Comment on YSK that "AI" in itself is highly unspecific term
Perspectivist@feddit.uk 3 days agoIn computer science, the term AI at its simplest just refers to a system capable of performing any cognitive task typically done by humans.
That said, you’re right in the sense that when people say “AI” these days, they almost always mean generative AI - not AI in the broader sense.
hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 3 days ago
Yeah, generative AI is a good point.
I'm not sure with the computer scientists, though. It's not any task, that'd be AGI. And it's not necessarily connected to humans either. Sure they're the prime example of intelligence (whatever it is). But I think a search engine is AI as well, depending how it's laid out. And text to speech, old-school expert systems. A thermostat that controls your heating with a machine learning model might count as well, I'm not sure about that. And that's not really like human cognitive tasks. Closer to curve fitting, than anything else. The thermostat includes problem-solving, learning, knowledge, and planning and decision making. But on the human intelligence score it wouldn't even be a thing that compares.
Perspectivist@feddit.uk 3 days ago
Any individual task I mean. Not every task.
hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 3 days ago
Yeah, I'd say some select tasks. And it's not really the entire distinction. I can do math equations with my cognitive capabilities. My pocket calculatir can do the same, yet it's not AI. So the definition has to be something else. And AI can do tasks I cannot do. Like go through large amounts of data. Or find patterns a human can not find. So it's not really tied to specific things we do. But a generalized form of intelligence, and I don't think that's well defined or humans are the measurement.
Perspectivist@feddit.uk 3 days ago
Most definitions are imperfect - that’s why I said the term AI, at its simplest, refers to a system capable of performing any cognitive task typically done by humans. Doing things faster, or even doing things humans can’t do at all, doesn’t conflict with that definition.
Humans are unarguably generally intelligent, so it’s only natural that we use “human-level intelligence” as the benchmark when talking about general intelligence. But personally, I think that benchmark is a red herring. Even if an AI system isn’t any smarter than we are, its memory and processing capabilities would still be vastly superior. That alone would allow it to immediately surpass the “human-level” threshold and enter the realm of Artificial Superintelligence (ASI).
As for something like making a sandwich - that’s a task for robotics, not AI. We’re talking about cognitive capabilities here.