough customers (and supposedly "proved the concept"), they could figure out how to use AI instead. I bet this is/was somewhat common.
I also see many (particularly "legacy") products say they're "AI-driven" or "powered by AI", when in actuality one minor feature uses some AI, even in the broadest sense.
Quite so. I had a visceral aversion to ML being rebranded AI. ML only very recently became anything resembling AI with ChatGPT. (Admittedly it’s so good as a coding assistant that it does feel like talking to Data from Star Trek though.)
That might be a fact in theory, but practically most companies literally did "replace all" of "ML" with "AI" in all their marketing materials and ML-engineers got rebranded as AI-engineers. ML-models are now called AI-models. Because ML is old and busted and AI is the new hotness.
Saying that you're going to "use AI" is more akin to saying "we're going to have a web application" back in 1998.
Back then a lot of startups didn't have websites, because they were making other products (hardware, boxed software, etc). If they had a website it was just a marketing page.
So saying that you were going to make a "web application" did in fact differentiate you, in that it showed your approach was very different from the boxed software folks, but it didn't tell you much beyond that.
Nah, pretty much everything's getting rebranded as "AI" now. Now, mind you, "ML" was itself largely a rebranding of things which were branded as "AI" prior to the last AI winter; "ML", in the imagination of the PR department, has never been all _that_ well-defined.
Yeah often the more marketing dollars spent to hype something as AI/ML the less likely it is to be AI/ML - the real applications just speak for themselves in their own utility label or no.
AI is the term used by marketing division and clueless public. Researchers don't use that term without a special need. FAANG engineers actually use ML approaches.
That is correct. It is actually all about marketing. For example, there shouldn't be a huge difference between something working intuitively vs using AI/ML. But somehow parading it as something build on AI gives a lot of airtime and credence to an extent.
Honestly speaking, having worked on over 8-10 ML and DL projects in last 4 years, I am quite aware of the fact that the term "AI" is used at places where it shouldn't be used.
The term "AI" in our product comes from the fact that in long term, we actually want AI to create entire logos/icons/fonts and we're actively working on this right now. Most of our current models use Conv Nets, Word Embeddings, and Random Forests which still atleast come under the category of AI.
The reason I have been trying to explain everyone about the inner workings of our product is to demonstrate that we're indeed using different ML systems and they actually make sense where they're used.
Is your complaint that they use AI/ML interchangeably?
Yes, that's all I'm saying. And it seems like such a known point that they're not the same and not interchangeable, or so I thought (that I'm kind of astonished at the downvotes at my original comment).
Because in this case, while AI is a more term for the technology than ML, it is not a strictly incorrect title.
I get what you're saying at the product level -- and the fact that the vast bulk of the public subjected to these technologies couldn't tell you the difference, nor could they begin to care.
But to practitioners, the basic facts remain: ML ? AI, it's a proper subset, and we're doing the public a genuine disservice (and arguably causing substantial harm) by pretending to tell them that we're making good progress developing AI as distinct from hypercharged ML, that any day now they'll have self driving cars ... and all that crap the industry has basically been telling people.
Two of the founders of my company are old school AIers (80s MIT and CMU/Stanford; PARC etc). When an investor asks us if we use “AI” we now say, “oh not at all, just some machine learning”. And it’s not core to the product, just some safety systems.
reply