
From AI to ML to AI: On Swirling Nomenclature and Slurried Thought (2018) - currymj
http://approximatelycorrect.com/2018/06/05/ai-ml-ai-swirling-nomenclature-slurried-thought/
======
gwenzek
I feel this switch was largely pushed by Google marketing.

I wonder how much of the name change was to acknowledge the fact that a lot of
Google smartness is actually not ML (eg Google search is mostly string
matching and giant lookup tables) or at least not Deep Learning.

At the start of my career in ML, I was shivering when someone was labelling my
work as AI. At first because I found it too old school, then because I found
it over-hyped. But I now use this world myself because that's what people read
in the newspaper.

Also, it's often hard to guess that eg the Google assistant is mostly based on
regexes and small grammars, while the photo classification is actual ML.

What I'm very cautious though, is to only AI as field name. I don't speak of
Google assistant as "an AI" but as an "AI powered" software.

(Ex-Googler)

------
gumby
It does annoy me that one small part (classifiers) has colonized the broader
term that encompasses planners, reasoners, semantics, etc.

------
Traster
I find it interesting that this discussion takes any interest in the
underlying technology, to me that seems utterly irrelevant. Machine Learning
largely seemed to me to become a term used by academics and engineers to avoid
having _that_ discussion about AI, because 5 years ago if you told anyone that
you worked in AI they'd think you were building Wall-e. As the ML research
paid off there were suddenly some hype around it and that's where marketing
came in. You actually have to sell the product. No longer was it enough to
tell people you were recognizing cats on the internet - you were developing a
DL ML AI CNN for feline categorization. It's like your 4K UHD HDR AMOLED HDTV.

When marketing gets involved it's actually quite positive for them to have
those associations with the bicentennial man.

