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Was there ever a moment in time when every company called themselves an “Excel” company? I feel the same about “AI”.


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This is silly. Companies call all sorts of things AI that aren’t - from IBM to your smallest startup. It’s a nothing phrase

For a lot of non tech people I meet, AI is just a fancier term for "Excel magic".

I have seen people call corporations AIs. This is not obviously wrong.

Anyway none of the company that pretend doing AI are actually doing AI. AI nowadays is pure branding bullshit.

You can stretch the term AI to refer to a lot of things, but not as far as I think you're implying. Even today, the vast majority of software written is unambiguously not AI, and the substantial majority of startups couldn't be called AI companies even as a dumb marketing tactic.

These days every software company has AI and ML acronym in their tag lines irrespective of whether or not they have anything to do with it.

That’s hilarious … I worked for a company (several, really) that bragged about being AI but where really just conventional business logic.

The products worked great so nobody cared. Nor should they.

To be clear, the companies started as AI. They just pivoted until they found a market and product that matched.


All the examples you've given are either still very academic or just marketing for 'clever algorithms'. The whole idea that one company or another is owning 'AI' is mainly analyst and marketing words - anything that moves over into practice and actual use just gets callled 'technology'.

Companies don't care what it is called. People are hired to do jobs.

'AI' is just math + programming. Don't overthink it.


So should I lie and say it’s an AI company? Just trying to understand this trend.

Calling it “AI” is handy for the corporations in question though. Call it “ML” and the connotation is “software monetizing publicly shared data at scale without consent” and it’s borderline illegal, call it “AI” and the connotation is “aww but machine is learning, you wouldn’t restrict a human from learning on what is public would you”. I can’t believe how many people are falling for this.

AI is closer to a tool, like a spreadsheet or a search engine, than an organization like a corporation. Semantic arguments that liken AI to humans are insanely premature.

Cool, any software that will come out after 2023 will be labeled as AI. Doesn't matter if it is just a statistical analysis software. Call it AI. Cool.

Eh, a lot of it’s more down to marketing. ‘AI’ as a term has periodically come in and out of fashion; for instance, is OCR AI? Well, not 20 years ago, certainly, the term being unfashionable at the time, but now: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/ai-services/computer...

(Computer vision, in particular, is basically always classified as AI today, but the term was mostly avoided in the industry until quite recently.)


Possibly, but today EVERY nontrivial piece of software is "AI". It's the new "synergy" for dipshits spouting nonsense.

FYI: in MBA speak, "AI" is now anything that can't be hacked together on top of airtable, outsourced, or done by someone with a GED and six months of bootcamping. If you need someone who isn't perceived as interchangeable cog labor to help build the thing then it's now called AI. Was just in a meeting where a major component for an optimizing compiler was called "the AI".


But... accountants do work for AI companies, right? That doesn't seem like a good example.

Nah, my company is saying they use AI fully aware that they are only using AI so that they can say they use AI.

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.
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