AI != LLM

Perhaps I just feel this way because I worked for a number of years at an AI startup before LLMs existed.
But I am quite sick of people meaning LLM when they say the word AI.

I know I just need to adapt, and keep up with the times. But I still get confused when somebody uses the word AI to purely mean LLMs.

Venn Diagrams

AI is a field, the persuit of Artificial forms of Intelligence.

The persuit of AI has a deep and rich history. With many ebbs and flows over time.
There are well known marked AI winters, periods of time where we thought we may have reached a dead end and progress was halted.

The Large Language Model is the latest addition to our arsenal in this persuit. We have been trying to get computers to understand Natural Language since the very beginning - and this is the best itteration of it yet.

Before LLMs came out, Machine Learning had had it’s moment, and had died down a little bit. Making it’s way for the hype of blockchain and web3!

So when we say, “does this use AI?” - what do we really mean? I hate to be that guy that sounds overly pedantic. But I’d really like to be precise here. What are we objecting to? Is it the whole field? Is it this particular itteration? Is it just propietary weight models? remote-hosted models? Small Language Models vs. Large Language Models?

Here is a small ASCII visualisation of the field. I hope it helps to clarify what we mean when we discuss Artificial Inteligence, versus Large Language Models.

Artificial Intelligence
│
├── Machine Learning
│   │
│   └── Deep Learning
│       │
│       └── LLMs
│
└── Other AI
    ├── Rule-based systems
    ├── Expert systems
    ├── Knowledge graphs
    ├── Search / planning
    └── Symbolic / logical AI

Venn Diagrams#

Venn Diagrams