1y ago

What is a well known 'public secret' in the industry you work in that the majority of outsiders are unaware of?

You're viewing a single thread.

661 comments

Not every "smart" software solution is smart nor is every "AI powered" software having AI.
- AI is not a meaningful term.
  If you ask people if a piece of software that never loses at tic tac toe is AI, most will say yes. Everyone I've asked that didn't already know why I was asking said yes.
  I cannot separate that piece of software from any piece of software.
  I've literally had this conversation with the marketing department. It's marketing. Tell me what you want to say is AI, and I'll give you a justification.
  
  I think the waters have been muddied for a long time by referring to NPC behavior trees and state machines in games as AI. You can apply that to just about any software that takes input and makes a decision. Then you have the movie version of AI which is sentient computers. So decades of use without any actual meaning have made the word useless in actually communicating anything
  
  I love how divergent those two popular interpretations of AI are, too. One is all Skynet and scary and all-powerful and the other is being refactored for the umpteenth time because navmeshes broke and all the enemies are T-pose floating 10cm in the air.
  
  I think there are various categories for types of AI/ML right? Like, neural nets, expert systems, Bayesian systems? Idk. I should really learn more about this topic.
  
  "AI" is a vague and all encompassing term used to describe computers making decisions.
  Machine learning, yeah, is what you're describing. If you're interested in learning more, look into writing your own neural nets from scratch using any number of programming languages. They're actually a fairly simple concept to both understand and apply in practice, but they can become fairly complex at scale.
  
  Do you happen to have a good guide for writing your own machine learning algo? Ideally not relying on Python libs?
  
  The best thing I can recommend is to just pick your most comfortable language and find guides specific to that.
  It's functionally the same regardless of language, however it's much easier to learn as you build it.
  
  I mean, technically, any software with an if-else is AI.
  
  It is if you’re in marketing 😂
  
  For the marketing folks: adding "AI" to your product ad may increase the chance that the pencil pushers will want it, so I get why it may make sense to put it there. But it will make IT folks start with the assumption that your entire product is worthless bullshit that tries to trick people into buying it with meaningless buzzwords. Same for "Blockchain".
  If I had a product that actually had a good use for AI/ML, I'd use the most technical term possible to describe it, just to avoid the appearance of buzzword fishing. With blockchain... just invent some new name for it. It's so toxic that people will roll their eyes and stop listening.
  
  Reminds me of block chain tea. Their stock price went up
- "AI Powered"
  Looks inside
  Data structures and algorithms

661 comments