I think The Lorax comparison is warranted for LLMs, hyping the race for AGI, and AI as marketing/branding, but the AI umbrella includes a lot of Machine Learning that’s just practical, applied statistics.
A lot of ML applications aren’t anymore resource intensive then using Lemmy. So I think the discussion about harms v. benefits of ai-- beyond hypers and doomers-- often diverges from conflating “AI” with these AI companies that are all-in on LLMs vs AI as a field that contains an over-hyped, over-invested, resource-intensive, subcategory bubble that needs to pop already as well as subcategories that make it easy and efficient to classify and cluster data.













Agreed, except I’m not frustrated by AI being overloaded-- it makes sense to me that a well-known, two-letter acronym be highly inclusive-- it’s frustrating that market dominance and marketing can just take over that acronym. LLM is a more accurate description than AI, but it would hurt their sales if most people understood it’s a statistical model and didn’t mistake it for a kind of intelligence.
I’m starting to think that those of us who understand this will probably fair better by forfeiting the semantics battle and making the distinction between LLM-AI and ML.