Miscellanea for 2025-07-23
- Hello world!
- I've been trying (and often failing) to be careful about my language around the current wave of LLM-powered tech that folks are calling "AI"
- Like, the following things can all conceivably be called "snack chips":
- Potato chips
- Corn tortilla chips
- Cheez-It® Original Snack Crackers
- CHEETOS® Crunchy Cheese Flavored Snacks
- Banana chips
- Baked kale chips
- But, I'm sure most would agree that each of these things have significant differences between each other.
- Just like a bunch of these things could be called "AI":
- Video game NPC behavior
- AlphaGo
- Large language models
- Movie & music recommendations
- Self-driving cars
- Weather forecasts
- But, we should be able to agree that each of these things have significant differences.
- They also have significantly different means of production, appropriate applications, and defining characteristics that builders and operators need to know inside & out.
- Just calling this stuff ✨AI✨ for the sake of simpler marketing does us all a disservice.
- Especially when folks get it tangled up with fictional depictions like Her (2013) and the computer from the USS Enterprise.
- That means the tech inherits a halo of expectations and enthusiasm that it hasn't necessarily earned.
- And that obscures understanding of the real operating characteristics of the thing.
- I feel like there's a longer blog post here, but I don't have the rest of it right this moment.
- Like, the following things can all conceivably be called "snack chips":